I dump the sheets in the tub and I wash my hands and I hear a knock at the door. My heart races but the rest of my body freezes and I picture Officer Nico’s face. I panic. There is another knock. It feels like the end. On the way to the door, I trip. I bump my knee against the bed. My body is protesting. I reach for the handle. Steeling myself, I swing the door open. But the person standing there isn’t Officer Nico. It’s someone worse.

Love.

48

LOVE’S arms are folded across her chest. “You said you left your lights on,” she says. “But it was only five.”

“Love,” I say. “I can explain.”

“I hope so,” she says. “Because you should also know that Pitch Perfect is not, and never was, on Netflix.”

She enters my room. “Anyone here?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “I’m alone.”

She looks at the stripped bed. “What’s this all about? Destroying the evidence?”

“No,” I say, and I can’t keep up with her questions. “Love, let me explain.”

She raises her voice. “Yoo-hoo! You can come out now?”

“Love,” I say. “There’s nobody here.”

“You know, we all live in the world, Joe. You think I can’t figure out that you flew to Rhode Island and rented a car? And I don’t mean this is in the asshole way, but you know who my father is. His people couldn’t find Forty because Forty knows how to hide. Because we grew up in this and we know how to disable our phones and pay with cash. But you think I can’t find you? Jesus Christ. Where is she? Hello!”

“Love, please stop.”

“No,” she says. She is wearing a navy raincoat, bell-bottom blue jeans, and a shrunken pink sweater. I want to hug every part of her, even now, while she accuses me of cheating on her, especially now. She isn’t going anywhere. She isn’t afraid of me even though she knows I was lying, even though I disappeared on her while I said I was looking for her brother. She isn’t the police. She is Love, which is why she is crying.

“Why won’t you tell me things?” she says. “I tell you things but you—you shut down, you won’t tell me the real deal. Why don’t you tell me how you saw Pitch Perfect? Because no, Joe. You didn’t see it randomly on Netflix. It’s not on Netflix and even if it was, a lie just feels different. I know you know that. And I think about this shit, you know, in the middle of the night, when you’re asleep, this is the kind of shit I think about. Why won’t you tell me?”

“Love,” I say, and I can’t explain it but I want to tell her. I want her to know.

“You know,” she says. “When you do stuff on your phone, I mean since the very beginning, like the whole time we’ve been together, I know you are doing something. Sometimes I think you have cancer. I actually console myself by thinking he just has some disease and he’s gonna die and he doesn’t know how to tell me that I’m gonna get my heart broken.”

“I don’t have cancer,” I assure her. But then I do; I have the mugofurine. It is a tumor spreading, malignant, infiltrating my love, my Love. She’s still wearing her coat.

“I know you don’t have cancer, Joe. That’s the point. But I have to know what you have. I can’t take it anymore. I have enough problems. I have a brother who disappears and a father who can’t even pretend he wants him to come back and a mother who wishes he wasn’t here in the first place. I can’t do this.” She is crying. I go to her but she doesn’t want me. “No,” she says. “You can’t be in this with me if you won’t be in this with me.” She wipes her eyes. “What the fuck are you even doing here? Why are you in Rhode Island? Is my brother here? Who are you? Because I can’t fucking ask you anymore. I can’t ask you anymore.”

“I’m sorry.”

She’s right. You can’t be in love, not fully, not eternally, if you can’t tell the truth. It builds up on you. She told me about fucking Milo in the Chateau. But how can I tell her my truth? I killed her brother. It’s like the atomic version of that universal truth: you can talk shit about your mother, but nobody else can, no matter what you say, no matter what she does. I can’t tell Love what I’ve been up to and to talk to her is to lie to her.

“I should just go. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

I kneel at her feet. “Please stay.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you.”

She shakes her little head. “Love isn’t enough, Joe. It isn’t nearly enough. I want more.”

“I know you do.”

“I don’t know what else to say,” she says. “But I can’t stand the way you make me feel so good, like, better than I ever felt, and then you tear it all away, like deep down, you don’t want me to be happy.”

“Of course I want you to be happy.”

“Then tell me who you are. Tell me why you said you watched Pitch Perfect on Netflix.”

“Love,” I say, and if we were married, if I had let her go with me to Vegas and we had eloped, she would not be able to testify against me in a court of law. But we are not married and the justice system does not acknowledge relationships like ours. I want to marry this girl. I want to stay with this girl. I want our ashes mixed, our crumbling bodies buried side by side. I want her to know how badly I want that. I don’t want to live without her. I don’t want to let go of her. If she leaves me, what then?

“So that’s all you have to say. That’s fine. Fine.” She sounds cold and she is inching away from me. “Joe,” she says. “It’s over.”

I look up at her. This is like Homeland when he’s going to cut a wire and the bomb might explode. I might kill us, everything we have. But maybe I can live with that because without her, I will die. I know it. I accept that she might hit me, call me names, run to the cops. This could be the end. But this could also be the beginning.

When you get baptized, you fall back into the water, your entire body. Some people hold their noses. Some people don’t. But there is no way around it; you have to get wet if you want to be in God’s hands.

I take Love’s hands. I choose love. I accept risk. I breathe. I speak. “The first time I saw Pitch Perfect was when I broke into a girl’s apartment.”

WHEN I am done, when I have told her everything—everything but Forty, of course—she just sits there. The minutes tick by and her face gives me nothing, the way Matt Damon’s face never looks all that fucked up when he’s being Jason Bourne.

I think about what I’ve done, about how it all must seem to her. I did not do that thing where you leave out the grotesque details to make yourself seem like some kind of unstained, impervious hero. I told her how I stole Beck’s phone and strangled Peach on the beach. I told her about the blood of The Da Vinci Code in Beck’s mouth when she slipped away, how I buried her upstate. I told her about the mug of piss.

I gave her as much as I had, but it’s like the difference between a movie and a book: A book lets you choose how much of the blood you want to see. A book gives you the permission to see the story as you want, as your mind directs. You interpret. Your Alexander Portnoy doesn’t look like mine because we all have our own unique view. When you finish a movie you leave the theater with your friend and talk about the movie right away. When you finish a book you think. Love grew up on movies and I have just read her a book. I give her the time to digest.

I am preparing for the worst, for Love’s face to change, for her to run out of here screaming. In a funny way, all the women in my life helped me brace for this moment. My mother. Beck. Amy. Women leave me, and Love will leave me. She has to. She believes in love and decorates her home with it, carries it on her passport, in her heart. She is going to walk out of this room and feel like she’s done it again, chosen the wrong man, blown those other two out of the saltwater infinity pool we’ll never go in again.