The court case came, and he won. It was a huge win, Lucien kept telling him, and he knew it was, but mostly he felt panic: Now what was he going to do? He had a new client, a bank, but the work there was of the long, tedious, fact-gathering sort, not the kind of frantic work that required twenty-hour days. He would be at home, by himself, with nothing but the Caleb incident to occupy his mind. Tremain congratulated him, and he knew he should be happy, but when he asked the chairman for more work, Tremain had laughed. “No, St. Francis,” he said. “You’re going on vacation. That’s an order.”

He didn’t go on vacation. He promised first Lucien, and then Tremain, he would, but that he couldn’t at the moment. But it was as he had feared: he would be at home, making himself dinner, or at a movie with Willem, and suddenly a scene from his months with Caleb would appear. And then there would be a scene from the home, and a scene from his years with Brother Luke, and then a scene from his months with Dr. Traylor, and then a scene from the injury, the headlights’ white glare, his head jerking to the side. And then his mind would fill with images, banshees demanding his attention, snatching and tearing at him with their long, needley fingers. Caleb had unleashed something within him, and he was unable to coax the beasts back into their dungeon—he was made aware of how much time he actually spent controlling his memories, how much concentration it took, how fragile his command over them had been all along.

“Are you all right?” Willem asked him one night. They had seen a play, which he had barely registered, and then had gone out to dinner, where he had half listened to Willem, hoping he was making the correct responses as he moved his food around his plate and tried to act normal.

“Yes,” he said.

Things were getting worse; he knew it and didn’t know how to make it better. It was eight months after the incident, and every day he thought about it more, not less. He felt sometimes as if his months with Caleb were a pack of hyenas, and every day they chased him, and every day he spent all his energy running from them, trying to escape being devoured by their snapping, foaming jaws. All the things that had helped in the past—the concentrating; the cutting—weren’t helping now. He cut himself more and more, but the memories wouldn’t disappear. Every morning he swam, and every night he swam again, for miles, until he had energy enough only to shower and climb into bed. As he swam, he chanted to himself: he conjugated Latin verbs, he recited proofs, he quoted back to himself decisions that he had studied in law school. His mind was his, he told himself. He would control this; he wouldn’t be controlled.

“I have an idea,” Willem said at the end of another meal in which he had failed to say much of anything. He had responded a second or two too late to everything Willem had said, and after a while, they were both quiet. “We should take a vacation together. We should go on that trip to Morocco we were supposed to take two years ago. We can do it as soon as I get back. What do you think, Jude? It’ll be fall, then—it’ll be beautiful.” It was late June: nine months after the incident. Willem was leaving again at the beginning of August for a shoot in Sri Lanka; he wouldn’t be back until the beginning of October.

As Willem spoke, he was thinking of how Caleb had called him deformed, and only Willem’s silence had reminded him it was his turn to respond. “Sure, Willem,” he said. “That sounds great.”

The restaurant was in the Flatiron District, and after they paid, they walked for a while, neither of them saying anything, when suddenly, he saw Caleb coming toward them, and in his panic, he grabbed Willem and yanked him into the doorway of a building, startling them both with his strength and swiftness.

“Jude,” Willem said, alarmed, “what are you doing?”

“Don’t say anything,” he whispered to Willem. “Just stay here and don’t turn around,” and Willem did, facing the door with him.

He counted the seconds until he was certain Caleb must have passed, and then looked cautiously out toward the sidewalk and saw that it hadn’t been Caleb at all, just another tall, dark-haired man, but not Caleb, and he had exhaled, feeling defeated and stupid and relieved all at once. He noticed then that he still had Willem’s shirt bunched in his hand, and he released it. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, Willem.”

“Jude, what happened?” Willem asked, trying to look him in the eyes. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I just thought I saw someone I didn’t want to see.”

“Who?”

“No one. This lawyer on a case I’m working on. He’s a prick; I hate dealing with him.”

Willem looked at him. “No,” he said, at last. “It wasn’t another lawyer. It was someone else, someone you’re scared of.” There was a pause. Willem looked down the street, and then back at him. “You’re frightened,” he said, his voice wondering. “Who was it, Jude?”

He shook his head, trying to think of a lie he could tell Willem. He was always lying to Willem: big lies, small lies. Their entire relationship was a lie—Willem thought he was one person, and really, he wasn’t. Only Caleb knew the truth. Only Caleb knew what he was.

“I told you,” he said, at last. “This other lawyer.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Yes, it was.” Two women walked by them, and as they passed, he heard one of them whisper excitedly to the other, “That was Willem Ragnarsson!” He closed his eyes.

“Listen,” Willem said, quietly, “what’s going on with you?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m tired. I need to go home.”

“Fine,” Willem said. He hailed a cab, and helped him in, and then got in himself. “Greene and Broome,” he said to the driver.

In the cab, his hands began to shake. This had been happening more and more, and he didn’t know how to stop it. It had started when he was a child, but it had happened only in extreme circumstances—when he was trying not to cry, or when he was in extraordinary pain but knew that he couldn’t make a sound. But now it happened at strange moments: only cutting helped, but sometimes the shaking was so severe that he had difficulty controlling the razor. He crossed his arms against himself and hoped Willem wouldn’t notice.

At the front door, he tried to get rid of Willem, but Willem wouldn’t leave. “I want to be alone,” he told him.

“I understand,” Willem said. “We’ll be alone together.” They had stood there, facing each other, until he had finally turned to the door, but he couldn’t fit the key into the lock because he was shaking so badly, and Willem took the keys from him and opened the door.

“What the hell is going on with you?” Willem asked as soon as they were in the apartment.

“Nothing,” he said, “nothing,” and now his teeth were chattering, which was something that had never accompanied the shaking when he was young but now happened almost every time.

Willem stepped close to him, but he turned his face away. “Something happened while I was away,” Willem said, tentatively. “I don’t know what it is, but something happened. Something’s wrong. You’ve been acting strangely ever since I got home from The Odyssey. I don’t know why.” He stopped, and put his hands on his shoulders. “Tell me, Jude,” he said. “Tell me what it is. Tell me and we’ll figure out how to make it better.”

“No,” he whispered. “I can’t, Willem, I can’t.” There was a long silence. “I want to go to bed,” he said, and Willem released him, and he went to the bathroom.

When he came out, Willem was wearing one of his T-shirts, and was lofting the duvet from the guest room over the sofa in his bedroom, the sofa under the painting of Willem in the makeup chair. “What’re you doing?” he asked.

“I’m staying here tonight,” Willem said.

He sighed, but Willem started talking before he could. “You have three choices, Jude,” he said. “One, I call Andy and tell him I think there’s something really going wrong with you and I take you up to his office for an evaluation. Two, I call Harold, who freaks out and calls Andy. Or three, you let me stay here and monitor you because you won’t talk to me, you won’t fucking tell me anything, and you never seem to understand that you at least owe your friends the opportunity to try to help you—you at least owe me that.” His voice cracked. “So what’s it going to be?”