I’d pillaged the fashion closet the day before I left: Dark waxed jeans, Theory silk tops, suede booties that were neither too high nor too low. I got the accessories editor to lend me a lovely little necklace: delicate rose gold chain, a small bar of diamonds glinting in the middle. It would pick up nicely—tastefully—on camera. I had a professional blow out the messy, trendy waves in my hair that afternoon. The goal was to look simple and expensive.

I was folding a charcoal-colored blouse into my weekend bag when I heard Luke’s key in the door.

“Hi, babe,” he called.

“Hi,” I said, not loud enough that he could hear me.

“You in there?” Luke’s Ferragamo shoes clicked closer, and soon his frame filled the open doorway. He was wearing a spectacular navy suit, narrow pants sewn from a fabric so rich it shone. He put his hands on either side of the frame and leaned forward, his chest expanding.

“Nice loot,” Luke said, nodding to the pile on the bed.

“I didn’t have to pay for it, don’t worry.”

“No, that wasn’t what I meant.”

Luke watched me transfer piles of clothes from the bed into the gaping hole of the bag.

“How are you feeling about this?”

“Good,” I said. “I feel like I look good. I feel good.”

“You always look good, babe.” Luke grinned.

I wasn’t in the mood to joke. “I wish you could come with me,” I sighed.

Luke nodded sympathetically. “I know. Me too. But I just feel bad because I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to see John again.” Luke had been all set to go with me this weekend, but a few weeks ago he’d found out his friend John, who’s been feeding orphans in India or some shit that makes me feel like a plastic bitch for what I do, was coming to New York. He would be here only two days and then he was back in India for another year. He couldn’t even come to our wedding. He was bringing his fiancée, another volunteer named Emma, who was twenty-five. I was instantly wounded by her beautiful name and her perfect age. I still couldn’t believe I was going to be thirty in two years. “Twenty-five?” I’d snorted to Luke. “What is she, a mail-order child bride?”

“Twenty-five’s not that young,” he’d shot back. He’d heard himself and added, “I mean, to get married.”

I understood how important John was to Luke. Even though things were chilly between Nell and me right now, if she moved across the world and came back to New York for two nights, I would drop everything to see her too. That didn’t bother me. What did was Luke’s palpable relief that he was off the hook. That was a pain I couldn’t lie away. I e-mailed Mr. Larson, thinking, You drove me to this. “Want to get that lunch on the Main Line?”

“I love you though,” Luke said. It came out like a question: “I love you though?” “You’re going to do so great, babe. Just tell the truth.” He laughed, suddenly. “The truth shall set you free! Man, I haven’t seen that movie in so long. Whatever happened to Jim Carrey anyway?”

I wanted to tell him that’s a line from the Bible, not Liar Liar. To just take this fucking seriously for once. I was going into the lion’s den with nothing to protect me but a few old green carats on my finger. How could that possibly be enough? Instead, I said, “He did that Burt Wonderstone movie. It was actually pretty funny.”

When I’d asked the director, Aaron, what hotel he’d booked me, his eyebrows had jumped halfway up his forehead in surprise. “We just assumed you would stay with your family.”

“They live pretty far out,” I’d said. “It would probably be more convenient if you got me a hotel in the area. The Radnor Hotel is pretty reasonable, I think.”

“I’ll have to check to see if that’s in our budget,” he’d said. But I knew it would be. No one had said this to me, but I suspected my story was the pin holding this whole thing together. There was no new light to shed on the incident without my version of events. Also helpful was my chest, which Aaron’s eyes seemed to flick to involuntarily.

I hadn’t slept in my childhood bedroom since college, and even then it was only sporadically. I interned every summer, in Boston the summer of my freshman year, and then in New York after that. I tried to spend the holidays with Nell’s family as much as possible. My sleep was heavenly at Nell’s house.

It was an entirely different experience at my parents’ place, where I would oftentimes lie awake almost all night, gripping a silly tabloid magazine in terror. I didn’t have a TV in my room, and this was before colleges dealt out laptops like free condoms at the health center, and the only way I knew how to distract myself from the galloping anxiety, from the disgust that this room, this house, dredged up from the shadowy mine of the past, was to read about the Jennifer Aniston–Brad Pitt–Angelina Jolie love triangle. For me, the only worthy competitor of bleak, starless memory is superficial fluff. The two are successfully and mutually exclusive.

As I got older, and as I made more money, it was like an epiphany—I can actually afford to get a hotel. It was easy to blame on the fact that, when I came home, I brought Luke, and my parents wouldn’t allow us to sleep in the same room. Not even now that we’re engaged. “I just don’t feel comfortable with the two of you sleeping in the same bed under my roof until you are married,” Mom said, demurely, narrowing her eyes at me when I laughed.

I didn’t tell my parents that Luke had backed out of the trip until the very last minute. And over Mom’s hollow insistence that I stay at home, I calmly explained that the production company had already paid for the Deluxe Guest Room at the Radnor Hotel, and it was more convenient for me anyway since it put me only five minutes from Bradley.

“It’s more like ten,” Mom pointed out.

“It’s better than forty,” I snapped. Then felt bad. “Why don’t we go out to dinner on Saturday night? Luke’s treat. He’s sorry about canceling.”

“That is so sweet of him,” Mom gushed. “Why don’t you pick the place?” Then she added, “I do love Yangming though.”

And so I tucked my withering body into Luke’s Jeep (our Jeep, he keeps correcting me) on Thursday evening. Proud of the New York plate. Proud of my New York license. The streetlights caught the bauble on my hand every time I spun the wheel, the collision creating a burst of jade light so sharp it could blind. “Philadelphia. Just a hop, skip, a cab, a Metroliner, and another cab away” from New York City, Carrie Bradshaw said once. It felt so much farther than that. Like another dimension, like a life of someone else who I felt sorry for now. She had been so naive and unprepared for what was to come, it hadn’t just been sad. It had been dangerous.

“So what we’ll have you do first is state your name, age, and how old you were at the time of the”—Aaron fumbled for a word—“the, uh, incident. Let’s refer to it as the date it happened, maybe. So how old you were on November twelfth, 2001.”

“Do I need more powder?” I fretted. “I get really shiny on my nose.”

The makeup artist approached and scrutinized the stage layer of foundation. “You’re good.”

I was sitting on a black stool. The wall behind me was black too. Friday was the day we filmed in the studio, a cavernous room above a Starbucks in Media, PA. The whole place smelled like the burnt, overpriced fuel of diabetic Americans. I would tell my story here, and on Saturday morning, when the students were sleeping off the previous night’s antics, we’d get some shots of me around the outskirts of Bradley. Aaron said he wanted me to point out “places of interest.” The navigational points at which my life became an average before and rarefied after were places of interest now, I supposed.