“Jonah?”

“You should have told me.” The words burst from him, so angry I wince. He sees that, and speaks more quietly, but with an effort. “I needed to know, Vivienne.”

“It’s a difficult thing to tell.” That sounds so inadequate.

“You didn’t think I needed to know that before I did these things to you?”

Humiliation scorches me from the inside out. “We both wanted that fantasy. It was your idea!”

“If I’d known you were a rape victim, that would have changed everything.” Jonah won’t even look at me now.

I’m crashing. Burning. And from a greater height than ever before, because only moments ago I dared to believe that Jonah was truly on my side. For the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to make peace with my sexual desires. Now all the shame has returned in an instant. “You think I’m sick for wanting it after what happened to me. Don’t you?”

“That’s not it.”

Of course it is. “You hate me for giving in to the fantasy, even though you wanted it too—even though it was your idea.”

Finally Jonah turns to me again. I wish he hadn’t. The fury in his eyes makes me feel sick inside. “You turned me into the last thing I ever wanted to be. You turned me into someone who abused a rape victim.”

“It wasn’t abuse. Not if I wanted it.”

“Your wrists are still raw!” he shouts.

I wince and turn away.

When Jonah speaks again, his voice is calmer—but in the tight, controlled way that tells me it’s mostly an act. “We can’t keep doing this.”

Does he mean we can’t play our games any longer? No. He means that this is the end of him and me.

“All right,” I say. The words come out cool and polite. I sound like my mother. In our worst moments, we often revert to our worst selves. “Let’s go to the airport.”

Jonah doesn’t speak as I drive him there, though I sense he’s waiting for me to say something. What? It doesn’t matter. The man I showed my most secret self to has rejected that part of me. The one person who looked deeply enough to find the truth turned against me because I didn’t tell him myself.

And something about my secret feeds the darkness inside him in ways neither of us can bear.

I pull up in front of the airport, by the sign for Oceanic Airlines. We are surrounded by people dropping off friends and family members, hugging each other tightly around the backpacks they wear, exchanging kisses and laughter amid nests of luggage. Jonah opens the car door, then says, “Good-bye, Vivienne.”

It sounds so final. But I can top it. Without looking at him, I say, “Get out.”

Thirty-two

“This is the part where you say ‘I told you so.’” I wipe at my eyes with the Kleenex Doreen always has waiting on the end table. “Go ahead.”

“That’s not what I’m thinking, and it shouldn’t be what you’re thinking either.”

“Why not?” My eyes actually ache from crying. I don’t think I’ve stopped weeping since I broke down driving past Shreveport yesterday afternoon. “The most fucked-up sexual arrangement ever has now blown up in my face. Not like a grenade, like an atomic bomb. You saw it coming.”

Doreen shakes her head. “Not this.”

All last night, I kept staring at my phone, waiting for it to chime with a text from Jonah. I didn’t expect an apology, much less an explanation. But I can’t stop wondering what he’s thinking.

Jonah may have left my life, but his shadow will linger for a long time.

“Someone finally learned the whole truth,” I whisper. “And he hated me for it.”

“You don’t know that he hated you. You only know that Jonah had to stop.”

“Why else would he stop?”

“You tell me.” Doreen gives me one of her looks, which means it’s time to dig deep.

And I remember Jonah’s words: You turned me into the last thing I ever wanted to be.

I tuck a lock of hair behind my ear. “Whatever darkness that’s within Jonah—whatever fuels that fantasy for him—he doesn’t want to turn that on someone who’s actually been hurt.”

“Jonah spoke harshly. He shouldn’t have done that. But he gets to have limits too.”

She’s said this to me before, but about Geordie, when he absolutely could not play along with my fantasy. Those two men have drawn their boundaries about a thousand miles apart, but they’re both within their rights.

Still. “Jonah was angry. He was furious. I froze up just the way I did when I was a little kid and Mom would start screaming.”

“Did you feel threatened?”

“Not physically. It just . . . hurt so much. Jonah had stood up for me, and finally, finally Chloe knows Anthony’s full of shit, and it could have been one of the best days I’d ever had. Instead everything fell apart.”

Doreen nods. “Let’s focus on the good part of the day for a bit. Somebody finally believed you. Somebody finally put the blame where it belongs, on Anthony. How does it feel?”

Beneath all my sorrow, all my anger, that tiny light still glows. “Unbelievable. Like—like the whole world turned upside down.”

“In a good way?”

“Yeah.” Whenever I think about returning home for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, I feel apprehensive, but it’s not the dread that has consumed me for years. Anthony will never have as much power over me again, even if Jonah’s not at my side. I saw him humbled; I saw him humiliated. That memory will feed me for a long time to come.

“What about your father?” Doreen says.

I have to laugh. “Apparently he already talked one of his golf buddies into sneaking him some jambalaya. He hasn’t changed.”

“Do you wish that he would?”

“I try not to wish for the impossible.”

And yet I can’t stop wishing I could roll back time, wind it back on a spool until I reached yesterday morning. Maybe I couldn’t change anything, but at least this time I’d understand exactly what went wrong.

Even understanding wouldn’t be enough.

•   •   •

Later that day, as I sit in my office manually inputting grades, my phone buzzes with a text. Electricity crackles along my skin, and I have no idea whether the sudden flush of energy comes from anger or hope.

But when I look at the screen, I see it’s only an invitation from Shay to come over and watch Netflix with her tonight or tomorrow. And how was your romantic weekend in the woods?

I never even told my closest friends about Dad’s heart failure. Major omission. So I send out a few texts, then spend the rest of the afternoon answering frantic questions from Carmen, Arturo, and Shay. I tell Kip, too, and within minutes a caramel macchiato has appeared on my desk as if by magic.

“Caffeine doesn’t solve everything,” I say to him, even as I accept it with a smile.

Kip sighs. “A macchiato can only solve your problems if you let it, sweetie.”

The one person I don’t hear from is Geordie. He’s incredibly busy at the moment—papers are always due at the end of the semester, and LLM papers are to undergraduate papers as World War II is to the invasion of Grenada. Still, for something like this, I would expect him to text at least. Geordie was the only guy I’ve ever been with who won my mother over; he launched a full-scale charm offensive on my parents, to such good effect that they sent him a birthday card two months after we broke up. So Geordie would be worried not only about me, but also about my dad.

Sometimes cell phone reception sucks in the library, I remind myself. Plus he might have shut off his phone to be sure he’d be productive.

Which isn’t a bad idea. I snap off the phone, and just like that, I’m not waiting for Jonah any longer. It should feel triumphant, or at least decisive. Instead it only feels sad.

That evening I go to the studio. Some artists find it difficult to work when they’re upset, but sometimes that kind of emotional energy fuels me. Don’t knock sublimation until you’ve tried it.