He looked at her for a long time without answering.
“I’m not an overdose you can undo with a Ph.D.,” she said, hurt where she’d wanted to be angry. “I’m not a problem you can solve. I thought you understood that.”
“I did. I do.”
“Well, it seems like you don’t. It seems like you have conditions for being with me.”
“It’s not … it’s not that. It’s not conditions.”
Her pulse faltered. “But it’s something.”
“I just don’t know,” he said, sounding as if he might say more, but then he spread his hands helplessly. “I just don’t know.”
She stared at him in silence. She felt the floorboards giving way beneath her like sand, some tide in the distance turning.
“I used to have this theory that I could save myself with time,” Aldo said. “That I’d solve it, and then I’d turn a corner one day, and then everything would be different. One hundred and twenty degrees from what it had been.” He paused. “Now, of course,” he mumbled, more to himself than to her, “I realize I can’t actually save anything.”
Tears pricked at the back of her eyes. “Why? Just because I forged a painting?”
He seemed sorry, but he didn’t say it.
“Because,” he exhaled wearily. “Because I think you need me more than you want me, Regan, and I think maybe—”
There was a dull drone in her ear, temporarily deafening.
“—I think maybe that means that I should go.”
Reaction flooded her in waves, in surges.
First, like an electrical socket she’d shoved herself into, she sparked with panic, angry and lost without knowing which to suffer most. She felt stricken and empty and vacant with rage. Then it was doused, drenched, plunged. In a wash of desperation, chilling her to a shiver, she felt like falling to her knees, like grabbing him around the ankles. She felt like kissing his feet, like slapping his face.
Next, it was violence. She wanted to take the words and force them back into his mouth—the shape of which she knew like the God she’d never believed in—and shove them back down to his liver. She wanted to stab him and stab herself and stab her mother and especially to stab Marc; she couldn’t stop the images of herself, stabbing and stabbing and stabbing until her hands were soaked with tears and blood.
She would do all of it, she thought, and then use the carnage to paint something new, something brilliant, and with Aldo’s blood especially—from the vessels of his lovely wounds—she would paint a sky mixed with gold, dotted with constellations. Then she would say: See what I did, what I made? She would make a promise to him, kissing each of his lifeless eyes with reverence, and the promise would be this: Now, you and I will live forever.
But after the violence had been the numbness, the unfeeling calm.
“Maybe you should go, then,” she said dully, and Aldo froze, hesitating for a moment.
Then he nodded, tucked his hands in his pockets, and headed for the door.
* * *
FOR A LONG TIME AFTERWARD Regan would think about what had gone wrong, turning it over and over in her mind. She couldn’t escape the feeling that she had misjudged something in the framework, somewhere in the landscape of The Fight, and that perhaps it had been something not of her making, but of theirs. She had thought, since their love had been red—had been fiery and passionate and untamed, magnetic and disruptive—The Fight was meant to be red as well, but the more she thought about it, the more it became clear that they—neither of them—truly knew what it was to fight like that for anything. They could have only fought in blue, in melancholy tones of it, because relationships, for them, were blue. Life was, for Regan, a cycle of arriving and leaving, passing through a revolving door. When she left, which she always did, she left quietly; not even a gust of wind but a little breeze, hardly a disturbance at all. Aldo had told her himself that he was a master of outlasting his friendships, enduring until there was nothing, and then he simply faded away. Should she have screamed, should she have made demands? Yes, probably, but she was out of practice, untrained. Too many people had refused when she had wished that they would beg her to stay, and now, because of them, she had let him go so easily, unclenching all her fingers at once.
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED TO REGAN.
“So,” the doctor had said the week prior, “how are things?”
“They’re actually really good,” Regan said.
“Classes at the Institute still going well?”