When you finally reached Houston, you checked into a seedy motel and found a public library. On a computer between the musty stacks, you typed her name—Facebook surfaced right away. In her profile photo, Jenny wore a pair of plastic sunglasses, her shoulders tan and surprisingly toned. She had been tagged, a few days earlier, in a photo of three women standing in a parking lot. Last day of work for Bethany! the caption read. Behind them, a sign bared the first four letters of the hospital’s name. Google proved it—the hospital was in the suburbs. Not far from here. Your chest thrummed. Your body shaped itself momentarily back into something you understood.
Hope, like a blade.
The next morning, you waited in your car, patient outside the emergency room. You knew from Facebook that Jenny had cut her hair into a stylish bob, but you had not imagined it would suit her so well. It thinned out her face, lengthened her. Jenny looked good. She held a coffee cup in one hand and her phone in the other—when she laughed into the speaker, the echo drifted through your windshield. Maybe things would have been different if you’d just done it then, talked to her in the shock of day, as people streamed through the revolving doors. But you were too curious.
The hours passed, your story expanding as it smothered in the heat. You would fix things—a second chance. You would go back to that house with the cherry red curtains, to nights fossilized on the couch. By the time Jenny came out, the sun was glowing pink over the asphalt, and she was walking with a man. The man wore a pair of sky-blue scrubs, his jaw scruffy and angular. He leaned to plant a slow kiss on Jenny’s cheek.
A flush of rage, lightning hot.
After a long goodnight that made you queasy, after the man had gotten into his own car and driven away, you followed Jenny through a neighborhood of sprawling gingerbread-style mansions, then into a smaller subdivision. She stopped in front of a bland modern condo, which looked the same as all the condos around it, painted pastel, lined up like crayons. Jenny stood on the stoop, digging through her purse for her house keys. It was the same purse she always carried, the fake leather flaking off in chunks. Inside, you knew, there would be a pile of crinkled receipts and ChapStick tubes with crumbs stuck to their rims.
The lights in the apartment clicked on. Darkness had fallen like a sheet from the rafters, and everything solidified in those long throbbing minutes, before you slid from your car. The man’s thumb, knuckling Jenny’s cheek. The hurt, the crave, the shame—it all congealed, rancid.
You turned the knob. Locked.
So you kicked until the door flung open. Louder, more violent than you’d planned. This would be a point of contention, later—the felony charge, the prosecution claiming burglary, making you eligible for the death penalty.
But in that moment, there was only Jenny. She stood in the open marble kitchen, her back to the stove—Jenny’s house was clean, gleaming. She had bought a fancy new espresso machine, shining against the granite countertop, and there were fresh flowers bathing in a vase by the windowsill. Gas clicked beneath the teakettle, as one of her favorite old Sheryl Crow songs trilled from the speakers. The song was Jenny in her clearest form, so basic, so wanting, so sentimental. A cataclysm. In that moment, she was more than Jenny—she was all of them. Every woman who had left you behind.
Ansel, she said, trembling afraid. As you kicked down the door, Jenny had lunged in fear for a kitchen knife, shiny and stark, too big for her hands.
This was not how you’d pictured it.
Jenny, you wanted to plead. Jenny, it’s me. You wanted the Jenny you had chosen for her patience and her comfort, the Jenny who’d rolled over in bed to press her lips to your shoulder blade. You wanted the Jenny who had believed you could be more than yourself. The Jenny who had given you a life worth surviving.
But there was only terror, in that kitchen.
There was a split second, where it could have gone differently. Maybe there were millions of those alternate seconds—if the kitchen knife had not glinted in her grasp—if, if, if—things could have been different. Even as you lunged, as Jenny raised her hands in a defense that looked like surrender, you ached for those substitute lives, the milliseconds that held endless possibility.
She was just a Girl. You were only you.
*
Thirty-one minutes.
You stand rigid in the far corner of your cell. The chaplain is gone, and the tip of your nose mashes into the wall. Cool, gritty. Your body feels sensitive to every touch, a walking fever.
No one seems to care. No one seems to understand how intent can change things. Of all the facts that brought you here, this one feels most important: that night came from your very core. You did not plan it or fantasize it. You only moved on the force of what you knew yourself to be. It should matter, the distance between your desire and your actions. It should matter that you wanted to love Jenny, or at least to learn how. You did not want to kill her.