Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

Goodbye

FARAH

I do not fall apart in the car.

This is not nothing. I want to note it somewhere, in the small private ledger I keep of things I have managed, but there is no one to tell and I have long since stopped keeping score for my own benefit. I simply do not fall apart. I watch the frost-bitten outskirts of the town that used to be a different town recede in the side mirror, and I keep my hands flat on my thighs, and I breathe the way I was taught to breathe when the situation requires that your face not become a problem.

My face is not a problem.

Inside is a different accounting.

Caspian drives. He has not asked me how I am. This is one of the things I have catalogued about him — the absence of that particular question, which most people deploy reflexively and which I have always found