She didn't sleep, not really, not in any way that counted. She lay awake turning the evening over the way she turned over a failed prototype — looking for the c***k, the weak seam, the exact point where something that had felt so certain in the room had started, hours later, in the dark of her own bed, to feel like something she might have imagined the size of.
I have to be the one who stops. She kept returning to that sentence, testing it from different angles, and each time she arrived at the same uncomfortable landing: it was, by any reasonable measure, the responsible thing he could have said. It was also, underneath the responsibility, an admission large enough that she didn't know how to simply set it back down and return to being Ms. Immani in a classroom on Monday morning as thoug
