The morning Kate and Ben broke up for the last time, there was an opening at Kate’s gynecologist, so Kate took it. She didn’t think there was anything wrong with her, had no experience with nor reason to suspect female troubles of any kind, but she liked the idea of starting over, re-emerging into the world from the safety of her doctor’s office with a clean bill of health, being inspected and declared emission-free. Like that car. Like that new vintage-contemporary concept car they were only selling online—in Radium, or whatever. No, not Radium. That couldn’t be right. Vapor. She meant Vapor, like that ad said, “Vapor, as in e-Vapor-ating,” as in only available to the first two thousand takers. Which was a pretty lewd thought, if you took the time to think about it—Kate always took the time to think about it—two thousand takers was like that girl in college who claimed to have had 378 lovers by the start of her sophomore year. (It was only in this context that Kate ever allowed herself to consider her own list of conquests, which even at her advanced age of twenty-three still only numbered in the teens).

Kate’s gynecologist, Dr. Edwards, was the junior doctor at a practice headed by the most famous ob-gyn in New York, a Dr. Vogel, who was the subject of her very own New Yorker cartoon. Kate had a thing about famous doctors. She liked seeing magazine covers on the wall next to certificates of educational achievement. Kate collected newspaper and magazine articles about her doctors—her dentist, her ophthalmologist, her internist and gynecologist—not to mention the woman who shaped her brows. She repeated jokes about the people who tweaked and tweezed her. She liked being part of the cultural conversation. Ben told her, “That doctor who advertises on the subway is part of the cultural conversation.” But Kate refused to think she was taking her brand-name obsession too far. That’s why she was Dr. Edwards’ patient instead of Dr. Vogel’s. You spent hours in the waiting room, waiting on Dr. Vogel. For Dr. Edwards, there was rarely a line.

Plus, Dr. Edwards had a way with the pussy patter. She knew just what to say when she had her hand up your cootch.

Dr. Edwards squeezed lubricant on a paper towel, readied swabs and slides and specula while Kate tried not to squirm in the plastic-sleeved stirrups.

“You having any complaints, or is this just a check-up?”

“Just a check-up. And I need to get my birth control refilled.”

“No problems I should know about? Sex life fine?”

“Yes, fine. Great. Thank god.” Kate resisted the urge to tell the doctor she’d been dumped last night. Dumped by the funniest, most intelligent, adventurous, insatiable, simpatico lover she’d ever had, her lover of nearly two years—give or take certain absences—the sort of man who—

Well, to be honest, the sort of man she hadn’t even wanted at first. They’d met at a college drama club meeting to which Kate had brought the Sunday Times. Ben was drawn to her side by the blue plastic wrapper, and asked if he could read the Arts and Leisure. He didn’t ask her name, and she didn’t offer it, and apart from his expressing gratitude when he gave the paper back, they didn’t exchange another word for nearly four months. Then Kate won the part of the slutty housemaid in the senior musical, singing the big number in the second act that brought the audience to its feet three nights in a row (plus two matinees). Even now, she’s not sure what did it—her three-and-a-half octave display or that of her breasts—but soon Kate noticed she was commanding Ben’s attention. He asked her out for weeks, suggesting coffee, breakfast, drinks, but Kate kept saying no. He was too polite, too well-dressed. Everything about his perfect speech patterns and the double-knotted laces on his unscuffed shoes screamed repressed. He wasn’t her type, and the fact that he wouldn’t give up on her seemed to confirm it. What sort of man would put himself in a situation that involved his constantly getting turned down? Either he was stupid or sickly submissive, and neither choice was something Kate could stand.

It took him six weeks to break her down.

“Are we having dinner Monday?”

“Why Monday?” Kate asked.

“Because if I asked if we were having dinner tonight you’d say no.”

“You’re right,” she said. Kate was folding laundry and watching television and balancing the phone receiver between shoulder and ear.

“I’ll come get you at eight,” Ben said.

This was a new tactic, Ben’s assuming control. Kate liked it. She muted the television. “Um, eight,” she said, in what she hoped was a neutral tone, in response to which Ben hung up.

He showed up ten minutes late, but he brought flowers, and then he took her to the new Malaysian restaurant downtown. The waiter brought a wine list but Kate ordered Chinese beer, which prompted Ben to turn to the waiter and say “Isn’t she great?” About dinner, Kate remembers only this: they were so busy talking—about movies and politics and books, which were subjects Ben discoursed upon with an energy that like so many other things Kate is beginning to realize she mistook for passion—that the waiter came for their order three times before Ben told him, “We don’t know what we want, why don’t you just start bringing things?”

Kate considered that a romantic gesture. Ben was throwing caution (and credit) to the winds.

Later, at her door, he didn’t try to kiss her and she didn’t invite him up. But he called the next day, and the next, so they went out a second time, and a third. Like the waiter, he just started bringing things—magazine articles, movie tickets, novels he’d read (or read about) and wanted to discuss with Kate.

Finally, he brought groceries. He cooked Chinese in Kate’s kitchen—it was a skill, Kate learned later, that his previous girlfriend had taught him—and then they watched The Last Seduction, after which Ben performed their first.

Three months later, Kate brought Ben home for Passover. It was the first time she’d been asked to bring a man home. She wasn’t sure she was ready—and it wasn’t that she was afraid her parents wouldn’t like him, but that they’d like him too much. Already, they’d fixed upon the list of his academic prizes, the details of his oft-described good looks, the fact that finally their daughter was dating someone who could pick up a check.

“You don’t have to come—it will be a nightmare, really, my grandmother will even be there, if it’s too much pressure, I completely understand—”

“I’d love to come,” Ben said.

“You really want to? I’m not sure how it—I’m not sure what to expect.”

“How do your parents normally behave when you bring men home?”

“I’ve never brought anyone home before,” Kate said. “They’re never home to bring anybody to.” Kate knew, as she said it, that this was only partly true. Yes, the Justers were rarely in one place long enough for Kate to get a fix on their locale—generally, they checked in once or twice a month, calling from the Andes or the Serengeti to shout “What time is it there?” into the phone. But it was more than their absences that kept Kate from introducing them to men. Until Ben, Kate hadn’t felt she was seeing anyone presentable enough to present them to.

But now she had Ben. Ben was the ultimate in presentable. It was a campus joke that he’d never been seen in the laundry room—all of Ben’s clothes required dry-cleaning.

“They’re home now,” Ben said.

“That’s because it’s monsoon season in most parts of the world.”

“You’re behaving like you have no relationship with them, like you don’t even talk,” Ben said. “You and I both know you’ve spoken to your mother three times a day for the last week. Compared to the two of you, my mother and I are functional mutes. Tell me, really, what do you two talk about?”

“Nothing,” Kate said, and congratulated herself for resisting the urge to say You.

So Kate brought Ben home, and just as she’d suspected, her parents adored him. Every time Ben got up to go to the bathroom they came up with another reason why.

“He’s very smart,” Kate’s father said.

“You only think that because he’s trying so hard not to argue with you. Believe me, if he thought it was worth it, he could argue circles around your Wall Street Journal bullshit. He’s Phi Beta Kappa, Dad. You wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“He’s so good looking,” Kate’s mother said. “He looks like John-John, don’t you think?”

“He looks like John-John, but Jewish,” Kate’s grandmother said.

“What a relief,” Kate’s father said.

“It makes things easier,” Kate’s mother said.

“One less thing for you to fight about,” Kate’s father said.

After dinner, Kate’s mother handed Kate the keys to the country house. “We never get up there anymore,” she told Ben. “Someone should be using it.”

So Kate and Ben used it. They used the kitchen, they used the living room, they used the pool, used every single bed in the place, including her parents,’ rocked it so hard that one night they moved it three feet from the wall. Kate can’t stop remembering—it hits her in the street sometimes, the subway, the nail salon while she’s drying her toes—the way they rocked that bed, and the way they pushed it back again, washed the sheets, even struggled together to replace the countless pillows just the way they’d found them, to slide the duvet cover still warm from the wash back over the down duvet. Kate had shown Ben how to maneuver the cover like a giant sock, rolling it down to its bottom and wriggling it over the duvet like the down thing was a gigantic floppy foot. She’d shown Ben how to wrap presents, too, how to double fold the edges of the paper for the neatest presentation, how to run the ribbon along the edge of the scissor-blade to create perfect plastic curls.

She can’t believe she made such a stupid mistake. For the first time in her life, with Ben, Kate had conflated making love with being in it.

“Still temping?” Dr. Edwards asked.

“Yeah, but I may—I’m thinking about leaving New York.”

“Scoot down.” The doctor wheeled her stool closer to Kate.

“I’ve been kicking around—I’ve got an offer to teach at my old prep school. Hart. It’s in Connecticut.”

“Remind me—is that what you’re doing? You teach?”

“I don’t, yet,” Kate said, “but the actress in me is beginning to think it’s the perfect gig. You know, the undivided attentions of a regular paying audience ...”

“That’s right—you’re an actress,” the doctor said. “This may sting.”

Kate held her breath. She wondered why she was telling the doctor about a teaching job she hadn’t yet decided to take. Was it because technically Dr. Edwards couldn’t tell anyone else? That was just stupid. It was time to really start thinking about this. If she were going to take this job, she’d have to leave Saturday in order to be ready for classes to begin next week. Two weeks ago, when the Dean had called to offer her the job, Kate had worried about the logistics of getting to Lakeview and beginning work so soon. But in light of her recent romantic … recent romantic what? Kate pondered the question carefully, and decided to test the power of positive thinking (a resolution that was a direct consequence of a construction worker’s having whistled at her this morning, shouting “Smile, baby,” as she walked on by). Recent romantic …

Kate felt a pinch—and then it hit her. She hadn’t been dumped, left, ignored, or abandoned. She’d been emancipated. It had taken nearly two years, but she’d finally been freed.

Kate had been thinking of going back to Hart for a while. In college, as the end approached, she’d talked it over with Ben, who’d talked her out of it.

“You hated it there.”

“‘Hated it’ is a bit strong. I hated it like one hates boot camp.”

“You want to go back to boot camp?”

“Nobody wants to go back to boot camp. But everybody who’s been to boot camp is grateful for the experience. You grow up in boot camp. You learn to love your platoon.”

“There’s a name for that.”

“Yeah?”

“Stockholm syndrome.”

“That’s when you fall in love with your kidnappers, Ben. It’s not the same thing.”

“What about your acting?”

“What about my acting? You don’t even like my acting.”

“I liked the last thing you did.”

“That’s because I took off my shirt.”

He reached for her, started undoing her buttons.

“If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were going to miss me,” Kate said.

He was fumbling with her bra now. He said, “I just want to make sure you want this.”

“What do you want?” Kate asked.

“That’s not the issue here,” he said.

“Isn’t it?”

“No, of course not.”

“It used to be,” she said, but he didn’t hear her. Stymied by her bra-clasp, he slipped his hands beneath the cups. Kate squirmed away from him.

“Where are you going?” he asked her.

“It unclips in front,” she told him.

She tossed her bra on the floor. Her pants followed.

They broke up for the first time three weeks after that, when Ben suggested they separate for the summer.

“If that’s the way you feel,” Kate said, “I think we should … separate … right now.”

“I don’t want to break up now,” he said. “I want to break up after graduation.”

“That’s two days from now,” Kate said. “If you won’t want me in two days, then it’s hard for me to imagine that you want me now.”

“I want you now. And after graduation, I want you. Just not for awhile. This is not a break-up, Kate.”

“This sounds like a break-up.”

“It’s not,” Ben said. He stared at the steering wheel—they were sitting in his car. “It’s a road-trip,” he said.

“What?”

“We’re just taking separate roads, Kate. We’re traveling in the same direction.”

“I grew up in Manhattan, Ben.” Kate took a deep breath, lifted the lock in the passenger door, and let herself out of the car. “Screw you. You know I don’t drive.”

So Kate moved back to Manhattan—and despite herself, she was grateful that Ben had stopped her from giving it up. Her heart beat faster when she was in New York. Anywhere else, she couldn’t feel her blood coursing, her organs pulsing and pumping every moment of the day. New York made her feel vital in the organic sense of the word.

It was the necessary to the endeavor element that she quickly found lacking. While Ben attended the uptown law school she’d convinced him to attend—where she imagined he was quickly arguing himself to the top of the heap—Kate temped in offices where no one, not even the other temps, ever learned her name. On days when she wasn’t working, she attended open-call auditions, but the only role she ever landed was in a children’s theater production of Barking Mad, which toured public schools and libraries throughout New England. Kate played a Cat who loved a Dog. It ended badly.

In March of her second year in the city, the tour ended, so Kate called Hart again, for the first time since college, to ask if they’d still be interested in having her go up there to teach.

This time she didn’t tell Ben about making the call. For one thing, there wasn’t anything to tell him. (When she’d spoken to the Dean he hadn’t offered her a post so much as intimated that, depending on how a certain piece of litigation fared in the Connecticut courts, there might or might not be a position for her in the fall.) More importantly though, like her parents, Ben simply wasn’t around enough to tell. Their paths had intersected several times since they’d moved to New York—but Ben kept taking detours. There were weeks when he called every night, and there were months when he didn’t. In the two years they’d known each other, Kate and Ben had broken up six times.

So Kate accepted blind dates. She went out with everyone who asked, even the roommate of a woman with whom she’d shared a cab from the airport on the way home from the last leg of the Barking Mad tour. And every once in awhile, Kate would meet a nice guy, a smart guy, (even sometimes a Jewish guy), a guy who took her to dinner and called when he’d said he would, a guy who worked somewhere where he had to wear a suit, a guy who liked to run along the river or go hiking upstate, a guy who wanted to take Kate with him, and Kate would like him, would be excited about the approaching fourth or fifth date, would have managed even to stop comparing him to Ben, and then, like clockwork, Ben would call, and Kate would find it impossible to shake the feeling that a) Ben was spying on her and b) she should accept no imitations, Ben was the man she was supposed to be with, after all.

So Ben would call and she’d let him take her out and she’d sit there and smile at him and try to read his mind. And every time, a waiter or a museum guard or an old man on the subway would ask if they were married, and Kate would wonder if everyone out there knew something that she and Ben did not. She wondered if people who were meant to be together were ringed with a certain kind of light that marked them that way for the rest of the world. Maybe those intended for one another carried a mingled aura that was incomplete, out of phase until they were sharing time and space again.

In the middle of June, when Kate had finally decided she was tired of his absences and convinced herself she was through with him once and for all, Ben called again, and when in the middle of August he hadn’t disappeared yet, Kate started to think that maybe this time they were for real.

But she didn’t trust it entirely. One night she told him, “I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop,” and he told her, “I have a lot of shoes.”

“There’s your cervix … ovaries … everything feels fine …” Dr. Edwards sounded like she was leading a museum tour through Kate’s innards. Kate tried to picture the sort of people would take this tour, who would pay good money to follow Dr. Edwards through the gallery of Kate’s sexual organs. Would they hang portraits of the men she’d … met … on the walls? She wondered what Ben’s picture would look like. What medium best expressed Great Looking Sex God with No Soul?

Last night, he’d shown up at dinner bearing gifts—well, gift, actually, but the box with the ribbons tied up around it just like she’d shown him was enough to allow for a little embellishment on Kate’s part.

“What’s this?” she asked him.

“I just saw it and I thought of you. You’ll love it.”

“What is it?”

“You’ll have to wait and see.”

“For what?”

“For later.”

“Does that mean … later?”

“If that’s okay with you.”

“It’s fine. I just never know—sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t—you know.” Kate never knew how an evening with Ben was going to play out until it was over, or it wasn’t and she was up the next morning making coffee for two.

“Well, tonight, if it’s okay with you.”

“It’s fine,” she said, and looked up at the waiter, who was waiting to ask what she wanted to drink.

The box sat between them on the bed while Ben removed his shoes. It sat there like a signal that tonight might be the night to ask the questions Kate had been trying not to ask. It was hot inside and out—Kate had told Ben the air conditioner was broken, lied about it because it was too near the bed, too cold and too loud for her to hear herself speak. Kate had a hard enough time getting Ben to listen to her without having to compete with her appliances.

Ben settled back onto the bed. “Open it,” he said, and handed her the box.

It was the first gift he’d given her since they’d left school, so she was careful with paper. She worked to untangle the ribbons rather than slide them off the box. She wanted to make the unwrapping portion of her evening last.

“You are so compulsive,” Ben said.

“Ssh,” Kate said, and lifted the top off the box. She plunged her hands into the white and purple tissue lining the package and grasped hold of something hard and rough, pottery or ceramic. She lifted it out of the box and as it surfaced she struggled not to react to what could only be described as the ugliest cookie jar she had ever seen. Or wasn’t it a cookie jar? It was hard to tell. It was shaped like one of those dancing tea pots in the indistinguishable, interchangeable Disney musical hits-of-the-moment: a curvy bronze-lacquered jar with appendages fixed at jaunty angles to two sides at what she imagined were its hips and shoulders. It was so tacky she couldn’t look at it, so she looked at Ben.

“It’s gorgeous,” she said. She kissed him. “I love it. Thank you.”

“Really? You like it?”

“I love it, Ben. It’s fabulous.”

“I can take it back.”

“It’s great. Thank you.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I’ll just put it in the kitchen,” Kate said, climbing off the bed and trying not to rush from the room. What the hell had he been thinking?

She shut it in the refrigerator because all her cabinets were full.

“Thank you,” she told him again as she climbed back on to the bed.

“I am so relieved you like it,” Ben told her. “I was a little bit worried.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Kate said, and Ben kissed her, flattening her beneath him on the bed.

But she was worried. That monstrous … thing … was in her refrigerator and she wasn’t going to relax until they’d talked. Obviously he hadn’t been paying attention for the last few years—or maybe Kate hadn’t been making herself clear. He didn’t know what she liked, what she wanted, what she needed—and it was time for that to stop. He didn’t understand her, and that was as much Kate’s fault as his. So, for the first time since he’d come back, Kate came up for air and started talking.

“I like having you here. You know that, right? I know you sometimes think I’m giving you a hard time, and I am sometimes, but mostly I’m not—I just get a little nervous and then I get a little bit … well, prickly, I get a little bit prickly, but it’s only because I’m not sure how you’re going to be. How we’re going to be. It’s just I guess I never know what you’re doing here, is all.”

Ben sat up and leaned over the side of the bed for his shoes.

“Don’t do that, don’t go,” Kate said. She put her hand on his shoulder to try to keep him still. “Just tell me why you’re here. I know why I’m here—besides the fact that I live here, I mean. I like having you near me. I miss you when you’re not here.”

“That’s how I feel, too,” Ben said, but he didn’t put down his shoes.

“You’re not just keeping me around until something better comes along?”

“Why would you think that?”

“Everyone thinks that,” Kate said. “All our friends. Anyone who knows us together, everyone who knows me.”

“That’s not true.”

“That they think that? It is true that they think that.”

“Why do you have to be so difficult? Do you want me to go?”

“I want you to stay. But I want you to be here because you want to be here, not just because you know you can.”

Ben stared at her. Kate looked away first.

“You want to hear something funny?”

“Sure.”

“They say you’re having your Kate and eating her, too.”

“And what do you say?”

“I say you’re pretty damn good at it.”

“I’m going to go.”

“Don’t, Ben. Please. I’m sorry. We were having fun, right? Weren’t we? This whole night? We didn’t disagree even once.”

“That’s right.”

“So I’ll fix this. Really. Come here.”

Kate leaned into him, up on her knees, supporting herself with her right arm while she touched his face with her left. Ben put down his shoes.

“Come here,” Kate said, lying back down again. “I’m sorry. Come here. Come back.”

Later that night he read to her from a book of stories in his briefcase. Tonight it was Mishima. Lately Ben’s taste in books had grown to resemble his taste in women. Last month Kate had caught him in the gift shop of the moma, leafing through Nan Goldin’s Tokyo Love.

(On Asian women: “It’s not a fetish—they’re just beautiful, I don’t know how else to put it.” “That’s not a fetish?” “It’s like this: Asian women are granted ten points, automatically, just for being Asian. Then you give out points for actual attributes—features, hair, body—to women across the board, and scores vary, obviously. But Asian women start out with a foundation of ten points, and you add additional points to that.” “And the rest of us, we just start at zero?” “That’s right,” he said, relieved she understood. “So the most unattractive Asian woman in creation, she automatically starts out more appealing than Cindy Crawford?” “I’ve never actually found Cindy Crawford appealing,” Ben said, and it was all Kate could do to keep from leaving him there, waiting for the hors d’oeuvres, and not come back.)

But tonight Kate wasn’t going to rock the boat. Ben was still here—that had to count for something. She wondered if she ought to tell him about Hart. She hadn’t told anyone else yet, because she knew if Ben asked her to, she’d stay in New York, and she didn’t want anyone to know that about her. Better not to say anything until she had all the facts in front of her, until she’d had a chance to make up her mind.

Ben finished the story. It was about chastity or suicide or something. Ben seemed uplifted. Kate was depressed. She was about to point that out, this newest difference between them, when Ben leaned over to kiss her, then got up out of bed and fished around the floor for his boxers.

“Going somewhere?”

“Water,” Ben said.

“You have to get dressed for that?”

“I’m not getting dressed.”

“Nice shorts.”

“Some girl bought them for me.”

“She did good.”

“She should be glad I wear them.”

“She likes it better when you’re not,” Kate said, but Ben had already disappeared into the hallway. She called after him, “We’re not together why?”

He didn’t say anything. She heard the clink of a glass upon the counter, heard the cupboard door slam shut. Faucet on, faucet off. The floor creaked as he came back in.

Still he didn’t say anything. He just crawled under the covers and grabbed her again.

Four-fifteen. Nearly morning and she couldn’t keep her mouth shut.

“Are you seeing anyone else?” Kate asked him.

“No,” Ben said. He wrapped himself around her, leg across her waist, hand on her chest. Very John and Yoko. Kate ran her hands through his hair and waited for Ben to ask her the same thing, but he didn’t.

“So this would end if you met someone else?”

“Yes,” he said.

But he still didn’t ask her.

“Would it bother you if I were seeing someone else?” she asked.

“That’s not really any of my business,” he said.

The thought stopped her breathing. She swallowed, but not hard enough that he’d notice. Kate wanted not to lose control.

She said, “What do you mean?”

“Well, who am I to say who you should or should not be seeing?”

“You’re in my bed, aren’t you? And you’re here pretty regularly, right? Lately? I mean, all things considered?” She forced herself to keep her voice light, forced herself to keep stroking Ben’s hair.

But Ben wouldn’t say anything, so she asked him again, but slower, this time: “Would it bother you if I were seeing someone else.” She said it like it wasn’t a question, inflected it wrong like she was sounding out the words.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said it. He said: I sort of assumed you were.

What Kate wouldn’t forgive herself for later was she didn’t kick him out of her bed right there.

In the morning, the alarm went off just after seven. Kate listened to Ben get out of bed, but she didn’t turn to watch him rise. She heard him in the bathroom, heard the shower run and the toilet flush, but she didn’t move. Didn’t roll over, didn’t get dressed, didn’t even pull the comforter over her to cover her naked back. She left herself exposed to the door.

Ben came back into the room dripping but she didn’t see it for herself. She didn’t watch while he dressed, didn’t move to stroke his back as pulled on his socks or adjusted his tie. This used to be her favorite thing, watching him prepare to go out into the world in his dry-clean-only, well-taken-care-of clothes, but now finally after two extremely interrupted years all Kate wanted was to get him out of her apartment and out of her life. She was shocked at how much time had passed, all the hours and nights and afternoons she’d put in and still, no matter what she said or how she said it, the man she loved didn’t know her at all.

Ben put on his shoes and then he came around the bed to sit down beside her. He ran one hand across her waist, kissed her neck and then the very top of her spine.

“That was fun,” he said.

“Yeah,” Kate said, but she didn’t turn around.

“Go back to sleep,” he said. He smacked her lightly on the butt. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

It struck her then, for the very first time, the difference between later and soon. Later implied temporal continuity, a moment in time that was further along but still connected to the moment that was now. Soon meant a return, a coming back from a period that was entirely unconnected to the present. Soon was what you said to someone with whom you no longer had anything in common, as in “We should do this again soon, if neither one of us can think of anything better to do.”

“Pull the door tight behind you,” Kate said. “I don’t want to have to get up.”

“Okay.” He kissed her neck one more time, then stood up to go. “Bye.”

“Bye.”

Kate listened as he undid the deadbolt to let himself out, and waited for the door to thud and click back into the frame behind him. The apartment shook a little when he pulled on the knob to check the door was completely closed.

She waited until she was sure he’d left the building, counting in her head one minute, two minutes, three. Then Kate got up out of bed. She put the towels Ben had used in the hamper, and found a clean set for herself.

Euphoria flooded over her as Kate waited for the water to warm. Was this optimism? It occurred to her that it had been ages since she’d allowed herself to anticipate anything, good or bad.

Kate stepped behind the plastic curtain.

She would have made it through her shower without crying if she hadn’t gotten shampoo in her eyes.