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  My brother called me while I waited for my food. I didn’t mention the brunch, and neither did he. He didn’t actually say anything about my mother or our sister or the Bar Mitzvah at all. He’d just called to chat, and I was reminded how lucky I was to have a brother who I loved and considered a friend.

  “Hey, so, what’s up with you and Niall?”

  I licked fudge frosting off my finger. “Nothing’s up. Why?”

  “You went out with him again, didn’t you?”

  I laughed. “Did he tell you that?”

  “He mentioned it, yeah. Gave me kind of the third degree about you, to be honest. Wanted to know if you had a boyfriend, how often you still modeled, what you were into.”

  “Did you tell him basket weaving and underwater interpretive dance?” I asked, only a little sourly.

  “He meant, you know.”

  “Gross, Evan. That’s so gross. I don’t want my brother discussing my...God!” I lowered my voice when heads turned.

  My brother laughed. “Hey, believe me, I don’t really want to think about it, much less talk about it.”

  “Why the hell is everyone so fucking obsessed with what I choose to do in the bedroom?” I hissed and stabbed my brownie with a fingertip.

  “Because it’s weird.”

  I knew he was trying to make light, but it hit me hard. “Fuck you, Evan.”

  “Hey. Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I just meant that...shit. I’m sorry. It’s the pictures, that’s all. Nobody would even know if you hadn’t ever done any of those pictures. Or if you’d maybe just said it was a thing for the pictures, not something you...do.”

  “Sorry if I refused to closet myself for the comfort of my family and friends,” I told him. “You’re married. I could assume that makes you a reasonably straight male who gets laid once every few weeks and maybe gets a blow job for your birthday. You don’t see me going around speculating or trying to psychoanalyze you about it.”

  “Calm down.”

  “Fuck you,” I said again, hating the way tears clogged my voice. “While you were blabbing away to a stranger about how I like to fuck, did it ever occur to you to tell him to fucking ask me?”

  “I did tell him,” my brother said. “I told him that you were my sister, and you were awesome and that if he wanted to take you out, he’d better be fucking prepared to handle you with care, or I would mess him up.”

  I sniffled, hoping nobody in the coffee shop could see me crying. “You didn’t.”

  “I totally did.”

  “I thought you didn’t want me to go out with him.”

  “You’re going to do what you do. Doesn’t matter what I want.”

  That was the truth. “Well, considering he totally blew me off, maybe he’s not such a nice guy, after all. Or maybe what you told him scared him off. So I guess your evil plan to prevent us from finding true lurve worked.”

  “C’mon, Lise, I got your back. You know that.” Evan paused. “You know I don’t care what you do. Whatever. Some people like black licorice and some people don’t.”

  “Thank you. I love you.”

  “Gross,” my brother said. “Shut up.”

  In the bathroom before I left the coffee shop, I got a clue as to why I was in such a bad, weepy mood. In high school, Alicia’s mom had still referred to periods as “the curse.” I totally felt cursed just then, cramping and bleeding and bloated and emotional. As I washed my hands, I caught sight of the rabbit on the inside of my wrist, and I let myself touch it briefly, just once.

  George had always brought me chocolate ice cream when I felt this way.

  And then I was crying again, deep and gasping sobs I stifled with the back of my hand while I prayed nobody was waiting too long on the other side of the door.

  21

  I could’ve canceled my rendezvous with Esteban. Should have, maybe, considering how I felt, physically. But it was how I felt mentally that kept me from calling it off.

  I did prepare him, though, when he called me the morning before our evening rendezvous. “Just to let you know, my lady garden is in full bloom.”

  We’d talked about it before—fucking during my period was nothing I’d ever wanted to try, though Esteban had said more than once he wouldn’t mind. Ask it of him, and he would comply.

  That was why I liked him, after all.

  He laughed. “I’ll come prepared for whatever you want. I’m already tingling with anticipation.”

  “Me, too. I’m looking forward to it.” The words were out before I knew to stop them—once said, impossible to call back. I meant it. I just hadn’t meant to say it aloud.

  He sounded pleased. “Kisses, until later.”

  We said our goodbyes. I lay back on my bed, the heating pad not even coming close to doing what it was supposed to do. Ibuprofen didn’t help, either. The curse of womanhood, I thought with a sour, bitter sigh and pressed ungentle hands to my belly, thinking if I could rip my uterus out with my bare hands, that might be a lesser agony than this.

  Cranky, crampy, emotional. I blamed that for the reason I took up my phone to log in to the email account I hadn’t used in years except to store all my saved messages from George. The pictures he’d sent—his socks, his sandwiches, his smiles. The buckle of the belt I’d bought him, a snapshot that should’ve meant nothing but had me fighting an indrawn breath that wanted to become a sob.

  I’m no masochist, but there was no doubting that I took some sort of twisted pleasure from hurting myself this way. Over and over. So desperate to cling to the memories of how he’d made me feel that I would gladly suffer this pain if only to have a moment’s bliss of remembering.

  It was bad enough to look at the messages and pictures, the screenshots of our conversations, but it was the final photo of the two of us that tipped me over the edge. Us, together, smiling as though there was nothing in the world that could make either of us happier than to be with each other.

  I’d looked at the photo a hundred times if I’d looked once. That and the one I’d taken the first night we met. How many people have a picture of both the very first and very last times they were together? I hadn’t known in the first that I’d ever see him again; I hadn’t known in the second photo that I never would.

  And, because I was stupid and melancholy, because I was hurting and hormonal, because I was in love, I emailed him the picture along with a message.

  This is a picture of two people who are ridiculously happy when they are together.

  One of them thinks that state of ridiculous happiness would extend into the kitchen at dinnertime and in the morning bathroom routine and at the grocery store and on road trips and during thunderstorms and bill paying and laundry and arguments and watching TV and being sick and during holidays and making love on clean sheets and using the Crock-Pot and in the backseat of a taxi at four in the morning after pancakes, and even at an amusement park in August, although that is its own level of hell.

  The other one is you.

  I’d sent dozens, no, hundreds of messages, but in three, almost four, years, I had never emailed him. Unlike the agony and ecstasy of being able to see that he’d received and read my text message, I would have no way of knowing if he’d opened an email. But I knew he would read it, just as I knew he would not reply, just as I knew it might hurt him a little even though really, I wanted it to hurt him a lot.

  I wanted him to ache and burn and mourn and yearn and grieve for me the way I was helpless to stop myself from doing for him, but I knew he never would.

  22

  Esteban and I pulled into the parking lot at the same time. Usually he texted me the hotel room number ahead of time and I met him there. Seeing him get out of his car, I didn’t get out of mine. We wouldn’t walk in together. It wasn’t like that for us, and never had been. Instead, I sat in my car looking uselessly at my phone, pretending to wait for Esteban’s message but really waiting to see if an email reply from George had somehow managed to sneak through while I was drivin