“What happened?” Nora’s questions were as relentless as any assault.
Zach took another breath. He never even allowed himself to think about that time, much less tell another soul about it. It was his burden alone.
“I was in my office late on a Friday night. I had a hundred exams to grade that weekend. I suppose I’d complained about this in class. Somehow she knew I’d be there.”
“She came to your office?”
“Yes. I was exhausted.” Suddenly Zach was back in that cramped third-floor office again. His sleeves were rolled up; his fingers were tinged with red ink. His head ached from the hours of reading, the endless concentration. He yawned, stretched, heard a noise in the hallway. “I heard footsteps in the hall and looked up. She was standing in my doorway.”
“She came to your office late at night. Shall I assume the inevitable happened?”
“It felt inevitable. She came inside without waiting for me to ask her. And then she closed the door behind her.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘I don’t have any poems tonight.’”
“And what did you say?”
Zach exhaled. “I didn’t say anything at all.”
“This shouldn’t be a bad memory for you. Tell me why it is.”
“She was…” Zach stopped and let the silence speak for itself. Behind the blindfold he closed his eyes. He remembered how easily Grace came to him, how her body relaxed against his, how his hands fit her thighs as if they’d been made to press them open again and again. And then he recalled her gasp of pain, that brief intake of breath that told him all.
“She was a virgin,” Nora said, filling in the blanks.
“Yes.”
“It’s not your fault that you didn’t know.”
“It was my fault…” Zach began and felt the guilt on him again like a knife pressed to his throat. “It was my fault I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.”
“Did she tell you to?”
“No. But I should have anyway. I had dozens of lovers before then…but never…” Zach said and though the memory was an agony, his body remembered that moment. He could still feel himself inside her tight passage. “I’d never taken such pleasure inside the body of a woman before that night.”
“Tell me what happened, Zach,” Nora demanded. She wouldn’t stop until he told her.
“No, it wasn’t my fault I didn’t know she was a virgin. But it was my fault she got pregnant.”
“Jesus Christ,” Nora said, sounding both shocked and sympathetic for the first time. Zach was almost afraid of the next question.
“You don’t have any children so I’ll assume it was one of three possibilities—adoption, abortion or miscarriage.”
“It was ectopic. Worse than a miscarriage.”
He heard Nora’s slight intake of breath, the wince of pain.
“How bad was it?”
“It almost killed her. She was so young she didn’t know what was normal and what wasn’t. She ignored the pain for a month. We’d only been married two weeks when she woke up in a pool of blood. One in a million chance, the doctor said, that a girl so young and healthy would suffer that. So young, he said, and he looked at me like a criminal. I felt like one. Eighteen years old and she’s hemorrhaging in the emergency ward. Eighteen years old and she has to marry a man over a decade her senior, a man hardly more than a stranger to her.”
“What happened after?”
Zach shook his head. “She survived. But I wasn’t sure we would or even if we should. I waited every day for her to tell me she was leaving me. We married because she was pregnant. Then she wasn’t. But she never left me. Still, that year was hell for us. I had a nineteen-year-old wife I barely knew who had to transfer to King’s College in London after I left Cambridge, left before they could fire me.”
“But you stayed married.”
“We did. How or why, I don’t know.”
“Because she loved you, Zach. And because you loved her.”
“I did. Not that it matters.”
“Why doesn’t it?”
“Because we’re over. She’s made that perfectly clear.”
“How do you know it’s over?”
“Because she left me, Nora,” Zach said, letting irritation seep into his voice.
“She left you?” Nora seemed unfazed by his anger. “Aren’t you the one who packed up, boarded a plane and moved across an ocean?”
“She left me long before that.”
“Tell me.” Nora’s voice was insistent, hypnotic and musical. Unable to see, Zach felt uncoupled from the ground, unmoored. Nothing seemed real. It was easier to make his confession in this kind of darkness.
“Two years ago Grace told me she wanted us to try again. Try again—as if we were trying the first time.”
“What did you say?”
“I said she nearly died because of my mistake, and I would never let that happen again. After that, she started to fade out on me. First she stopped making our coffee in the morning. Another month passed and she stopped reading with me in the evenings. She didn’t leave all at once. Just room by room. She left the bedroom last. I told her about the job here. She told me to go if that’s what I wanted. But she was already gone. I did leave, but she left me first.”
“Can I tell you a secret, Zach?” Nora’s voice came from over his shoulder. “I would have left you, too.”
“Nora, I—”
“Shut up and listen,” she said with such cold, quiet authority that Zach fell silent at once. “You called the first night you spent with her a mistake. It was that night, that mistake that brought you two together. What should have been a one-night stand created a marriage. Can you imagine the guilt she’s been carrying for the past eleven years? Thinking that because of her you had to leave a job you loved, that you had to marry someone you didn’t, that she ruined your career, your life, your world. And you call the night that started it all a mistake? She didn’t leave you, Zach. You threw her out.”
“She nearly died because of me, Nora,” he said, nearly spitting the words. “You can’t even imagine what that was like.”
“She was eighteen, an adult. It was her decision as much as yours. She came to your office. You think she came for a cup of tea and a chat? She wanted you. She got you. And I can promise you even waking up in a puddle of her own blood it never once occurred to her that it was all a mistake. Making love to her a mistake? That’s a worse slap in the face than Søren ever laid on me.”
“Why…why are you saying all this, Nora?”
“Because you need to hear the truth. The truth that your guilt didn’t punish you. It punished her. You were so afraid to hurt Grace that everything you did ended up harming her. No more, Zach. No more fear. You will not be afraid anymore, afraid to hurt a woman with your own passion and desire. Remember that night at the 8th Circle?” Nora asked. “Do you remember what I told you I was?”
“A Switch.” As long as he lived he’d never forget that night.
“Yes. And that means I can give pain but I can also take it. Aren’t you tired of the pain?”
“Yes,” Zach breathed.
“Good,”