HELENA WASN’T at home when I got there; a relief, since I’d worried on the way back that she’d returned too early on this particular day, earlier than normal just like she had left later than normal that morning, and that she and Olga had already been alone together for a long time, and that she somehow, using one of her regular techniques—anger, fishing for a secret—had persuaded Olga to tell her something, tell her everything. I called Helena’s name as I stepped through the door, I put my things away with the feigned nonchalance of a murderer, I got no answer. No Helena on the ground floor, no Helena in the sarcophagus, in the garden; no sign of Olga either.

I walked up the spiral staircase, exaggerating the noise of my steps, like a warning: come out if you’re here.

Her door was shut. Mine, however, was open, which was not how I’d left it, and on the bed was Olga, face down with her head on the pillow, her arms wrapped around it. It seemed like she’d been lying like that for a very long time waiting for me, that she’d prepared this tableau. She turned around when I entered the room, her movements slow and measured; I shut the door behind me. Her face was red, swollen, wet. I sat down on the bed next to her, moving with the same calm and restraint, as if to avoid bothering or upsetting her. Suddenly everything about my body seemed too much, vulgar: my wet hair, my salty face, the clothes that chafed against the skin, the thighs that met when I sat, flesh that swelled. I didn’t speak and she just looked at me for a long while, her eyes sticky and half-open, the eyes of a newborn animal.

Are you mad at me, she pleaded, finally. Everyone is always mad at me, I can’t do anything right, uhu—she collapsed in tears, prey to the violence of crying, seemingly involuntarily. Her face contorted in a desperate mask and I embraced her: no, no, no, why would I be mad at you? I kissed her hot cheeks. I held her. Her shoulders were narrow and hard, bent, shaking violently. I’m not angry. I undressed her. I towered like a giant, I was enormous, coarse, a wave that washed over her. Olga slippery under my hands, Olga’s mouth open, wet tongue, wet face, her teeth bumping into mine, she was trembling, she gaped as if she were about to drink. Her body grew very still, stiff. She whimpered. I’m not mad, and she went silent.

It felt like devastation, it felt like great riches, I was consumed by them. I burned the ground she was walking on, I gave her an indelible memory, I erected a border, there would be no way back. I tore a hole in her history.

In the great silence that fell over my room, in the haze of half-slumber, timelessness, I pictured her death. Not real death, not like a photograph, but a painting. I fantasized about her throwing herself out a window, a silver spiral flung at the ground, the repetition like the picture of velocity, eight bodies, eight arms extended, like an octopus. I saw my hands around her neck, I saw her bathing in the sunlight, her irises turning honey in the light, I saw theater blood flood—no, flow calmly—out of her cleft skull, red silk ribbons.

No, she would not die like this. This was not a movie. This was not The Children’s Hour. This was not Dracula’s Daughter. No snare, no arrow piercing the heart, no punishment. She would keep living; I would have nothing to grieve.