When I arrive home from court, there’s a package on my doorstep. It has a neatly printed mailing label and a plain brown wrapper. I can’t imagine how it got here—all deliveries are supposed to be left with the security guard.

I go inside and open the package. There’s a DVD inside with the title Raunchy Co-ed Orgies, Vol. 3. The picture on the cover is an overhead shot of what at first looks like a serpentine cord of bare flesh, a kind of Photoshopped expressionism that doesn’t have a recognizable shape or substance. Then I realize that the photo depicts a dozen or more people engaging in group sex on mats spread out on the floor of a warehouse. One of the performers has been circled with a blue marking pen. She’s thrown her head back in ecstasy, which has caused her to look directly into the camera lens. She has her hand wrapped around an erect penis, while another penetrates her from behind.

Lovely Diamond. Much younger, but unmistakable.

I feel as if my brain’s neurons have been riffled like a deck of cards. I flip the DVD over to the back cover, not to see more pictures, but to check the copyright date, as if that matters. And yet at the moment, it seems vitally important. I have to squint to make out the fine print. I pore through the legalese that in our world accompanies even prefab sexual fantasy—FBI warning: unauthorized reproduction is prohibited. And another legal disclosure—All models are over eighteen. Is that what she was—a model? In what sense? As some standard to be imitated? Hardly. As someone who poses for an artist? There’s no art here. As a representative of something? Maybe so. The video was shot in 2001, when she was eighteen or nineteen. So this was her job in the entertainment industry before she entered college.

I take the DVD out of its package, load it into the player, and hit the play button. I don’t take my eyes off the screen for the next hour and twenty-seven minutes, during which Lovely has sex with multiple partners, both male and female. At one point, she simultaneously engages in oral, vaginal, and anal sex with three men. At another, she and seven other women connect to form a writhing circle, each receiving oral sex from one person and performing it on another. Near the end of the video, several men in succession ejaculate into her mouth, after which she swallows their collected semen and smiles for the camera.

The dehumanization is calculated. Factory porn, with the performers merely robotic workers on an assembly line. Even the setting, a shabby warehouse with unpainted drywall and no furnishings except gray floor mats, is barren.

I sit on the edge of the sofa and stare at the wall. Lovely defiled herself, enjoyed defiling herself. She’s slept with many men after that, and probably women, too. We’ve had unprotected sex since the first time. And I recognize in the video some of the same techniques that she uses when she and I are making love. I’ve mistaken prepackaged erotic choreography for love and passion.

I pick up the DVD box and walk out onto the balcony, hoping the air will be purer outside. A fulvous layer of smog hangs over the ocean, locked in place by a lid of hot, stagnant air. I stand at the ledge and stare out at the horizon.

Because Lovely’s been spending a lot of time at my condo, I gave her a key. Around five thirty, I hear her putting it in the lock. I don’t turn around when she comes inside. It takes only a moment for her to see me standing on the balcony. She comes out and joins me.

“Hey, you,” she says. “I know today was tough, but—”

I turn around and hand her the DVD cover.

Her eyes narrow slightly when she recognizes it, but otherwise she doesn’t react.

“I found this on the doorstep when I came home.”

She opens the box and sees that it’s empty. “You watched it?”

I nod.

She sets her jaw with an icy certitude. “I’m not sorry for any of it. I’m not embarrassed. I was an adult, and adults have the right to express themselves sexually with anyone they want and however they want, as long as no one gets hurt. And I never hurt anyone, including myself.”

“This hurts me. It destroys us.” I struggle for a breath. “Did that son of a bitch you have for a father—?”

“God, no!” she says in horror. “My father would never . . . I was not abused. He hated it. He didn’t speak to me for two years.” She shakes her head as if trying to banish the idea from her mind. “Don’t you dare think that about him.”

I believe her. At that Friday night dinner at Ed’s house, he implied that there was a time when he and Lovely were estranged. The video is a perverse repudiation of him, the ultimate fuck you to a man who spent his career directing beautifully filmed movies that for all their explicitness depicted sex in a tender way.

“There are reasons why I did it and why I stopped,” she says. “But I won’t waste your time explaining unless you want me to.”

“Don’t bother.”

She shuts her eyes for a moment, little more than a blink, but enough to reveal a tear. She starts to say something, but then raises her hand to her mouth and bites down on her knuckles hard, so hard that I fear she’ll draw blood. I want to pull her hand away, to shout at her to stop, but I’m not brave enough.

She finally lowers her hand and looks at it curiously. No blood, but purplish indentations where her incisors bit into the skin. “I’m leaving,” she says. “But the trial. You need my help. And I’m . . . I’m still going to need you to sponsor me on the Daniels case.”

“I guess I don’t have much choice on either of those things, do I? I wish I did.”

When she passes by me, her shoulder brushes against my chest. Her touch is still electric, and the air stirs slightly in her wake, leaving a trace of that citrus-ginger scent that I’ll always associate with her. I wait outside on the balcony until I hear her walk out the front door.

The moment I saw the cover of that DVD, I knew that the Assembly had left it on my doorstep. That’s how they operate—by doling out intimidation in stages, each escalation more painful than the one before it. If a physical beating doesn’t work, they move on to more sophisticated methods. They want to destroy me, and at this moment they’ve succeeded.