Rain soaked into Rebecca’s clothes and Lewis’s apology began to dissolve her emotional invulnerability. She looked at her hands. The flesh was solid, and she felt more open and free than she ever had before.
It was a fragile state, Rebecca knew, and to sustain it she began thinking of Stewart. Working chronologically, she pictured each significant moment in their relationship. She saw him kneeling behind the damaged tail light. She watched him tinker with the engine of the Karmann Ghia. She saw him on their first date, the day they moved in together, their wedding day.
Each memory returned to her so clearly that she forgot about the park and the bench and the rain. Each moment she remembered, she almost relived. A tiny residue of her feelings for Stewart had remained inside her: the combination of her new vulnerability with the vividness of the remembered moments created a tiny opening. As she pictured the day Stewart left her, Rebecca began to fall in love with him again.
She tried to pick up her cellphone, but it passed through her fingers. Her state was now so advanced that there was only one thing that could save her, something that part of her—her pride, or her fear, or both—had stopped her from doing before. For three years she’d been unable to make herself do it. And even now, even though she knew that making this call was her only chance, she was still hesitant to do it.