I held my hands up. One of them still had the knife in it.

Out of nowhere, his good hand yanked me around, right around, like we were square dancing. This opened up his whole torso. His white shirt was this huge field.

It felt weird putting the knife in. His body was too soft and too hard at the same time. I didn’t want it to be like this. It was like touching a guy you don’t really like because you have to or else he’ll yell at you or say things about you. I didn’t push hard or move it around. I just rubbed it across, but the sharpness went in anyway. The knife did that. I was just pushing him away.

When our positions were fully reversed, I saw that Alexandra had a vase over her head, a huge urn from next to the fireplace. She looked like she was carrying water back from a well. She’d been about to smash my skull in, except that the policeman had heaved me away.

“What the hell did you do that for?” Alexandra shouted. She wasn’t angry at me. She was angry at him, for pulling me out of her range and so making himself vulnerable.

She couldn’t balance the weight of it any longer. It shattered on the concrete stoop. We all jumped at the impact.

“What did you do that for?” I echoed, really curious. He sagged to one side, with the good hand kind of on his hip, I think holding him up. His shirt wasn’t white anymore. His cut hand hung down, limp at the end of his arm.

That good hand shot out and pulled my arm hard, twisting it behind me. We both went down, me front first. His weight on my back hurt. My cheek pressed into the concrete. I wiggled and whined. I thought it was a siren at first, but it was me.

His breathing was rough. He told me right in my ear that I didn’t have to say anything, but that if I withheld something that would later be used in my defense, that would be a problem. He told Alexandra that there were handcuffs in his pocket and to get them on me, which she did, fumbling and I think freaking out. One of my hands was under me, and she had to dig it out. The other one was still held behind my back, under the policeman’s chest, and held tight in his good fist. It was slippery from him bleeding on me. The cuffs were cold and she pinched my skin on purpose. “Bitch,” I said.

“Keep still.” That was the cop.

“I didn’t do anything,” I insisted. It was hard to breathe down there.

“We know about Gretchen, Liv. And Harry and the birds. It’s over. Stop struggling.”

“I didn’t-” But I didn’t get the chance to say that I hadn’t hurt the birds. I’d only found them that way, but I didn’t get to make that clear because a car turned the corner. Nick was home.

It was the car I’d seen on Chesterton Road, and the woman driving it must be his mother. He didn’t see us yet. He was looking at her. He’d notice her change in expression any second, but for this moment he was only happy.

When we’d all first become friends together, me and him and Polly, we’d gone to the Fitz a lot. That was always my idea. Once we borrowed one of the kids’ play kits they have: games and puzzles based on various galleries. Nick carried the plastic box, a clear tool-type box. Inside, the first game we picked up had been a kind of birdwatching in the ceramics gallery.

I’d never paid much attention to ceramics before. The whole point of these games is that they make kids pay attention to things they otherwise might not have. It works for adults too. There was a set of binoculars we shared between the three of us, and we prowled that gallery looking at every little piece to find representations of the half-dozen birds listed in the challenge. We horsed around, and made bird calls at each other, and tussled over the binoculars. That day, more than any other, is what I saw in his face in the car. Any moment he would look and see me and his face would get complicated. But for that moment in the car, and that whole afternoon in the Fitz, he’d been plain happy.

There are four Monets in the Fitzwilliam. I like the way the Impressionists would find one good moment and go after it. They wanted to show that for one moment the wind blew, or the sun reflected off the water this one way. They understood that life is mostly a mess and that good moments need capturing. Because light moves on. Wind dies. An expression changes.

Nick looked up. He saw me. His mother was already getting out of the car.

Alexandra called 999 on the policeman’s cellphone. He was still breathing, but wasn’t holding on to me anymore. I could roll him off me. The cuffs had really calmed him down.

I thought: This is my chance. Right? In a moment, Nick would be out of the car, Alexandra would get through to the emergency line, Mrs. Frey would stop freaking out and get it together. But this moment-just before all that would happen-was my chance.

I could run.

Into the jungle behind the house… skirting the edge of the huge pond… through back gardens and over a hedge… between the medieval ridges and furrows of ancient fields… sliding between tightly packed cars in the park-and-ride lot, cars that scream alarms when touched. This is where I went in my mind. This was my plan as my strength coiled.

My mind raced on, leading me. Onward up Madingley Road. Where was I taking me? There were two of me: myself, here, about to bolt, and myself, ahead, guiding me forward.

The solid me shoved off the policeman. I sprang forward and landed flat on my feet, knees bent, hands still cuffed behind me. I looked like a child bent to imitate a pecking chicken.

The soon-me, the just-ahead-me, kept running. I would make it. All I would have to do is follow.

The destination took me by surprise. Lawn, studded with thousands of short white crosses. The American Cemetery.

Both of us hesitated. Me, and me-about-to-be. How had it happened? How had we ended up there?

Britain had given the U.S. the land for the cemetery in thanks after World War II. It’s American. Even in my mind I’d run, somehow, home again. My fantasy had taken me roundabout, back to where I’d started.

I was still on the flagstones in front of Nick’s house. Horror had frozen my escape. My imagination had betrayed me.

I was trapped. Not by the cuffs, though they hurt, or Nick tackling me to the ground, in a grotesque parody of what I’d once wanted from him, or by the distant sirens blaring toward us from the motorway. I was paused by those things, but I was trapped by realization. I was trapped in my head.

Even in my fantasies I couldn’t get away from home. Nothing would ever be new, ever. I knew that now. No place would ever be foreign enough that I wouldn’t be me anymore.

Nick was on top of me. “Gross! Get off me!” I grunted, pushing. He was disgusting to me now. What had I ever been thinking? He was holding me down.

Alexandra kicked my midriff, just beneath where my shirt had gotten rolled up around my rib cage. She kicked my bare side, hard. I felt something crack. I think it was a rib. It got difficult to make my chest expand.

Her mother pulled to get Alexandra away from me. The girl resisted. “You bitch!” she said, like I had to her, I think mistaking me for everything that had gone wrong. Mistaking me for why Nick had ever been gone. The toe of her shoe plunged in again.

The sirens got louder. Nick’s dad stumbled out the front door, awake at last. He blinked, just coming to, as confused as a newborn. He almost tripped over the cop on his doorstep.

Alexandra abandoned attacking me, to fling herself at him. “Daddy!” she cried out, melding herself to him. She was miniature against his adult height and barrel chest.

I squirmed. Nick must have felt my breathing shrink. He got off and rolled me over onto my back. That helped.

I really had seen him in the car this morning. A living Nick really was back. There had been no true ghosts, none of them. So I knew this was real too: