I hear them heckle Matthew as he crawled away.

“To where?” she asks. “Where did Matthew go?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know.”

I picture it: his sorry eyes settling on mine before he turned and moved out that door. Joseph and Isaac laughing mockingly, taunting Matthew out the door.

They figured they’d won.

But I knew this was far from through.

“And then what happened? Once Matthew had left?”

I pull back my hair and show her the crater Joseph left behind when he pummeled me with that lamp. He waited until Matthew was out of sight—Isaac still snickering, still calling Matthew a pussy out the front window—and he turned to me with the meanest eyes I’d ever seen in my whole entire life. He picked the lamp base up from the floor—dented at both ends—and smacked me point blank on the side of my head. I don’t remember it hurting so much, but I do remember its crippling effects: the way my body lost all feeling, lost its ability to stand on my own two feet, the way I crumpled to the floor and Isaac stood, watching and pointing. Laughing. I remember the blackness that crept in from the edges of my eyes until I could no longer see, the ugly words and voices in the background that ebbed until all was silent.

When I awoke I was in that bedroom of mine, on the bed, on top of the patchwork quilt, the door locked from the outside.

CHRIS

I’m in my Denver hotel room, washing up for bed, dead tired.

I’ve got the smallest room in the hotel, but even that goes for over two hundred bucks a night. The view out the window could be any other city, any other night. To me, it all looks the same anymore, big buildings, thousands of lights.

I’ve got on some pajama pants, blue seersucker, a little snug, an undershirt. On the bed sits my open laptop.

The day’s newspaper, the Denver Post, which I picked up on the way out of the airport, lies ignored. The furthest I got was a front page blurb on the weather—cold—and the day’s lottery numbers.

I didn’t win.

I’m tired, the exhaustion marking my face. I stare at myself in the mirror and think that I am looking older. That I am getting older. That I can’t keep up this pace much longer. I’m ruminating on other jobs: college professor, maybe management consulting, as I brush my teeth. I’m imaging myself at the front of a crowded auditorium, standing before the podium, lecturing on global capitalism before a bunch of cocky kids who used to be me. Back when I was consumed with money. Money, money, money. I’d take a huge pay cut teaching, that’s for sure, but Heidi and I would make due, I think, spitting toothpaste into the bathroom sink.

We’d put the condo on the market, maybe rent for a while. Maybe Zoe could go to public school, even though I know that won’t fly. But maybe. Hell, maybe we’d move to suburbia, buy a single family home with a fenced-in yard, get a dog. We’d take the train in to work. Live the real American dream.

It could work.

I’m thinking what it would be like to be home for dinner, what it would be like to lie in bed beside my wife, every night. I’m picturing Heidi that afternoon at that Asian grill, the way she leaned in close to me, pressed her lips to mine. The way she laid her hand on mine, the way she uttered those words You must be so tired, Chris, concerned for once about me, her husband, and not just foreign refugees from around the world. Mindful of my needs and not just those of homeless girls and stray cats.

Maybe something was changing.

I pine for the olden days: Heidi at that benefit dinner in her vintage red dress, dancing with me after everyone else had left the building, after the dimmed lights had been flipped back on and the catering staff was cleaning up the room. She was a college student at the time, and so she had nothing more than a dorm room to her name. I was right out of school, paying more in student loans than the national debt. I was dirt poor, living in a studio apartment in Roscoe Village, which we took a cab to, running wildly up the steps of the walkup apartment, me, forward, and Heidi, gracefully, in reverse, undressing each other along the way.

We never made it to the bed, but fell to the floor right behind the door.

By morning, I expected that she’d be gone. Because certainly someone that amazing, with her beautiful brown eyes, wouldn’t want a thing to do with me in the light of day.

But I was wrong.

We stayed in bed half the day, watching the pedestrians who moved up and down Belmont through the windows. That and The Price is Right. Then later, when we finally did get up and get dressed, Heidi sporting my Bears sweatshirt, thrown over her own red dress, we went shopping for antiques, buying an old beer tap handle because it was the only thing we could afford.

Heidi stayed with me for three days. Living in my undershirts and boxer shorts, surviving on takeout and delivery. I went to work in the morning and when I came home, she was there.

She was easygoing in a way I thought she’d always be, but that was long before Zoe and cancer and the heavy weight of reality. I think about that weight, how it must deplete her. I think of Heidi, caring more about the rest of the world and everyone else’s insatiable needs than she does her own.

I stand in the bathroom in that Denver hotel, thinking to myself, I miss Heidi, when there’s a knock on the door, a light rat-a-tat-tat, and I know who it is before I ever glance through the peephole.

I open the door and there she is. Not Heidi, of course. Though there’s a split second of what-if? What if it is Heidi, flown all the way to Denver to see me, abandoning that girl and her baby who have consumed our home, swallowing my wife whole. What if she made arrangements for Zoe to stay with Jennifer, hopped a flight out to Denver and now here she is, to spend the night with me?

But the scene that greets me instead is something else entirely, Cassidy Knudsen letting herself into my room. She’s wearing leggings, black and tight, with some sort of baggy tunic whose V-neck exposes the basin between her breasts, a valley, a ravine set between neighboring hills, the skin soft and pale, up for grabs. She wears some sort of pendant necklace, with a long copper chain that forces the eyes to the V of that tunic, forces the eyes down to where the charm sits tucked beneath the shirt, at the end of the copper chain. The makeup on her face is barely there, save for the bright red lipstick that seems to have become a matter of course, the norm. There are heels on her feet, four-inch heels, red, like the lipstick.

She lets herself in, as always, without waiting to be invited.

And there I stand, in my pajama pants and undershirt, still clutching a toothbrush in my hand.

“I didn’t know you were stopping by,” I say, “or I would’ve...” my voice drifts off and I’m not sure what to say. I glance around the room to see the day’s clothing in a pile on the floor, the seersucker pants that cling to my legs like plastic wrap.

She doesn’t have to tell me why she’s there; I know what she’s come to do. She moves quickly, her hands on me, her lips on mine, stating in an undertone, “I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to do this,” and I say, “Cassidy,” though I’m not sure if the word comes out argumentative or inviting. I make a feeble attempt to slide away, out of reach, though deep inside my mind screams at me to let her. To push those forgotten memories of another Heidi out of my mind, and let Cassidy do as she pleases, whatever she came here to do.

And then she’s touching me, but her hands are cold, different from Heidi’s in so many ways. They are bold and presumptuous, not waiting to get acquainted before they dive right in, full steam ahead. She’s doing everything wrong, not the way Heidi would do it, Heidi who is indulgent in the way she touches me, tender, and I find myself thinking about Heidi, suddenly, desperately, longing for Heidi, wishing it were Heidi here in this hotel room, with me.