He crawls to the bedroom. He quickly cleans himself off in the bathroom and gathers his things and puts them in his bag. He scuttles to the door. For an instant he is afraid that his car will have disappeared, and he will be stranded, but it is there, next to Caleb’s, waiting for him. He checks his watch: it is midnight.

He moves his way across the lawn on his hands and knees, his bag slung painfully over one shoulder, the two hundred feet between the door and the car transforming themselves into miles. He wants to stop, he is so tired, but he knows he must not.

In the car, he doesn’t look at his reflection in the mirror; he starts the engine and drives away. But about half an hour later, once he knows he is far enough from the house to be safe, he begins to shake, so badly that the car swerves beneath him, and he pulls off the road to wait, leaning his forehead against the steering wheel.

He waits for ten minutes, twenty. And then he turns, although the very movement is a punishment, and finds his phone in his bag. He dials Willem’s number and waits.

“Jude!” says Willem, sounding surprised. “I was just going to call you.”

“Hi, Willem,” he says, and hopes his voice sounds normal. “I guess I read your thoughts.”

They talk for a few minutes, and then Willem asks, “Are you okay?”

“Of course,” he says.

“You sound a little strange.”

Willem, he wants to say. Willem, I wish you were here. But instead he says, “Sorry. I just have a headache.”

They talk some more, and as they’re about to hang up, Willem says, “You’re sure you’re okay.”

“Yes,” he says. “I’m fine.”

“Okay,” says Willem. “Okay.” And then, “Five more weeks.”

“Five more.” He wishes for Willem so intensely he can barely breathe.

After they hang up, he waits for another ten minutes, until he finally stops shaking, and then he starts the car again and drives the rest of the way home.

The next day, he makes himself look at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and nearly cries out in shame and shock and misery. He is so deformed, so astoundingly ugly—even for him, it is extraordinary. He makes himself as presentable as he can; he puts on his favorite suit. Caleb had kicked him in his side, and every movement, every breath, is painful. Before he leaves the house, he makes an appointment with the dentist because he can feel that one of his upper teeth has been knocked loose, and an appointment at Andy’s for that evening.

He goes to work. “This is not a good look for you, St. Francis,” one of the other senior partners, whom he likes a lot, says at the morning management committee meeting, and everyone laughs.

He forces a smile. “I’m afraid you’re right,” he says. “And I’m sure you’ll all be disappointed when I announce that my days as a potential Paralympic tennis champion are, sadly, over.”

“Well, I’m not sad,” says Lucien, as everyone around the table groans in mock disappointment. “You get plenty of aggression out in court. I think that should be your sole combat sport from now on.”

That night at his appointment, Andy swears at him. “What’d I say about tennis, Jude?” he asks.

“I know,” he says. “But never again, Andy, I promise.”

“What’s this?” Andy asks, placing his fingers on the back of his neck.

He sighs, theatrically. “I turned, and there was an incident with a nasty backhand.” He waits for Andy to say something, but he doesn’t, only smears some antibiotic cream on his neck and then bandages it.

The next day, Andy calls him at his office. “I need to talk to you in person,” he says. “It’s important. Can you meet me somewhere?”

He’s alarmed. “Is everything okay?” he asks. “Are you all right, Andy?”

“I’m fine,” Andy says. “But I need to see you.”

He takes an early dinner break and they meet near his office, at a bar whose regular customers are the Japanese bankers who work in the tower next to Rosen Pritchard’s. Andy is already there when he arrives, and he places his palm, gently, on the unmarked side of his face.

“I ordered you a beer,” Andy says.

They drink in silence and then Andy says, “Jude, I wanted to see your face when I asked you this. But are you—are you hurting yourself?”

“What?” he asks, surprised.

“These tennis accidents,” Andy says, “are they actually—something else? Are you throwing yourself down stairs or against walls, or something?” He takes a breath. “I know you used to do that when you were a kid. Are you doing it again?”

“No, Andy,” he says. “No. I’m not doing this to myself. I swear to you. I swear on—on Harold and Julia. I swear on Willem.”

“Okay,” Andy says, exhaling. “I mean, that’s a relief. It’s a relief to know you’re just being a bonehead and not following doctor’s orders, which, of course, is nothing new. And, apparently, that you’re a terrible tennis player.” He smiles, and he makes himself smile back.

Andy orders them more beers, and for a while, they are quiet. “Do you know, Jude,” Andy says, slowly, “that over the years I have wondered and wondered what to do about you? No, don’t say anything—let me finish. I would—I do—lie awake at night asking myself if I’m making the right decisions about you: there’ve been so many times when I was so close to having you committed, to calling Harold or Willem and telling them that we needed to get together and have you taken to a hospital. I’ve talked to classmates of mine who are shrinks and told them about you, about this patient I’m very close to, and asked them what they would do in my position. I’ve listened to all their advice. I’ve listened to my shrink’s advice. But no one can ever tell me for certain what the right answer is.

“I’ve tortured myself about this. But I’ve always felt—you’re so high-functioning in so many ways, and you’ve achieved this weird but undeniably successful equilibrium in your life, that I felt that, I don’t know, I just shouldn’t upset it. You know? So I’ve let you go on cutting yourself year after year, and every year, every time I see you, I wonder if I’m doing the right thing by letting you do so, and how and if I should be pushing harder to get you help, to make you stop doing this to yourself.”

“I’m sorry, Andy,” he whispers.

“No, Jude,” Andy says. “It’s not your fault. You’re the patient. I’m supposed to figure out what’s best for you, and I feel—I don’t know if I have. So when you came in with bruises, the first thing I thought was that I had made the wrong decision after all. You know?” Andy looks at him, and he is surprised once more to see Andy swipe, quickly, at his eyes. “All these years,” says Andy, after a pause, and they are both quiet again.

“Andy,” he says, wanting to cry himself. “I swear to you I’m not doing anything else to myself. Just the cutting.”

“Just the cutting!” Andy repeats, and makes a strange squawk of laughter. “Well, I suppose—given the context—I have to be grateful for that. ‘Just the cutting.’ You know how messed up that is, right, that that should be such a relief to me?”

“I know,” he says.

Tuesday turns to Wednesday, and then to Thursday; his face feels worse, and then better, and then worse again. He had worried that Caleb might call him or, worse, materialize at his apartment, but the days pass and he doesn’t: maybe he has stayed out in Bridgehampton. Maybe he has gotten run over by a car. He finds, oddly, that he feels nothing—not fear, not hate, not anything. The worst has happened, and now he is free. He has had a relationship, and it was awful, and now he will never need to have one again, because he has proven himself incapable of being in one. His time with Caleb has confirmed everything he feared people would think of him, of his body, and his next task is to learn to accept that, and to do so without sorrow. He knows he will still probably feel lonely in the future, but now he has something to answer that loneliness; now he knows for certain that loneliness is the preferable state to whatever it was—terror, shame, disgust, dismay, giddiness, excitement, yearning, loathing—he felt with Caleb.