I laugh. What is wrong with me? It’s a puppy. It’s not a fucker. But then, maybe it is. Babies can be assholes and puppies can be fuckers. But you accept the risk when you make a baby, when you adopt a dog. I think I’ll write something about an asshole baby and a fucker puppy and it will be like one of those old-school Peanuts cartoons, where you can’t hear what the adults are saying because it’s all just sonic wonking.

I clap my hands and that’s when I see a flash of white linen, a bright yellow shirt and I realize the dog isn’t alone. The puppy yelps and the human throws something, an electric green tennis ball. The human whistles and the human is female. I see her hair in the mist—blond, tangled—and I see her sharp shoulders and two long legs and

Amy? Amy. Amy? Amy?

She scoops the puppy that was going to belong to me and Love into her arms. She kisses the puppy and then she looks up. She startles.

“Joe?” she says. She looks terrified, guilty. Time stops. I am in shock.

She holds the puppy too hard and the puppy fights and the puppy has claws and the puppy wins. She drops the puppy and it runs and she stands there, frozen, and this bitch fucked me. Stole from me. Tricked me. Lied to me. Used me. She wronged me and the nice people in Rhode Island—Liam & Pearl & Harry & Noah—and I loved her. I loved her but she didn’t love me.

Amy? Amy.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, and she thinks she’s pretty and clever, tucking her hair behind her ear, pretending to trust me, but people don’t change and I see her bracing to run. She doesn’t get to run away from me now the way she did then, not after what she did. She turns, hair flying, and instinct takes over. I spring forward. She runs but I’m faster and I knock her to the ground. She screams and I clamp my hand over her mouth and look into the eyes I know too well.

She knees me in the groin and I react, loosening my grip, but I manage to grab her by the hair and pin her down in the sand. I cover her mouth again and she thrashes like a marlin and I can’t believe that after all these months, Amy is here.

Her face has changed from all this sun, more freckles, smoother skin, longer hair, crusty mascara around her eyes, she was out last night. She is who I used to love. Who I used to covet. Who I used to want to kill, but who I forgot to worry about after I fell in love with Love.

She kicks me again and I smack her face. “Don’t scream,” I say. “Understand?”

She says yes with her eyes. They are as bright as I remember, even in the mist. I take my hand away.

“Jesus, Joe, what are you doing?”

“Shut up,” I command. I clamp my hand over her mouth. “You are not to yell. Do you understand?”

She nods emphatically. “Joe, please,” she begins.

I’m still getting reacquainted with her face, how crazy human faces are, how noses are all so different, some bulbous, some pointy. Amy’s is aquiline. I used to love her nose. I used to kiss her nose. Now I love Love’s nose.

“Joe,” she says. “About the money . . .”

“The money?” I can’t help it. It’s been so long, but it all washes over me again. The humiliation I felt when I found my computer in the cage, the keys I made for her, the note in Charlotte & Charles. “How can you think this is about money?”

“Cuz I lifted the books,” she pants. “I can pay you back.”

“I don’t want your fucking money, Amy,” I say. “I’m not like you. I don’t give a fuck about money.”

“I get it, okay? I suck. But please, let me go,” she begs.

I hold her down. “You do suck. You’re a vicious empty cunt.”

“You’re acting crazy,” she says. “Let me go.”

I spit at her. She blinks. “Fuck you,” I say.

“Joe,” she says. “Please stop it.”

I tighten my grip on her neck. I should get it over with. I should squeeze the life out of her for all the things she did do. Instead I am allowing her to speak, to rail on about what she did. “I took some books,” she confesses. “And it sucks and I know it. And I know it must have been terrible for you to find out. But you know, Joe. You knew I was in it for myself. I know you knew.”

I didn’t know. And this is what hurts. I loved her and she did not love me. She doesn’t think it was real, she never did. My cheeks turn red. I need to kill her because she says things like we were just fucking and it was summer and I didn’t rip you off. I ripped off the shop. She wasn’t in love with me and every time she promises she can get me the money I know I have to kill her. She wasted my heart, my time. She begs me to let her go and she can get a cash advance and she can get you anything you want and she is house-sitting and there is art I could sell, like, a lot of art and she is a commercial beast.

Beck never loved me either and if Love knew about this, the dark humiliating truth of it, that I love women who don’t love me back, I don’t know how I could look her in the eye. I don’t know if I could go on, because the real horror of my life is not that I’ve killed some terrible people. The real horror is that the people I’ve loved didn’t love me back. I may as well have been masturbating in the cage, telling the books about the girls because all the girls before Love, they were not there with me, not really, especially this one, this tall blond cunt begging for her life and promising me that she can give it all back to me every last penny.

“You don’t get it,” I tell her. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“Let me go,” she pleads, she squirms.

Everything in her tone and her language and her eyes seems confused. She’s acting like I’m some guy she knew and I’m looking at her like she broke my heart. But she’s just talking about what a pain it was to sell books online. Does she really think this is about Portnoy’s Complaint, about Yates?

“What about everything you wrote in Charlotte and Charles?”

She swallows. “What?”

“Charlotte and Charles,” I snap. “You read it to me on the beach and a day later you run out on me and write me a letter in it and I want to know why.”

“’Cause it was in my bag from the beach when I went back to the shop,” she exclaims, and that is not what I was asking about.

“You read the book to me on the beach and you left me a note in the book and now you want to tell me you don’t remember.”

“Joe,” she says. “I told you. You were looking in my phone. I mean, you didn’t trust me either.”

“Why did you leave that book for me?” I ask.

She asks me to let her go. I ask her to tell me about the book. The air is cold and loud off the water and she groans again. “Because you’re so sad and lonely!” she says. “Jesus, if this is it, fuck it. I give up.” She smacks her lips. She clears her throat. “Get off me,” she says. “Get off me and I’ll tell you.”

“No,” I say. “Tell me now.”

“I left you that book because I did feel bad,” she says. “You’re sad and lonely and you should be better at being alone. You’re just so fucking depressed and you wear it like a badge the way you sit in that shop alone and you’re so obviously desperate for someone to come in and change your life and it’s fucking annoying. Like, take care of your shit. Pull yourself together. Stop being so self-conscious about your music and every little thing you say. I gave you that book because those giants are pathetic, the way they can’t fucking deal with themselves and they expect everyone to be as decent as they are. They have no right to be shocked when the humans gang up on them. Like, that’s fucking life. Get over it. You can’t go around expecting everyone to be like you. That’s the point.”

Her words sting. “If I’m so depressed and pathetic, then why did you date me?”

She rolls her eyes. “Joe,” she says. “The day we met, I was using my ex-boss-boyfriend’s credit card and you didn’t call the cops.”