She sat for a while on a rock at the edge of the road. She stopped crying. Then she thought: It never happened. She would never speak of it, or let herself think of it, ever. She was quite certain that you could change your past, change the facts, by will alone. Only memory makes it real. So eliminate the memory. And if it was also true that there were occasions when she couldn’t control where her mind went—a dream, a cold sweat at an unexpected moment, an odor that would suddenly betray her—time would improve it. Time lessens everything—the good things you desperately want to remember, and the awful things you need to forget. Eventually all will be equally faint. This was one thing her second life had taught her about how humans endure.

It was at this point—and not later, when the meeting with Bobby at their agreed-upon rendezvous point didn’t happen—that she began to inhabit her new life as her only life.