I asked Brandon if he’d touch the top of the head to see if it was warm. Meaning, alive. Brandon said no. I said, someone has to. He said, it’s your floor. I gave him this look. He sighed and told me how when we went on a date four years ago I was really rude. I tried to remember this date. I remembered lots of other dates, but none of those guys’ faces looked like Brandon’s, not really. I felt like I could grab Brandon’s wrist and put his hand on the head before he realized what was happening. Then we’d know.

Lily and the new patient enter the TV room, and I feel my skin blanch. She’s cut from the cloth of my nightmares: petite, with wide hazel eyes, caramel-colored hair, bangs cut low across her forehead. Her arms and legs are delicate, milky stems protruding from the silken edges of a blue polka-dotted dress. She wears no makeup, no jewelry, no polish on her nails. My career writing ad copy to exploit women’s physical insecurities has rendered me expert in the minutiae of female beauty. In this sense, I am like a judge of pedigree dogs or horses. When I say that this woman is flawless, I do not mean it lightly. She possesses no attribute that I would, in good faith, suggest augmenting or reducing, highlighting or minimizing, smoothing or shaping or lengthening or rejuvenating or otherwise subjecting to any of the verbs I employed daily to describe the infinite ways in which a woman might fail to achieve her corporeal potential. I would not know how to sell her a thing.

In an exam room, I complete my surrender. Bradley presses his body to mine. He kisses the nape of my neck. His fingers press my pelvis and thighs, molding my supple bones into the shape of his desire. I taste his skin, wishing I could unhinge my jaw and swallow him whole. As we lie entwined, my back to his, I cry silently, because I know I will never actually have him. The other times I’ve been in love, there was hope of a future. With Bradley, I harbor no such illusions. I have given up on the dream of a life together beyond the ward. What I feared from the beginning was confirmed the day Olivia arrived—that given a world of women to choose from, he will never, ever choose me.

Perhaps it is possible, though, to revise my idea of love. To remain in the present; to love Bradley now even though I know he will only hurt me, in the end. But it doesn’t really matter either way. I am too weak not to claim every moment with him that is offered.

I wake each morning in a panic that I’m back in Wheaton, and am coaxed to reality by the itch of carpet, the smell of smoke from the burning city, and the sparkle of sunlight on my vast foil model. My project now fills half the restaurant, extending from the south windows to the stairwell door. Within the cityscape, I’ve begun constructing vignettes using a larger scale, scenes placed under a magnifier. I rendered the souvenir factory inside which laborers were forced, on threat of imprisonment or of having their children taken as wards of the state, to work fourteen-hour days, using hot-glue guns to affix tiny seashells to velvet-lined jewelry boxes. I rendered the brothels where tourists paid third-world rates for sex with the young locals, and slightly higher rates for sex with minors—a practice vehemently denied by city officials, but corroborated by multiple undercover investigations. I have planned models of the Grand Casino and the drug bazaar and the complex subterranean network of T-shirt sweatshops.

Karl no longer fantasized about naked women in his bed, bodies gleaming with moisture. He could not spare the lotion even in his imagining. The house needed all of it, every drop.

Linda draws me into the house, which has the vibe of a Billabong store run by teenagers. In the living room, speakers blare the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I match each family member to Ruben’s description. Uncle Skip, a bachelor who makes his living volunteering for dangerous medical experiments, perches on an ottoman, looking like someone’s gone after his face with a melon baller. On the leather sofa sit Ruben’s older brother, Lucas, a tattoo artist and former pro snowboarder, and his wife, Cindy, a Bikram yoga instructor decked out in Lululemon. Their teenage son, Chad, sits between them, a glowering slab of flesh whose arm is in a sling—due to something innocent like sports, I hope, rather than consensual violence.

Meg decided the only way out was through. She asked Roger to summarize one of the books he’d been reading, and tuned out during his rigorous synopsis. She wanted to ask him what his deal was—what was wrong with him—but didn’t know how to phrase it in a way that wasn’t hurtful. It was possible, she now realized, that he had suffered some trauma that kept him frozen in a childlike state, preventing him from developing social skills. This thought softened her view of him, and she felt guilty for having judged him previously simply because he was so attractive. She observed Roger as he summarized the Murakami novel, filing away data points that she could later convey to Genevieve.

“Sure, sure,” Genevieve said. “I mean, no judgment.” She said this without apparent irony; Genevieve was the most judgmental person Meg had ever known. Without her usual eyeliner, Genevieve looked like a child, her round face puffy, lips swollen from sleep. She was not conventionally beautiful, but Genevieve harbored a self-assuredness that drew people to her, broken people who longed to be told how to live, and with whom Genevieve amused herself temporarily before gently breaking their hearts. She possessed the unyielding self-esteem of a person with rich parents who loved her unconditionally, who called her every Sunday evening, hoping she’d soon tire of her West Coast experiment and move back to Connecticut. Genevieve would have been capable of using Roger for sex, laughing in his face when he told her he loved her, but Meg had known too much of life to treat people so casually.

Roger saw the wisdom in Steve’s thinking. He stopped texting Meg. He reflected on the details of their first encounter, in case he should get another chance to achieve sex with her. She had responded most positively when he did not speak, when he simply focused on inserting parts of his body into her orifices. She had recoiled when he told her he loved her, and Roger resolved to never do this again, though it was the truest thing he had ever known. Roger asked Steve if he would be willing to practice kissing. Steve agreed, and they spent Thursday afternoon engaged in this practice, first with Steve pretending he was Meg, then with Roger pretending he was Marisa, and then with Roger pretending he was Meg and Steve was Roger, until by the end Roger felt ready to approach kissing Meg from any perspective, including his own.

This piqued Meg’s interest. She wondered how Roger had access to this cabin, but she had learned that asking him practical questions about his life only yielded unsatisfying, cryptic responses. It occurred to her that Roger was embedded in a network of tech-industry privilege that she might enjoy the perks of. Matt had been similarly privileged, but abstained from indulging due to his political convictions. He’d been a hacker as a teenager in rural Oregon, a vegan anarchist who justified his current job coding for a major tech company as a means of stockpiling cash to fund hazily defined revolutionary activities. In the meantime, he and Meg had eaten bland quinoa every night. She’d fallen asleep to the faint sound of Rage Against the Machine issuing from Matt’s headphones while he stayed up until 3:00 a.m., Slacking with his comrades. She had longed, in those days, for a partner who would engage with her in expensive, ecologically irresponsible activities.