The year you turn forty, your pretending escalates for the first time in more than a decade of slippage, and you find yourself splintering off occasionally—usually when you are alone, but sometimes with your husband too—fragmenting into your latest novel’s protagonist, Mary. It is the mania, you tell yourself, of finishing a draft; this often happens when you are in the throes of a book’s completion and know you will have to leave your characters’ world soon. But at the age of forty-two, on a bucket-list dream trip in Kenya with your family, you are still pretending to be Mary, dividing your attention between what is real and what is not, that old equator you cannot seem to stop straddling. Why has this escalated again, here in middle age? You are old enough to know that at this point you are exercising choice—that you are volitionally participating when you could just stop. But you do not stop. Instead, you breathe in the familiar air of escape while your husband screams at you on Manda’s Diamond Beach, a flank of jaded islanders standing by nonplussed at seeing a woman put in her place—while your husband waves his arms and shouts and then stalks off away from you into the sand, you remember this safe house inside your head and let it in on purpose, fuck it, fuck him. Inside the confines of another fictional woman’s skin, you cannot be hurt; you cannot be disappointed; you cannot wonder why you are putting up with behavior you orchestrated your entire life in an attempt to flee. Yes, you remember this: the oblivion, more soothing than rum and gingers, better than any drug you’ve ever tried. The water is always warm in here. Come in.