There was absolutely no doubt she was a horrible person. She had driven another devoted, adoring boyfriend to desperation through her utter inability to even pretend to love someone (the first one, back in high school, had coped using acoustic guitar breakup songwriting as a gateway drug to the opiates of his college years, eventually graduating from prescription to street, which surely, she could tell herself, she had nothing to do with, but the evidence was incriminating and who did she think she was fooling, really?). Sloppily, she had missed him (this last one, John, a full-stack developer at Google NY), and gone back to him in August, just a month after breaking up with him, only to find that the sheer act of him walking into the same room made it hard for her to breathe and made her forehead sweat, which he noticed and privately cried about, all the while letting her stay at his place while Vika looked for an apartment, even when it was clear she didn’t love him, probably never had, and had no inclination to have sex with him or anybody else anytime soon. So maybe she hadn’t really missed him. But she had eventually snuck out of his studio in the middle of the Hell’s Kitchen night and never answered his calls again, because the truth was, she really didn’t care about him. He was a lovely, good-hearted man, and she had hurt him so much, and so deliberately, and she didn’t care at all.