A year without a word was coming to an end which I couldn’t see yet. A no-bullshit apocalypse, near enough to forecast the weather for the very last day. The final seconds, ticking away on a watch that had stopped working months ago. Something else, in a place no one had ever bothered to look. Someplace you can only find by accident, standing perfectly still for your life and banging a left.

I hadn’t spent much time wondering whether I was losing my mind, because she was pretty convincing: I’d lost it more than a year ago. You had taken it from me, she said. And I didn’t put up much of a fight, because I wasn’t expecting to go on living. Even if she had been wrong about me, I must have figured: what am I going to do about it? I wasn’t a person anymore. I didn’t have any traits or ideas or a word to offer anyone about anything.

For a long time, I believed she hated me. The way she looked at me seemed a clear-enough indicator, and I could imagine a number of decent reasons why she might: if she blamed me for what you’d done, or if she just saw me as a product of your madness, left to burden and haunt her. Either would have been fair, and neither required much pondering to seem plausible. It was only once I finally stopped feeling sorry for myself that I realized it had nothing to do with me.

In her bedroom, in the instant she knocked my left light out, I saw what she had seen but couldn’t admit:

I was incidental. She hated you. And you hadn’t gone anywhere.

Maybe I had gone insane, at some point. Maybe I had gone insane just then, as her knuckles collided with my eye socket. Or maybe she had just bashed sense back into my skull.

Regardless, my remaining eye was sufficient to see that she would kill me right there in her room, if I pushed my luck. And unfortunately, I was terribly well-poised to do just that, even by mistake. If I was going to figure out whether I’d just had an epiphany or a psychotic break, I needed to put a door between us as quickly as possible.

With her fist half-cocked for a follow, she demanded to know where the book was. I answered immediately. She had no reason to suspect that I wouldn’t give up so easily because, after a year, she didn’t know me at all. What little I had said to her during that year, it was clear that she had not been listening. My guess is that the visible fear on my rapidly swelling face was enough to sell her on my submission. So she turned and left me there, defeated and cowering in her bedroom, to retrieve the book from the patio.

“Swear,” you said, “to never fight fair.”

I’ll never know, but I have wondered if she already had your bat in her hand when she returned to find the bedroom door locked. Or maybe she grabbed it when she retrieved the key from the kitchen cabinet, only to learn that the door was blocked from the inside, and blocked well enough that she wasn’t getting in without an ax or a ladder.

When she discovered that the book wasn’t taped to the bottom of the patio table as I’d said it was, it must have struck her at once that I wasn’t going to let her near it. So she didn’t turn her apartment inside out to find the book; she knew it wasn’t there. She tore the place to pieces because she couldn’t get her hands on me.

She didn’t sound like herself, screaming through the wall or crying quietly on the floor.