From Jean’s house Julie had driven to Whitfield. She planned to reassert herself. She wrote Theo on an index card and taped it to her steering wheel. She waited tables at a sushi restaurant called Raw. She moved into a windowless studio. Each morning she would slip into one of the dresses Wes had bought for her — baggy sacks patterned with diamonds or flowers — before walking to campus. She tried delivering fake telegrams to English classes in session. She’d knock politely, enter, and assuage the scorn of professors with, “I have a letter for Gregory Hayes.”

The professor would ask, “Is there a Gregory Hayes?”

There wasn’t. The registrar handed over a stack of outdated student directories. No Greg Hayes. But in the 2006 directory she found a Nicholas G. Hayes. She got Nick on the phone. “Did you ever make love to a woman named Julie?”

“Who is this?” he asked.

“Is your middle name Greg?”

Nick Hayes hung up.

He was hiding something, she reasoned. At the library she searched through the yearbooks. Finally, she came to Nicholas Hayes: cropped hair, black glasses, tick-like mole on his chin. Class of 2008. She flipped back a page. Returned. The face hadn’t changed. The past six months swelled up inside her and popped. At home, Julie found his address in the student directory. 21995 Rickard Road, Bend, OR. She called in sick the next day, halfway to Bend.

The iron gate at the end of his driveway was locked with a rusted chain. She stuck her foot on the ornate H in the center of the gate and gripped the bars, pulled up, and rolled over the top, landing with a pitiful thump on the pavement. Spruce squeezed the serpentine driveway. The forest flattened to lawn gone marshy in the Oregon winter. The house resembled a church crossed with a frat. Tall, shattered windows. Bone-colored columns rimming the porch. Julie marched across the yard, footsteps splattering mud on her calves.

Inside dust moats curled and hovered. Julie pinched her nose. Dead mice stacked in the corner smelled nearly as strong as the black xs tktktk