Taylor watches me, loose wisps floating around her face.
“I just want to be left alone,” I say. I throw all my strength into the words, but they emerge like a plea. This is all wrong; I sound like a child.
I turn on my heel to go. Again, she calls my name.
“Can we just talk to each other?” she asks.
We go to a coffee shop, the one where I met Strane three weeks ago. Standing in line, I take in the up-close details of her, the thin silver rings on her fingers, a mascara smudge below her left eye. The scent of sandalwood clings to her clothes. She pays for my coffee, her hands shaking as she takes out her credit card.
“You don’t need to do that,” I say.
“I do,” she says.
The barista starts the espresso machine, a din of grinding and steam, and after a minute our drinks arrive side by side, identical tulips drawn in the foam. We sit near the window, a buffer of empty tables around us.
“So you work at that hotel,” she says. “That must be fun.”
I scoff out a laugh and a blush immediately takes over Taylor’s face.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “That’s a stupid thing to say.”
She says she’s nervous, calls herself awkward. Her hands are still shaking, her eyes looking everywhere but at me. It takes effort to stop myself from reaching across the table and telling her it’s fine.
“What about you?” I ask. “What kind of company is that exactly?”
She flashes a smile, relieved at the easy question. “It’s not a company,” she says. “It’s a cooperative work space for artists.”
I nod like I understand what that means. “I didn’t realize you were an artist.”
“Well, not a visual artist. I’m a poet.” She lifts her coffee and takes a sip, leaving a pale pink stain on the rim.
“So being a poet is what you do?” I ask. “Like, for money?”
Taylor holds her hand up to her mouth, like she’s burned her tongue. “Oh no,” she says, “there’s no money in that. I have side hustles. Freelance writing projects, web design, consulting. Lots of things.” She sets down the coffee, clasps her hands. “Ok, I’m just going to go ahead and ask. When did it end with you and him?”
The question catches me off guard, so pointed and yet banal. “I don’t know,” I say. “It’s hard to pinpoint.” Her shoulders seem to fall in disappointment.
“Well, he ended things with me in January oh-seven,” she says, “when the rumor really started to circulate around school. I always wondered if he cut things off with you then, too.”
I try to keep my face arranged in a patient smile as I think back to that year. January? I remember his confession, the burning building encased in ice.
“Obviously I didn’t have it as bad as you,” Taylor continues. “He didn’t get me kicked out or anything. But still, he made me transfer out of his class, stopped acknowledging me. I felt abandoned. It was awful—so, so traumatizing.”
I nod along, not knowing what to make of her, what she says or how willing she is to say it. I ask, “So you weren’t in touch with him at all over the past ten years?” I already know the answer—of course she wasn’t—but after she twists up her face and replies, “God no!” she asks, “Were you?” And that’s what I want, the chance to say yes, to differentiate myself, to draw a line and make clear that we are not the same at all.
“We were in contact right up until the end,” I say. “He called me right before he jumped. I’m pretty sure I was the last person he talked to.”
She leans forward; the table rattles. “What did he say?”
“That he knew he’d been a monster, but he loved me.” I wait for realization to cross her face—that she’d been wrong about him, about me, and about whatever it was he did to her, but she only snorts.
“Yeah, that sounds like him.” She gulps her coffee, throwing back the mug as though it were a shot. Wiping her lips, she notices my expression. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t mean to mock. It’s just so typical, you know? That way he’d berate himself to make you feel sorry for him.”
My head tips back as though the weight of my brain has suddenly changed. He did do that. He did it all the time. I’m not sure I’ve ever summed him up so neatly.
“Can I ask you another question?” Taylor asks.
I barely hear her, my brain busy righting what she’s thrown off balance. It must’ve been a guess, what she said, extrapolated from some moment of him slipping out of the teacher role and revealing himself. It’s hardly profound, describing him that way. Beating yourself up in the hopes of gaining sympathy—what person doesn’t do that every now and then?
“How much did you know about me at the time?” she asks.
Still far away, I answer, “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
I blink and she comes into focus, her face so sharp it hurts to see. “I knew you existed. But he said you were . . .” I almost say again nothing. “A rumor.”
She nods. “That’s what he called you at first, too.” She tucks her chin, lowers her voice into an impression of Strane: “‘A rumor that follows me like a black cloud.’”
It’s stunning how much she sounds like him, his exact cadence and the metaphor I remember him using to describe me, the image it always put in my head of him relentlessly pursued by the threat of rain. “So you knew about me?”
“Of course,” she says. “Everyone knew about you. You were practically an urban legend, the girl he’d had an affair with who disappeared after it all came out. But the story was so vague. No one knew the truth. So I believed him at first, when he said the story wasn’t true. It’s embarrassing to admit now, because of course it was true. Of course he’d done it before. I was just . . .” She lifts her shoulders. “I was so young.”
She goes on, explaining how eventually he told her the truth about me but waited until she was “fully groomed.” He called me his deepest secret, said he loved me but I’d outgrown him, we didn’t fit together anymore the way we did when I was Taylor’s age.
“He seemed genuinely brokenhearted,” she says. “This is really screwed up, but he had me read Lolita at the beginning of things. You’ve read it, right? The way he talked about you reminded me of the first girl Humbert Humbert is in love with, the one who dies and supposedly makes him a pedophile. At the time, I thought a man being wounded like that was romantic. Looking back, the whole thing was just deranged.”
I try to pick up my coffee, but I’m trembling too much so it just clatters back down, spills all over my hands. Taylor jumps up and grabs some napkins, still talking as she wipes the table. She explains how she eventually suspected Strane was still seeing me—that she snooped on his phone and saw all the calls and texts, figured out the truth.
“I used to get so jealous when I knew he was going to see you.” She stands over me, sliding a soppy napkin across the table, the end of her braid grazing my arm.
“Did you have sex with him?” I ask.
She stares down at me unblinking.