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first place doesn’t automatically make you feel any less wounded. Paying someone back simply means that you’re poorer afterward. Your tempestuous entrance, the denial of your shyness, the abandonment of your fear, your “exhilarating demand,” which I would not—and you knew this very well—have wanted to or been able to turn down, your perfectly executed plan, taking things to their limit and then letting it all go, as if intimacy were the most worthless thing on Earth; your calculated departure, your skillful disappearance—none of this was retaliation, but an act of desperation. The looks you gave me afterward seemed to say, “Isn’t that what you wanted from the very start? Well, now you’ve had it.” No, it’s not what I wanted at all, and you know it! We have never been so close and yet so far apart. That was our nadir. You can’t fool me, Emmi. You’re not the cool, powerful, self-assured woman who can turn humiliation into victory like that.
    The only punishment I really felt was your silence. What has connected us and bound us together until now has been words. If you have any feelings left for me at all, then talk to me!
    Leo
    Three hours later
    Re:
    So you want words. Fine, my mouth is full of them and I’ll give them to you gladly, what else can I do with them.
    You’re right, Leo. I wanted to prove it to Bernhard. I wanted to prove it to you. And to myself. Now I know that I’m capable of cheating. What’s more, I can cheat on Bernhard. What’s more, I can cheat on Bernhard with you. What’s more—my greatest achievement—I can cheat on myself at the same time. Thanks for “playing along,” by the way. I know it had nothing to do with an inability to control your urges—it was pure compassion. You offered to deal with half my feelings. Considering the strained circumstances, you coped with this brilliantly yesterday morning. A bed shared means half a bed. Suffering shared means double the suffering.
    You’re right, Leo. I don’t feel any better today. In fact I feel shittier than ever.
    You cannot imagine, Leo, what “you two” have done to me. I feel betrayed, sold down the river. My husband and my virtual lover made a pact behind my back: if the one wants to feel me physically, just once, the other will make an exception, turn a blind eye. If the one then disappears, never to be seen again, the other can keep me forever.
    The one gives me back to my husband, the rightful owner, as if I had been a find. In return, the other allows me a “physical encounter”—a sexual adventure with an otherwise virtual fantasy love figure, like some kind of finder’s reward. A scrupulous division, a perfect separation, a perfidious conspiracy. And dopey little Emmi, bound to her family and yet driven by a thirst for adventure, won’t ever hear a word about it. Oh yes.
    I cannot even begin to gauge what this might mean for Bernhard and myself, Leo. And you will probably never know. As for what it means for “us”? I can tell you that right now. But for you, the man who was supposed to be able to read my very soul like no one else, it must be obvious, isn’t it? Come on, Leo, don’t be naive. There’s no “four-letter miracle.” There is only a six-letter logical conclusion, and we’ve trembled in the face of it so many times before. We’ve put it off, suppressed it, written straight past it. But now it has caught up with us, and it’s down to me to spell it out: T-H-E E-N-D.

CHAPTER NINE

    Three months later
    Subject: Yes, it’s me
    Hello Leo. The well-qualified lady who looks after my ragged psyche thinks I can afford to ask you how you are. So, how are you? What can I tell my attentive therapist? I can’t tell her: THIS EMAIL ADDRESS HAS CHANGED … !
    All best,
    Emmi
    Three days later
    Subject: Me again
    Hi Leo,
    I’ve just been