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villages in the countryside. I wanted to sit in a pub in Ireland and listen to music. I wanted a lot.”
    He shook his head. “Not a lot. You wanted to be happy. To be yourself.”
    â€œGod, yes. I wanted to touch everything, see everything. Absorb everything. I’d dreamed of it for so long, and there I was, staring at the Duomo in Florence, drinking wine and flirting with the waiters in Rome, sitting on a hilltop in Tuscany. No structured tours for me. No structure at all. I was done with that. That’s why I was hiking in a remote area of the Piedmont in the fall, a few months after my eighteenth birthday. Alone, watching a glorious sunset, walking as twilight came, soft and so lovely. It was incredibly romantic, and peaceful and exciting all at once. I was going to hike over to France.”
    â€œOh, baby.” Instinctively he squeezed her hands. Someone had hurt her, she’d said. And she’d never known him. “Were you raped?”
    â€œNo.” Not quite true, she realized. What else to call the invasion of her body, the horror? “Not . . . not sexually.” She paused a moment. She was stalling when she needed to get through it all quickly. And yet, didn’t he have to know the whole of it? Didn’t she need to make him see it, believe it?
    â€œI should’ve camped near one of the villages, or gone to a house or farm. Something. But I was eighteen and immortal, and I wanted to experience the night in the mountains, alone. The full moon. I heard something, and I thought, Oh Christ, is that a wolf? Are there wolves up here? But a wolf wouldn’t be interested in me. Then I heard it howl. I felt the fear strike across my neck like an axe, even when I told myself wolves didn’t bother people. People weren’t their prey.”
    She tossed the throw aside, pushed to her feet, moved to the fire to poke at the logs, even though she knew the flame wouldn’t warm her. “It was all very quick. I walked faster. I could hear my boots ring on the rock. I had my Swiss Army knife in my pocket. I remember digging for it. I saw it—the shape of it—and I ran. It came at me from behind. My backpack saved me. It knocked me flat, and I could feel it tearing at the pack, and its breath on the back of my neck.”
    She rubbed her arms, rubbed them hard, and kept her eyesfocused on the leaping flames. “The sounds it made—hungry, wild. Inhuman. I screamed. I think I screamed. I lost my knife. It wouldn’t have helped me anyway.”
    She turned back, knew she had to face him with the rest. His eyes were riveted on her. “I must’ve fought, but I remember it clawing me, and the pain was beyond belief. Beyond that when it got its teeth into my shoulder. It might’ve killed me then, and it would’ve been over. But I had this.”
    She drew the cross out from under her shirt, let it dangle from the chain. “I stabbed at it with this cross, out of panic and pain and desperation. I only saw it for an instant, and then not clearly, but I hacked the point of this cross into it, and it screamed. I lay there alone, looking up at the moon. I don’t remember after that, I must’ve passed out. They told me hikers found me in the morning, and carried me out of the mountains. They told me I was lucky I hadn’t bled to death. Luckier, they said, than the man they found dead. But the strange thing about him was he was smeared with blood, but only had two small wounds. A puncture wound in his cheek, another in the jugular.”
    â€œSelf-defense, Simone. You had to—”
    â€œNo, wait. I have to get it all out. He was a hermit, they said. This man they found dead and smeared with blood. A strange, strange man who lived alone in the hills. It must’ve been he who attacked me, but wasn’t it odd that my wounds looked to have been inflicted by some sort of beast? The claw marks, the bite in my shoulder. But