“Henry Page,” Grace said to me flatly when Piper finally managed to get her up and walking. “Take me home.”

“Come on, we’ll get you out of here,” said Lola, slinging Grace’s arm around her neck.

I didn’t want to take her home. I didn’t want her to come back to my place and take off her clothes and lie naked in my bed. It didn’t seem fair. That she could choose to have me anytime she wanted.

It started drizzling out on the street, which seemed to revive Grace somehow. She peeled herself away from Lola and started turning in unsteady circles, sprinkles of water clinging to her hair and coat. Her cane was gone, abandoned at some point during the night, but she seemed more agile without it. Like she didn’t really need it, just kept it for security, the same way she kept his clothes.

“I used to be a ballet dancer,” she said, extending her hands above her head as she moved. “I used to dance. I don’t think I ever told you that. Just another thing I can’t do anymore.”

Lola held my hand, her head on my shoulder, as we both watched Grace dance in the rain, because you couldn’t not watch. You couldn’t not be enraptured by that. It was something close to reverie.

After a minute, Grace curtsied, smiling. Lola clapped.

“Oh, dear, Henrik doesn’t look happy with me,” Grace said to Lola, grinning. “I’ve been very mean to him. I probably deserve it.”

“I think you should have this back,” I said, taking “I do not love you” out of its home in my wallet, where it had festered for months, a poem that had been a prophecy from the beginning.

Grace took it from me and laughed and slung her arms around my neck. “I don’t want it back, my darling Henry. I gave this to you.”

“You’re never going to be my girlfriend, are you?” I said flatly. Lola was standing right there next to us, but I was drunker than I realized, so I didn’t care. I didn’t care if she heard.

“Jesus Christ,” Grace said, wrenching herself away from me. “Do you ever think about anything else? What do you want from me?”

“I want you to be with me.” Ugh, so needy.

“I am with you. Literally. Right now. We are together.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Why’d you have to write me that stupid letter? Why couldn’t we just keep doing what we were doing? I hate to go all Hollywood cliché on you, but why do we have to put a label on it?”

“Oh my God. Do you realize how ridiculous you sound?”

La, by this point, was making a very good show of looking like something on her phone was intensely interesting.

“Me? What about you? What do you want? You want to make it Facebook official so all your friends and family can like it?” She tore the poem in half and in half and in half again and let the pieces fall to the dampened sidewalk. “You can’t project your fantasies onto people and expect them to play the part, Henry. People aren’t empty vessels for you to fill up with your daydreams.”

“Come to Burger King with us,” Lola said, sliding between us, putting her hands on Grace’s waist. “Get something to eat. Come back to Henry’s or mine and sleep it off.”

“If I go to Burger King, I will vomit on everyone there,” Grace said as she grasped Lola’s shoulder to steady herself. She looked back at me, blinking as she tried to focus her vision, her pale hair falling over her face. “I wanted to see how you’d react. If I forced myself to be her for a night. Kintsukuroi Grace, all stitched up with gold seams. You’ve never looked at me like that before, when you saw me through the crowd. I think you have feelings for someone who doesn’t exist.”

Then Grace let go of Lola’s shoulder and threw up on the sidewalk and kind of disintegrated into a heap on the ground. It took us five minutes to get her back on her feet, and another five minutes to convince the Uber driver we’d requested that he wouldn’t need to call an old priest and a young priest if he drove her home.

“Thanks for looking after me and stuff,” she said as she slid into the backseat.

“That’s okay,” I said. “Just . . . get home safe.”

Then she said, “I love you, Dom,” right as I was swinging the car door closed. And in the moment that it thumped shut, I felt my heart tear a little bit more. The last thread that had been holding me together ripped away. I couldn’t breathe as I watched the Uber pull into traffic and ferry her away. I didn’t want to breathe anymore. I wanted to lie down on the sidewalk and be swallowed by the concrete.

“Did she say what I think she said?” said Lola, who was collecting the torn pieces of Pablo Neruda off the ground and putting them in her bag. I’d been really hoping she hadn’t heard.

“Yeah,” I said, staring after the car with my hands in my pockets, not entirely sure how I was still alive.

“Look, don’t let it fuck you up. Falling for her was always gonna be a really shit time. Grace does love you, okay? In her own way. If you’d been first, if you’d been before him, she’d realize that what she feels for you is a kind of love. It’s just that what they had . . .”

“Was bigger? Was better?”

“People are perfect when all that’s left of them is memory. You’re never gonna measure up to a dead dude.”

“Thanks for the honesty.” I shook my head. “When she’s sober, she’s so hot and cold. It’s only when she’s drunk that she makes me think she wants me.”

“That’s when people are most truthful, though, right? When all the inhibition kinda melts away and people say what they really feel.”

“Like that they love their dead ex-boyfriend?”

“C’mon. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. I mean, you can’t just go around kissing people and taking their virginity if you’re not in love with them, right?”