“Shhh.”

Her sister crawls into bed with her and wraps her arms around her. When the little girl is on the edge of sleep, her sister kisses her on the back of the neck and slips out of the bed.

“Where’re you going?” the little girl mumbles.

“Far away.”

“But—”

“Shh. Don’t tell.” She pads across the room, opens the door, and is gone.

The little girl doesn’t tell. Not when her parents ask. Not when the police question her. At first she doesn’t tell because it’s a secret, and she is good at keeping secrets. She is patient. Later, when her sister has been missing too long, she doesn’t tell because she is scared she did something wrong by not telling and everyone will be angry with her. Later still, when they tell her that her sister is dead, she knows she will keep the secret forever, because it is the last thing she has of her sister and she wants to keep it for herself. She keeps it so long, unspoken, that it becomes difficult to believe it happened at all.

Don’t go.

If she had said this, maybe her sister would have listened. Her sister would have rubbed aloe over her itchy skin, and in the morning she would have woken to her sister’s warm body beside her in bed.

Feeling better? her sister would ask.

Don’t go. That was all she had to say. But what kind of thing is that to know, really? Because to have said those words, she would have had to be a different person altogether. So, in the end, what is the tragedy of her life if not being, again and again, the person she is?

“It will feel good.”

I actually said that to her. Like I knew better than she did. Like she was under some na?ve misapprehension that sex might be unpleasant and here, let me clear it up for you. She had found me at the bar and we had gone out to the beach. We were alone, it was late, and we were pretty drunk. We were doing what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call making out. She was taking the lead and I was just happy to be taken along for the ride. At Yale, I was not exactly a Casanova or a Vronsky. I was a German major in the orchestra; I played the cello, for Christ’s sake—these are not cool things now and they were not cool things then. But sometimes when you go someplace where people don’t know you, they get an impression of you that’s different from who you are in your regular life. I remember thinking that this girl was way out of my league, but lucky me, she hadn’t figured that out yet. I’m not talking about the night she died. This was before, on her first night at Indigo Bay.

I wouldn’t call her aggressive, but she was forward. There was no coyness to what was happening between us, no game being played. When I put my hand on her thigh and she pulled away from me I was genuinely confused. I thought we’d both been pretty clear where this was leading and, like I said, she was the one doing the leading. I was moving my hand up beneath her skirt, and she stopped me. She said she should go. She looked nervous, which threw me because until then she had seemed so confident. That’s when I said it. I stroked her hair and said, “Are you sure? It will feel good.” Then—Christ, this is embarrassing—but I sort of, not sort of, I did, I nudged her hand toward the crotch of my shorts, toward my boner, if you want to call it that. I hate the language we have for this stuff: boner, horny, making out, feeling up, eating out. It’s so crass and graceless. Hanna teases me; she calls me a prude because I can’t say these words out loud. I’m not a prude. But these words make me feel like I’m an animal.

After I said that, I was actually relieved when she didn’t give in to me, when she said good night and left. Turns out all I really wanted was to go back to my room and jerk off and pass out. But there’s this script, a script all boys know, and I didn’t write it and I didn’t even really want to say it, but there we were, and it’s not like I was some player with a stockpile of great lines, so that’s what I said. It scared her. I scared her.

For months after she died, I was terrified something would surface and my life would be destroyed. When everyone thought those men raped and killed her and I knew they didn’t I felt terrible. But what could I do? When the police came to question me, it wasn’t even a conscious choice—I simply told them she’d been doing drugs and who gave them to her. When I told them I saw her early on the night she disappeared, and only briefly, and they asked if I was sure I didn’t see her again, I nodded my head and said, “Yes, I’m positive,” so decisively I almost believed it. It was not a choice, but something I knew I must do. To tell the truth, to tell them she had been with me after those men had already been put in the drunk tank, would have been unthinkable, tragic, foolish. It would have yanked me into this horrible mess, and for what? My life wasn’t meant to be derailed by one night on vacation.

It was late, and I was making my way back to my room from the bar, scuffing my Top-Siders against the pool deck, when I saw her. Her hair was a mess. Her mascara was smudged around her eyes.

“I promised, didn’t I?” she said. She smiled that sly smile that had teased me all week. Something was different, though. She was agitated, I might even say frantic. I was pretty sure she’d been crying. She grabbed my hand and I let her lead me to one of the beach cabanas. She wasted no time. She pulled off her top, her skirt, and her panties with a pragmatism that both chilled and aroused me. She pointed at my khakis with her chin. I unbuttoned them.

It was unlike any sex in my admittedly slender library of experience. She pinned my arms above my head and held my wrists so hard they still ached the next day when the police questioned me. (There were faint bruises there, which they would have found if they’d looked.) Then I moved on top of her. She placed my hands around her neck. At first I jerked them away, but she grabbed them and wrapped them around again. I squeezed. She closed her eyes and smiled faintly, like I wasn’t even there. So I squeezed harder, and her eyes popped open. I’ll never forget it. The violence she unearthed so easily in me, like she knew it was right beneath the surface.

It was about something other than pleasure for her. Something was wrong but I didn’t know what and I didn’t ask. When I remember it, my dick goes limp, but I was twenty years old—capable of enjoying all kinds of misguided sex. When it was over, she dressed and ran off so quickly I was still dribbling cum into the sand when I lost sight of her.

At first I felt horribly guilty. Maybe if I’d asked her what was wrong, or if I’d done something different, then … I played that game over and over until it nearly drove me crazy. Back at Yale, I paid penance in all kinds of ways. I tutored a low-income New Haven kid. I called my parents more. For a brief period during my senior year, I seriously entertained joining the Peace Corps. But with time, I grew comfortable in my life again.

I’ve never thought of myself as a secretive person, but I am practical, and practically you can’t tell this story, and I never have. I lead a good life. It is not as grand as the life I assumed would be mine when I was young—I haven’t changed the world with my goodness or brilliance or bravery. I haven’t made a giant splash with my existence, but I’m well respected in my field. I’m an architect. Hanna and I own a boutique firm together. She’s Dutch. We met during a summer studio in Budapest in graduate school. I love her frankness, which can come off as arrogance to those who don’t know her because she is beautiful, tall and slender and erect. I love the space between us, the gap our different native tongues and cultures opens, and the privacy this affords.