Lottie lay beside the sleeping Alice, studying Alice’s fair hair, scattered limbs, and the trace of kisses on Alice’s skin. Lottie fought the urge to linger, telling herself it would be easier not to hold on to details, yet she still wanted to pretend this was a beginning and not an end. She dressed in the dark, resolved not to look back, but paused when Alice sighed and reached out in sleep; instead of staying, Lottie wrote a note and left it by the bedside lamp.

Outside, Lottie crossed the rain-damp campus barefoot, savoring the solitude after the storm. As she wandered through the city, a car slowed and a man approached with predatory intent. Lottie met his gaze without fear; whatever he saw made him flinch and veer away, and she continued on, thinking that if she wanted to, she could wield similar power.

Lottie entered an all-night mini-mart, bought a black coffee and a Danish for the hotel’s night clerk, and walked to her hotel. She greeted the clerk, George, who recognized her as Miss Hastings, and left him the small offerings with easy familiarity. She then went upstairs as dawn began to break and changed into a robe.

Sitting on the sofa, Lottie took out a battered paperback and turned to the last pages, where she kept a running list of past lovers, each memory distilled to a single line. The list included names and brief sensory markers, a gallery of snapshots that she maintained instead of fuller journals, which she feared would haunt her.

After recalling the night with Alice—the feel of Alice’s skin, the rhythm of her heart, their tangled bodies in the dorm sheets—Lottie added a new entry to the list: “Alice. Scottish. Gentle. Tastes like grief.” Ink bled slightly from the final period, and Lottie dried the page before closing the book. With the entry made and the memory confined to a line, she climbed into the hotel bed and went to sleep.