I’d run out of options. That’s how these things usually happen, how a person ends up placing all her last hopes on a stranger, hoping that whatever that stranger might do to her would be the thing she needed done to her.

For so long I had been a person who needed other people to do things to me, and for so long no one had done the right thing to me, but already I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s one of my problems, I’m told, getting ahead of myself, so I’ve been trying to find a way to get behind myself, to be slow and quiet with myself like Ed used to be. But of course I can’t quite make it work, can’t be exactly who Ed was to me.

There are some things that only other people can do to you.