“Excuse me,” Shane mumbled, reaching into her pocket for a rumpled pack of cigarettes, grabbed her cup and stepped outside onto the back patio. She just couldn’t tell them …. Bette and Marina watched her leave the kitchen, looking silently to Shane and back to one another.

Shane shook a cigarette loose from the pack, pulled it out with her lips, lit it from a flame that wavered in the morning breeze. She pulled the smoke deep into her lungs, held it, tried to shake the memories out of her skull.

She’d walked into that gallery room, her image reflecting in a dozen mirrors. Cherie stood there, her silence unbearable. The conversation replayed itself. “People have said that… I would become a psychopath if I didn’t learn how to feel." Shane had said. "But I wanna know, Cherie, what the ***** is so great about feeling?”

She didn’t have an answer for that now either. All those years, she’d held herself apart from her many lovers and friends, giving what she was able, taking only what she needed and nothing more. Then Cherie, and the delusion that she could actually be with her, have a life together, be part of a we, an us. To speak in plural pronouns instead of singular. The hope that someday she would wake up with someone, the same someone, in her bed every morning. She never realized how deeply she wanted it until she’d found it…and lost it.

She wasn’t so delusional that she didn’t realize that Cherie wanted the same from her … but she had a life … husband, daughter, wealth, status, ambition … of course she wouldn’t give all that up, her comfort, all the trappings that made her who she was in the world. Still, Shane felt she’d sacrificed herself to a fiction … a fairy tale made real only by her own desire for it to be true.

“What an idiot!” she cursed her own stupidity. How could she have opened herself up for this? What had happened to her survival instincts, her ability to wall herself off and detach? Deep down, she knew there was never any real chance of a life with Cherie. That kind of happiness was beyond her reach.