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And you have long since outlived the scene where he buried his Swiss Army knife in the planting box outside the courthouse to avoid setting off alarms—as if you two hadn’t already created alarms enough, hadn’t sufficiently frightened and injured each other, which is why you found yourselves in a courtroom. And that was so many years ago, you can now observe those figures dispassionately, or even with pity: they are characters in a novel you’re tempted to cast aside, the story is so worn, the people callow and self-absorbed: you aren’t inclined, at first, to forgive them for being as young, as ignorant as you were then. Place the woman instead on a ledge of schist in a city park. Etch wrinkles around her eyes, her mouth. The rock is five hundred million years old. And she, past seventy, wears an old purple, Indian cotton dress, a little frayed, which almost rhymes with the fractured schist. A glacier, melting, has left her there. She has survived her own violence. She may even begin to tell a story.