I could have run away in the night, probably. I wasn’t a prisoner — at least, as far as I knew — and it would have been simple to just get into my car and drive. But go where? I didn’t have a home anymore, outside of Belmont House. I had no job. As Cayley I had no resume, and no easily marketable skills. And as Ben, I had nothing more than burned bridges behind me.

I stripped off everything, necklace included. There I was, the real me. I felt misshapen. You know that feeling when you put your right foot into the left shoe? My whole body felt that way, completely and indefinably wrong.

And yet, the necklace was a lie. I put it on and watched the change swirl out. No, not the change — the illusion. I felt at my crotch. In objective reality, were my hands touching a penis now? I grabbed a breast — was this just a flat chest? What happened when I brushed to the ends of my hair, nothing at all? It was all a lie, one that I knew was there but still could not see through.

I raised my hands, poised to taking off the necklace again, but I just couldn’t. Yes, it was a lie, but it was a safe and comforting one. Without it, I had to confront reality, and I couldn’t right then, I just couldn’t. At least this way I would not be continually distracted by masculine malformations.

Suddenly, I was aware of the cold. I put on a robe and started a fire in the fireplace. I sat there, staring into the flames. My thoughts went in circles, wearing a path in the metaphorical carpet like a 1950s cartoon husband waiting in a hospital for his wife to give birth. How was it that I had come so quickly to hate the body into which I had been born, grown up, come into adulthood? It had always just been there, the default, and so unchangeable that I had not considered the possibility of change.

But then Caroline came along and showed me the false promise of another way of life, one that I now knew was right for me. I was certain of it, more than I had been at any point in the last five months.

Could I live the rest of my life, bound to the necklace, aware that it was nothing but a skin of altered perception? Could I live with the alternative, returned to a body that now disgusted me, and unable to escape it at all?

I found no answers in the flames, not while sitting upright on the couch, head in my hands, and not while lying prone, the room tilted at right angles to gravity. When my eyes closed and I slept, I found no answers in dreams.

Normally I get up several times in the night, for a glass of water or a pee, but every time I awoke that night, I simply wrapped the afghan more tightly around me and squeezed my eyes shut until I lost consciousness again. Only when my bladder became insistent, and my stomach rumbled with incipient hunger, did I consent to move.

I padded into the bathroom. I suppose that in objective reality, I was just pushing my penis between my legs to pee. Why not just stand? I tried it, and the pee ran down my leg and dribbled onto the floor, until I cut off the flow. Or maybe it didn’t, and the necklace just made me think it did. Either way, I cleaned myself up and wiped up the floor.

Slicing berries and making toast sounded like too much work, so I just ate a slice of bread, straight out of the bag. I had no appetite. I wondered — could I just keep eating, indulge every whim? Stop exercising? The illusion didn’t need to stick to a healthy lifestyle, however obese my objective body became. But the illusion might change along with it, or else shatter under the load of dealing with such a discrepancy.

For a few minutes, I sort of just wandered from room to room. Bedroom, to living room, to private workspace. I had never really used the latter for much more than storage. Back to living room, back to bedroom. I looked at the wall, high by the ceiling, where the crack used to be. Or was it still there, hidden under a layer of illusion of my own creation? Back to living room, back to workspace. It smelled musty, and paint fumes suddenly made it hard to breathe. I threw open a window. Back to living room, back to bedroom. The bed was still made, since I hadn’t slept in it. Back to living room, back to workspace. The room was cold now, and I shut the window again.

Finally, I stopped the wandering and collapsed on the couch, wondering how time could go so slow. I felt trapped in my rooms, but I was unwilling to go out and face anyone. I didn’t want sympathy or censure. I just wanted... what? What did I want? For reality to be different than what it was?

There was a knock at the door. Every muscle in my body tensed. I waited, waited some more, but the knock was not repeated. Tiptoeing on the creaky floor, I put my eye to the peephole and looked out.

No one was there.

Slowly, I opened the door, ready to close it again if assailed. But there was no one. On the floor just outside was a silver tray. There was a pitcher, coffee by the smell of it, with an empty mug and a small silver sugar pot. Next to these was a plate, the house china, on which sat the round, pastry spirals of a cinnamon bun. Someone had made a smiley face on it with white icing.

I picked up the tray and brought it into the living room, closing and locking the door behind me. I now observed a note, a folded piece of thick gray paper, also sitting on the tray.

“I’ll be back with lunch. Holler if you need anything. G.”

I clutched the note. Tears filled my eyes as I stared at the ridiculous little pastry with its white frosting grin.

When the next knock came at the door, a little after noon, I had showered and dressed. The pitcher of coffee was empty, the cinnamon bun no more than sticky residue on the plate. I answered the door seconds after, finding Gerald kneeling to set down the tray.

“There’s a year of my life you just scared away,” he said, putting a hand to his heart. “Don’t worry, it was one of the stinky ones at the end.”

“Can we talk?”

“Always,” he said, and brought the tray inside.

I expected him to launch into one of his outrageous anecdotes, full of people I’d never heard of, or else thinly veiled descriptions of celebrity encounters. But he did not. He took up a position in the armchair, where he could go unnoticed if I wanted to stare at the fireplace, but where we could easily converse if I chose.

Even though I had asked if we could talk, I found that when it came to it, I didn’t know how to begin. I must have opened my mouth half a dozen times, and closed it when no words came out. Gerald was uncharacteristically silent throughout.

Finally, the will to talk and something to say coincided. “You all must hate me.”

“Oh honey,” he said, when it was clear my words had dried up again. “No. No one hates you.”

“Well, you should,” I shot back, unexpectedly angry. “I lied to everybody, about who I was, about deserving to be here.” I continued over his next protest. “Oh sure, maybe the place really was mine, but I didn’t know that and I came anyway, so it works out the same as if I really didn’t belong. How could any of you ever trust me again?”

“I know a little something about lying about who you are,” he said, in a voice dry, but kind. “I am fifty-eight years old. Do you know when I came out to my parents?” I shook my head. “Never did. I just waited for them to die. When my dad passed, I felt a sense of relief before I felt the grief.”

His voice dropped low. “I still feel guilt for that. And so I swore that I wouldn’t make the same mistake again, that I would tell Mom. But the funeral wasn’t a good time, or the week after, or the week after that, and pretty soon she had cancer and I didn’t want her last months on earth to be about me being gay. And then she was gone, and I went through the same thing again. So like I said, I know something about lying about who you are, to people you care about. What happened last night, that was the best thing that could have ever happened to you.”

I wanted to scoff, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so on the heels of his story. “It doesn’t feel like it.”

“Of course not. What happened to you, the way it happened, made you more vulnerable that you’ve ever been. You could have stripped naked and felt less exposed.” I nodded at this. “But we’ve known you for a while, Cayley. Long enough to care about the person more than the body you’re in. Long enough to take your side.”

“Anthony didn’t.” I did not bother to strain the bitterness out of my voice. “He spent months in an effort to bring me down.”

“I’m not saying that what he did was okay. Believe me, he got an earful last night, not just from me. But he’s not a bad person. And when a good person does an extraordinarily bad thing, they usually have a reason for it. What they think is a good reason. Do you want to know why?”

Did I? In a sense, it didn’t matter. The damage had been done. But no, if I didn’t find out, I knew I would always wonder. “Why?” I asked finally.

“It’s not my story to tell. Can I ask Anthony to come in and tell you himself?”

Another hesitation, but shorter this time. I had no wish to see Anthony, but it would be cathartic to confront my accuser, as it was. And somehow, I felt that however uncomfortable I was at the prospect, he would be more so. At least, he ought to be. That I could get behind.

“Yes.” My voice was so cold it cracked. “I want to ask him why.”