I handed her a tissue. Her fingers lingered on my knuckles. She sniffled. “Thanks.”

I sat back down. “So you thought you were doing what Nora Dowd taught you.”

“You know Nora?”

“I’ve read the court documents.”

“Nora’s in the documents?”

“She’s mentioned. So you’re saying the false abduction was related to your training.”

“You keep calling it false,” she said.

“What would you like me to call it?”

“I don’t know…something else. The exercise. How about that? That’s really what it started out as.”

“An acting exercise.”

“Uh-huh.” She crossed her legs. “Nora never came out and told us to do an exercise but we thought- she was always pushing us to get into the core of our feelings. Dylan and I figured we’d…” She bit her lip. “It was never supposed to go that far.”

She touched her temple again. “I must’ve been whack. Dylan and I were just trying to be artistically authentic. Like when I tied him up and wrapped the rope around myself, I held it around my neck for a while to make sure it would leave marks.” She frowned, touched a bruise.

“I see it.”

“I knew it wouldn’t take long. To make a bruise. I bruise real easily. Maybe that’s why I don’t do pain very well.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a crybaby about pain so I stay away from it.” She touched a spot where the scoop neck of the T-shirt met skin. “Dylan feels nothing, I mean, he’s like stone. When I tied him up, he kept saying tighter, he wanted to feel it.”

“Pain?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Not his neck at first, just his legs and arms. But even that hurts when you go tight enough, right? But he kept telling me tighter, tighter. Finally I screamed at him, I’m doing it as tight as I can.” She gazed up at the ceiling. “He just laid there. Then he smiled and said maybe you should do my neck the same way.”

“Dylan has a death wish?”

“Dylan’s a freak…it was freaky up there, dark, cold, this emptiness in the air. You could hear things crawling around.” She hugged herself. “I said this is too weird, maybe it wasn’t a good idea.”