“Don’t beat yourself up,” she says. “With all that’s happened, everything you’re feeling is completely natural.”

I nod, but I don’t buy into the “victim’s trauma” theory, at least not in my case. All I want to do is move on, go back to the way things were before. Sometimes I think I can do it, but there’s another voice, a dark voice, and it won’t let me forget, no matter how hard I try.

“I’ll be fine.”

Diane smiles, touches my cheek, then turns away.

I open the front door and walk out into the afternoon.

When I get to the end of the driveway, I turn left and start toward the university. I don’t know how far I’ll get, but I plan on walking until I can start acting human again, however long that takes.

Luckily, it’s a nice walk.

The sidewalks in our neighborhood are wide and lined with towering oak trees whose leaves drape green over the streets in the summer and cover the ground gold in the fall. The closer you get to the campus, the older the houses and the quieter the streets.

Quiet.

That’s taken some time to get used to.

When Diane and I first met, I had a studio apartment a few blocks from the capitol. There was a rooming house next door and a bar across the street, and it was anything but quiet. It wasn’t the worst place I’d lived, but you didn’t want to be out walking after dark, either.

Diane wanted nothing to do with it.

She was working as a buyer for a local art gallery, and living in a condo downtown. We decided that if we were going to get married, we needed a bigger place in a better neighborhood, something we could grow into. So, after I took the job at the university, we started looking.

We fell in love with the first one we saw.

It was a small brick Tudor tucked into one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city. Not too far from the gallery, and within walking distance of the university.