It was in those golden years at Hampden that I first saw her, though I did not see her—not fully—until it was far too late. She was a shadow at the edge of our Grecian masquerade, neither wholly in nor out of our sphere, drawn to our flame as a moth, silent and slight. Not beautiful in the vulgar sense, no—but remarkable. The kind of girl who, when she left a room, left it feeling emptier than before. We called her clever when she was cruel, said she was ethereal when she forgot to eat. We excused everything as art.

She came to Julian’s lectures once, twice. Then never again. She said we talked in riddles. I told her that was the point.

What we were, the rest of us—Henry, Bunny, Charles, Camilla, Francis—we were performers in a sacred rite, players in a pageant that demanded blood and reverence in equal measure. She, in contrast, was so starkly modern, though she read Rimbaud and listened to Sibelius and pretended to enjoy the silence of ancient rooms. But she laughed at the wrong moments. Asked the wrong questions.

She changed often, always chasing something unnamed. One month it was Catholicism, the next vegetarianism, then poetry in translation. I mocked her. Gently. With charm. And when she disappeared for weeks, it was I who noticed, not the others.

Her absence lengthened like a shadow across my thoughts.

Months later, I saw her again—older, thinner. Not in beauty, but in spirit. She stood atop a hotel roof in Boston, pale against the twilight, eyes fixed on nothing. The noise of the city murmured below like a distant sea. She turned to me as if summoned. I expected her to speak, but she didn’t. There was no clever remark, no sarcasm. Just silence, solemn as marble.

“I used to dream,” she said at last, “but it got too loud in there.”

I reached for her hand, trembling, chilled.

And in that moment, I realized—we had been the dream. And she, the only one awake.