My name is Robert Lord. This is a bad breakup story. Everybody's got one, right?

I first saw Fiona standing silhouetted against a hospital window, a midline IV in her

right arm. I couldn't even really see her face in that first passing glimpse. I think

now how curious it was that I felt the compulsion to stop at her door for a longer look.

I wanted to offer a few simple words. She was not my patient. Our conversation was natural,

and she was flirtatious from the beginning, completely comfortable with me seeing her

with no makeup, her long blonde hair and unwashed tangles, the profusion of tattoos on her

body, jarring so greatly with that cheap pale blue gown.

We talked about her miraculous survival of the fate that had come for her on the 12th

of June. We couldn't talk long. I had a lot of consulting to do that day in radiology.

She was released four days later, and we began to see each other right away. She's still

hobbling on crutches. At two in the morning, on our first night together away, at a bed

in breakfast in Cobden, she told me in some detail about the unusual activities that

occupied her at night and had since she was a teenager. She could have lied to me for months

if she'd really tried, I suppose, explaining her way her strange hours and secretive outings

with friends I never met, but she chose to partially let me in. Why didn't I run then

when she revealed her perplexing interests? You know why. It was because of the all-consuming

fog of physical and emotional infatuation that yearning to chase an unexpected adventure

into something completely divergent. It was because of the way eroticism erodes what

is logical and redefines what we believe we need from moment to moment. In a way, I

was secretly thrilled that Fiona was so bizarre. After a lifetime of playing it so safe,

I had been set free into some dizzying maze. Get good grades, go to school, become a doctor.

...