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than she expected, and she hobbled into the kitchen and ate a can of tuna and a couple of rice cakes she had bought months ago and hated. She drank a glass of Prosecco, even though the doctor had told her to stay away from alcohol while she was taking medications.
    She went to the bathroom and opened her side of the medicine cabinet, which was stuffed with over-the-counter remedies and personal hygiene products. The woman who lived here was evidently terrified of bad breath, she gulped vitamins, presumably because she had a poor diet, she suffered from chronic headaches and an acid stomach. She was afraid of getting old and of cracked fingernails. A working woman who had more money than time, who bought expensive olive oil soaps in little boutiques and didn’t get around to using them, and new toothbrushes before she threw away her old ones. It occurred to her thatat last she would have enough room for all her stuff. Somehow she couldn’t feel properly sad about Matthias. Sometimes she cried and cried without stopping. At other times she completely forgot that he was gone. They were always spending a day or two apart, being alone wasn’t an effort. Gillian hadn’t even been to his funeral, how could she know he was really dead?
    She took off her blouse and bra. Looking down herself, it was easy to imagine nothing had happened. The accident had left her with a couple of bruises on her torso and some stitches on one leg, but other than that there were no signs on her body. Then she raised her head and looked at her face. In the hospital all she had seen were the wounds. What she saw now, over an almost intact body, took all her strength away. Her stomach knotted, and she crumpled to the floor. She crawled to the bedroom on all fours and flopped into bed. She felt her naked body, belly, waist, hips.
    In the middle of the night Gillian awoke and couldn’t go back to sleep. She got up and hobbled over to her office. She turned on the computer and went through her e-mails. She had more than three hundred items in her in-box. She quickly scanned the subject lines. Get well. Recovery. Sympathies. Forthcoming meetings and, days later, summaries of what had been said at them. She deleted all the messages. The in-box of her other address, the alias under which she had corresponded with Hubert, was empty. She Googled her name. Apart from a few short news reports about the accident, she found mentions of her TV show, a couple of articlesthat had appeared about her, a Wikipedia entry that some fan of hers must have posted, which was surprisingly accurate. She wondered how much longer you lived on in the Internet after you were dead. In a blog she came across a longish analysis of her work as a host. The blogger seemed to have a deep loathing for her. Her first thought was that it had to have been written by a man, but as she read on she saw that it was certainly the work of a woman. It sounded as though the author had met her personally, perhaps she was an artist or an arts worker Gillian had interviewed. When someone laid into her in the press, she at least knew who it was. Now she had the feeling of listening at the door of a room where she was being talked about. You won’t please everyone, Matthias said sometimes when she had been criticized, but that wasn’t it. She had never learned to keep a distinction between her work and herself, whoever criticized what she did attacked her as a person. At the bottom of the blog, comments were solicited. There were a couple of brief entries, broadly in agreement with the blogger, semiliterate statements full of misspellings and obscenities. Gillian briefly wondered whether to write something herself but decided against. She turned off the computer and opened the top drawer of her desk. The envelope containing the photographs was still there where she had left it.
    Gillian hadn’t met Hubert until immediately before the interview in the studio. In their initial conversation, he had laid