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would welcome you flouncing in here to run your filthy fingers all over me? I told you clearly that you are to knock before entering a room. I explained the rules and you have broken them. You have flaunted your insubordination in my face and yet the first words out of your mouth are not an apology,’ he says.
    Though maybe ‘says’ is the wrong word. ‘Snarls’ would be more appropriate. He is so fierce that I have to obey.
    ‘I’m sorry, all right, I’m sorry, I had no idea you –’

    ‘You had no idea that I wish to have privacy to play?’
    ‘You can hear it all through the house! You were playing what I was singing so I just assumed that you –’
    ‘I haven’t the faintest clue what you are talking about. Do you honestly think I would perform a duet with my housekeeper? That seems at best a ridiculous leap and at worst the delusions of a diseased mind.’
    ‘You really don’t have to be so horrible about it.’
    ‘I am horrible. I told you clearly when I hired you – I am cruel and hateful and ill- tempered, and if you find any of that objectionable then you should leave now. In fact I believe it would be better if you did, considering your consistent inability to maintain boundaries,’ he says, in a way that to me seems pretty unfair. He can have the delusions-of-a-diseased-mind thing – that’s fine. But how can I fail consistently to maintain boundaries when we’ve hardly ever been in the same room together?
    ‘I’ve barely spoken to you for days and days,’ I say, half-sure already that my protests are only going to make things worse. Yet somehow, I still don’t fully understand by how much. I imagine him just telling me to go, and instead receive something so awful that I am wincing before he even finishes.
    ‘And that is precisely the way I like it. If I never saw your moonish face again I would be deliriously happy. If you were to refrain from placing your greedy hands on me again I could live something resembling a contented life. But instead you force your presence upon me – worse, you touch me on the shoulder as though that is something I could ever wish for,’ he says. And at that point I have to get out of there. If I stay he will probably say something even more diabolical than ‘moonish’, and that was bad enough. The second he said it I just wanted to crush myself into a tiny cube and mail myself far away from here. I am still feeling that as I stand out in the hall, legs slightly wobbly and with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
    Why did I do that?

    Why did I touch him?
    I should have been able to tell how that would go down. Just because we shared those letters does not mean we are bosom buddies, and the idea that I thought so makes me want to kill myself. At the very least I want to peel off my own skin, before it can finish roasting me alive.
    And things stay that way for a long time. I will be dusting a shelf or making some dinner or drifting off to sleep, and suddenly there it will be: a searing flash of mortification to remind me. You saw a friendship or connection that was not really there, my mind will kindly explain, and of course I cannot argue. It seems sound to me, this theory. It has no holes.
    Or at least I think so until I see him some time later. He stops at the end of the hall when he notices me coming from the other direction. And the second he does he goes to turn around, but not before I see his hand go to his shoulder, just as it did in that room. As though protecting the place I touched, I think.
    From a wound I never intended to give.

Chapter Five
    I consider writing him a note of apology but have almost no idea where to begin. I’m still not sure what happened. I want to believe that he is just an awful nightmare of a man, driven mad by a deep desire to insult me. But the more I think about it, the less it looks that way. I keep seeing my hand on his shoulder, as though I was giving him an injury. He was just defending himself, in a way