"It's okay," he said, softly, gently. "I know you belong to him. Like I said, we just got—carried away. That's all."

She lay against his chest in silence for what seemed a long time.

"I don't know who I belong to anymore," she said.

And soon she slept and dreamed once again—in which she found herself making love to her husband in the shitty trailer house in Anchor Rock ... which morphed into the ramshackle house in Lonepine and Will; which bled into the tent with Sammy and the vision ... a vision to which she returned, lost, wandering, until she found the man in the dirty bandana. Until they, too, were making love, or a perversion of it, and she knew not in truth who she even was anymore, but sensed that she had become not just a woman but a focusing point, an epitome, a river of menstrual blood as dark as it was unpredictable—the mother and whore to the entire world.