They both fell silent for a few moments. The night moved on as the moon slipped in and out from behind the clouds, supplementing the faint light from the nearby streetlamp, which kept flickering on and off. Perhaps the rains of the previous days had dampened an underground cable, causing an intermittent electrical connection.

In fact, it was off more often than it was on now, so the moon cast its silvery light across the faces of that strange pair.

"What do you do to beat insomnia?" Emma went on. "Because that’s why you’re out at night, right?"

"Partly, yes."

"You don’t take pills?"

"No."

"So how do you do it?" She looked at him, hoping for some advice or a trick he used. Since he was older, he surely had experience with that sort of thing.

"Well, when I can’t sleep, I pray."

"Pray?" she asked, surprised.

"Yeah. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I pray the rosary without getting out of bed, reciting the prayers silently. And before long, I fall asleep again."

"So, like… it works for you. And you don’t wake up again?"

"I do wake up. But then I start praying again from where I left off. And that’s how I spend the whole night—praying."

Emma remembered going into a church downtown a few years earlier. It was a winter evening, already dark, and the church was dimly lit. A group of old women sat there murmuring a string of prayers that must have been the rosary. And it certainly had been an incredibly sleep-inducing atmosphere…

"And what’s wrong with your mother?" Alder asked. "Why does she take pills?"

"According to her, like… she has anxiety."

"Isn’t that true?"

"No. She’s a grumpy, frustrated old woman who poisons herself with her own bitterness."

"An old woman?"

"Well, she’s already fifty."

Alder could not help the slight twitch at the corner of his mouth. It was not exactly a smile. More the expression of someone who, in the middle of a terrible conversation, had discovered a small, almost human absurdity. If a fifty-year-old woman was already old, what did that make him?

"I see. You’re an only child, aren’t you?"

"Yeah. How did you know? Like…"

"If you had siblings… more siblings, your mother wouldn’t be like that."

Emma did not understand why Alder had said that and wanted to press him on it. But he got ahead of her with another question:

"Does your father know you’re out this late?"

"Well, like… he works nights. He’s a security guard at a museum."

"Oh, I see," he realized. "Now I understand why you go out so freely. But still," he noted, "aren’t you afraid that someone might…?"

"That someone might do something to me? That I might get raped?"

"For example. The night is dangerous, even though this city isn’t one of the worst."

Emma smiled ironically.

"Alder," she began, almost talking to him like a parent. "When someone’s in the situation I’m in, like… those kinds of… fears a normal girl would have are, like… secondary. I don’t know if you get what I mean, like…"

The wanderer nodded. Despite being so young, almost a child, she showed a knowledge and understanding of the situation that was painful to witness.

"Right. You just don’t care about anything anymore."

"Exactly. Like… I’m already past that point."

He let a few moments pass before saying:

"It’s clear that your parents are the key. They haven’t done their job."

"No," she snapped. The word sounded louder than usual in the stillness of the night. "The key is those bitches who bullied me and left me like this. That’s the key!" she shouted. "My parents are normal, like… just like anyone else’s."

"Right, right," he conceded. "What I meant was that if your parents mattered to you, that could be an important factor keeping you from going through with your plans."

"I don’t care about my parents at all," she declared, staring straight ahead and almost spitting out the words. "Like… they’re not what’s stopping me from killing myself, if that’s what you mean."

"Well, if you don’t care about your parents…"

"Look, I won’t deny that I care a little more about my father than my mother."

"Ah! In that case…"

"But not enough," she interrupted. "He has no backbone, you know? Like… He lets her control everything, and he obeys her like a puppy. You know what I mean?"

"Yeah, I get the picture."

"Deep down, I don’t care about either of them. Like… and my mother hits me, you know?"

Alder barely turned his head. The change was slight, but Emma noticed. She also noticed that he did not react with shock to the outburst. He simply listened.

"She hits you?"

"Yeah. She’s a hysterical lunatic, like I told you. When I don’t do what she wants, like… she hits me."

"And what does she want?"

"Well, like, she wants me to stop acting this way. To be a ‘normal’ girl."

"Well, if that’s all it is…"

"What do you mean, ‘if that’s all it is’?"

"I mean, like, I think it’s because you’re making her suffer."

"You said ‘like.’"

"Me?"

"Yeah, you."

They both laughed. It was a brief, uneven laugh, yet real. In the empty park, it sounded almost insolent. Emma covered her mouth with her hand, as if she had no right to laugh after having cried so much. Alder lowered his gaze to the ground, grateful for that tiny respite.

"But you know what?" she continued. "I don’t care if she hits me. The blows don’t hurt anymore. I hit myself a lot too, you know? Like… that isn’t the worst kind of pain I have."

"Right. It’s the emotional pain."

"Exactly. Do you know what it’s like to live with that crushing sense of anguish… like… to have something inside you, like, that makes you reject yourself, that makes you disgusted with who you are, like… disgusted by everything you’ve lived through and everything you’ve done—and everything you haven’t done?"

"Yes, I do. I know it very well."

"Oh, yeah? What are your traumas, Alder?"

The old man turned his head away. On the other side of the park, the metal fence gleamed faintly. It was clear that he did not want to talk about it. But Emma was waiting for an answer, and there was something new in her waiting: not just curiosity, but a need to know that pain could exist outside her too.

"I’ve hurt other people," he began without looking at her. "Badly. And that isn’t the worst of it."

"What’s the worst of it? Like…"

"The worst part is that none of the harm I’ve done can be undone. I can’t go back and make it right."

Emma fell silent and did not answer right away. The silence that followed was not empty; it was full of things neither of them wanted to name.

"Well, my psychologist says, like… that everything can be fixed."

"Right. Everything can be fixed except death, isn’t that what they say?"

She shrugged. The gesture seemed practiced, a way of playing down what had actually consumed the whole night.

"That’s what my parents say, and maybe it’s true. But death is freeing. That’s the good thing about it: you can’t go back."

"That’s the bad thing. You can’t go back," he repeated in her own words and in the same tone.

"But you don’t need to, Alder. If you’re dead, you don’t need to go back! Don’t you get it? Like… that’s the good thing! It means ending everything once and for all, damn it!"

Emma began to cry again. This time she did not try to hide it. Alder did not contradict her with platitudes or tell her to calm down. He stayed beside her, motionless, glancing at her now and then with affection, with restrained tenderness. Only when her crying began to lose its force did he let out a long breath, as though he too had been holding something in.

A long while passed. The early morning moved forward unhurriedly. At the edges of the park, the city still seemed asleep, but not entirely. A distant engine, an elevator in a nearby building, the echo of voices fading away: small signs that the world would keep existing even though the two of them sat there, suspended on a bench.

"What would you do if you could go back? Like…"

"The past is unchangeable. It’s set in stone."

"I know. But, like… imagine you had a time machine."

The old man raised his eyebrows, his expression shifting slightly. He seemed to remember something that made him shudder, but he could not bring himself to say it. Something crossed his face—a memory or a guilt… She noticed and respected his silence.

"Well, if I had one of those machines, like, I would’ve stopped all the harm Madison and Savannah did to me before it ever got started. I remember the first time they hit me, you know? Like…"

"In the bathrooms?"

"No. At recess. They made fun of me for being ‘fat,’ and I kept quiet, and kept quiet… like… and when they saw I wouldn’t stand up to them, they shoved me. And when they saw I still wouldn’t fight back, then they kicked me. Until I ran away and took refuge with the teachers."

"And then they left you alone."

"For the moment. The next day it happened again, and the day after that, until, like… out of habit, I always stayed in that safe place."

"Right. And with your time machine, what would you have done?"

"What do you think?" she snapped. "I would’ve slapped each of them hard the moment they threw the first insult at me."

"Would that have been enough?"

"Definitely. They would’ve gone after someone else, like… There were other fat girls in my class, you know?" She looked at him.

"But the difference was that they fought back, wasn’t it?"

"That’s right. They fought back… like… and not just that. They attacked people too."

"Attacked people?"

"On social media. They went after everyone, and nobody went after them."

"The best defense is a good offense."

"Yeah. But to do that… like… you have to be that kind of person."

"Of course. And you’re not the kind of person who attacks others. Are you?"

"Clearly not."

She did not say it with pride or resignation. She said it as someone stating a law of physics: rocks fall, fire burns, she does not attack. Alder heard that certainty and understood that, in that sentence, lay a central part of the wound.

"You kept it all bottled up inside… never giving any of it back… until you’d built up so much that…"

"That I exploded," she finished, and began to cry again, this time with even more feeling, if that was possible. It was not only sadness. It was helplessness, anger, exhaustion, an old shame that seemed never to have found a clean way out.

"I exploded inside… like… or, as my psychologist says, I imploded…"

Alder let her get it out. Every now and then he glanced at her profile, at the way she tried to breathe between sobs, and then looked straight ahead again. He did not want to turn her pain into a spectacle. He simply stayed there, sharing the same bench, the same night, the same stretch of time.

When Emma had calmed down a little, he spoke again. He did so cautiously, like someone rapping on a closed door and waiting to see whether anyone answered from inside.

"But they don’t pick on you anymore, right?"

"No, not anymore. Ha!" she exclaimed. "Let them try! Let them try laying a hand on me! I’m not thirteen anymore, and I know how to defend myself, like… I’m sixteen now, almost seventeen, and I’m taller and stronger than they are."

The energy behind the statement did not last long. It soon went out, like a match snuffed by a gust of wind. Emma folded her arms again. The bench seemed too big for the two of them and, at the same time, too small for everything they were saying.

"The problem is the past, isn’t it?"

"That’s right," she sighed. "Like my psychologist says, like… even when things get better or end, their shadow lingers for a long time. Sometimes forever." She paused and stared straight ahead. "That’s why I wish I had a time machine, like… so I could change things." She sighed again, though now it was more of a sob than a sigh. "Because of them, I’m the way I am now… Because of those fucking bitches… like… I’m human garbage, a wreck, and the only comfort I can find is hurting myself and wanting to die…"

At that moment, she stood and, still crying, ran out of the park. Alder watched helplessly as she hurried down the path and headed toward the infamous bridge.

For a moment, he considered running after her. He would probably reach her in time and, if necessary, hold her back so she would not do anything reckless. But… that was the problem. Holding a woman—a young woman… He pictured the scene: Emma trying to throw herself into the void, and him behind her, gripping her tightly around the waist… Would he be able to do it without suffering a heart attack and dying before she did?

Yes, he could do it, he told himself. As she had said a moment earlier, he had already moved past that point, and it could not happen. He was not going to have a heart attack, because that was physically impossible. Still, it would be a traumatic experience, as much as—or even more than—the one he had suffered with the woman and her dog in the pastureland—Lucretia? No matter that Emma inspired nothing in him but compassion; she was still a woman, and if merely seeing a woman was already a problem, touching one…

A jumble of thoughts raced through his mind. Was it not already traumatic to sit there talking with her two nights in a row? Yes, of course it was. He was having a genuinely hard time, and now he did not know whether it was because of his natural aversion to women or because he was dealing with someone in such a desperate situation. In any case, he told himself, it was all for a good cause, and that softened everything. If he ultimately managed to keep her from killing herself, it would have been worth it.

The fact was, he racked his brain over what to do until he finally reached a logical conclusion. No matter what he did tonight, it would not solve anything. Even if, through a supreme effort of will and regardless of the consequences it would undoubtedly leave him with, he grabbed her and stopped her from jumping, Emma could try again at any other time. Perhaps the very next day. And if it was not from that bridge, it would be from another. He was not her guardian, and besides, he could not be.

So he resigned himself to it. He removed the crucifix that always hung from his neck and placed it on the bench. It was made of fine rosewood, with a silver figure of Christ set into it. It was, in truth, the only treasure he owned. Then he knelt before it and prayed with all the fervor he could muster, tears in his eyes, asking God to find a solution for Emma. And if she survived that night and they continued to see each other, he prayed that he would be able to advise her in the best possible way and help her find a way out of that dead end.