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I rested my head on my knees to try to calm myself down. My heart still pounded from my orgasm. It was a horrible thought, but I wanted Rien back. I wanted him to hold me again. Stupid, a stupid feeling, but I wanted him to care about me. I didn’t want to believe that he was only pretending. I didn’t want to believe that what had just happened was only a scene that we’d both acted in.

“No, Sara.” I shook my head. “No, no, no.”

I’d heard all of the stories about method actors. How Daniel Day Lewis had been playing the role of a crazy person and had gone crazy himself after spending days depriving himself of sleep. There were dozens of couples who had started out acting opposite one another in movies. Their characters fell in love, and they followed suit in real life. It was such a cliché, but it was true.

Delsarte knew that. He was one of the first people in theatre to propose the idea that emotions follow from facial expressions. If you frown, he said, you start to become angry. If you smile, you start to become happy. This was a couple hundred years ago, but even today you could see that concept all over the place.

There was a psychological study that had a bunch of people watch a comedy show. One group held a pencil above their upper lip so that they were forced to bare their teeth, like a smile. That group always found the comedy show funnier than the group who hadn’t been forced to smile.

Another study found that people who flexed their muscles and posed like Superman before an interview tended to do much better than people who were forced to do timid poses, like bending over and clutching their knees. Delsarte might not have been a method actor, but he knew something about psychology.

I looked down at my own posture. My arms were wrapped around my knees, in just about the most timid, un-Superman like pose ever.

“Okay, Sara,” I said, pushing myself up. I stood up on trembling legs. “Let’s become a survivor. Okay? Okay.”

I stood with my feet apart, and I flexed my arms like Mr. America. I didn’t feel strong, though. I felt utterly stupid.

I tried another pose, hands on my hips, chest out. Okay. Better. I was feeling my fright drain away. This could actually work. Thank you, Delsarte. I stretched my arms out and made a monster face, growling.

“I am the monster,” I said, making myself as big as possible. “I am strong. I am a survivor. I—”

CRASH!

The noise came from behind the bookcase. Was it Gary? Or Rien? I froze for a moment, not sure what I should do. Then I took a deep breath and shook the remainder of my fears away. Whatever it was, I could handle it. I stepped to the bookcase and pulled outMan’s Search for Meaning, not sure what I would find behind the door when it opened.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Sara

I stepped into the operating room, my eyes darting from side to side. Rien was nowhere to be seen. I heard another crash.

It came from the waiting room.

I ran to the doorway and stopped there, frozen in the doorway, unable to believe what I was seeing.

The metal stool was in Rien’s hand. He’d smashed both of the mirrored walls in the waiting room. He stood in the middle of the room with the broken glass globe at his feet. The shattered mirrors reflected his face a thousand different ways. His face was as white as the tiles in the operating room.

“Sara?” The question was hoarse and unsteady. He looked around the room in confusion, as though unsure if he had done all of this himself. His reflections splintered in the broken glass.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“It was too much,” he said. The metal stool clanged noisily to the ground. He waved a hand at the broken mirrors. “All of this. Too much.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. He looked up at me like I’d interrupted him.

“It’s all fake, all of it. The mirrors, they lie. They don’t tell the truth.” He talked like an insane person, running both hands through his hair as he muttered.

“Rien, I don’t—”

“You don’t understand! That’s why!” he yelled. Then his voice softened. “It’s me, Sara. I’m sorry. It’s me. Come, let me tell you something.”

I stepped forward nervously. I didn’t know what to expect when I came through the door, but it wasn’t this. Rien seemed angry, but not at me. He looked angrily at the mirrors and at the broken glass. He took my hands in his and knelt down, pulling me down next to him. I sat on the floor, in the one clean patch of tile that didn’t have shards of glass. He held both of my hands, his palms hot against mine.

“Have you ever heard of a delusion called Capgras syndrome?”

“Cap—what?”

“Capgras. Never mind the name. Names mean nothing. Nothing, right?”

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