Property: A Collection. Lionel Shriver

avoided people.

      She could no longer trust her own judgment. Competent animals could sniff out threat. They instinctively distinguished their own kind, and anodyne adjacent wildlife, from predators. So it was in the spirit of biological imperative that she reviewed her many intersections with Paige Myer. Their first meeting: That hadn’t been a slightly inept young woman with a tendency to blurt her fiercely held convictions. It was an outburst of immediate, uncontrollable aversion of a kind Jillian should have recognized. Because Paige would already have heard as much about Jillian as Jillian had heard about her, chances were high that Paige had prehated her, much as one preorders a book, or a burial plot. Some characters might be so beguiling on introduction that they are able to penetrate a shield of prepared enmity with the sword of their fearsome charm, but examples of prevailing against prehatred are probably few.

      Thereafter: Paige wasn’t bashful, and she wasn’t quiet. She was subdued around Jillian because that’s what people were like when the whole night through they were shoving a fist in their mouths and waiting for a guest to leave.

      The presents (the shawl, the fig preserves): camouflage.

      Various admirations (of the necklaces, the button self-portrait, even the high-loft popcorn): fake. Jillian made a note to self: she was as big a pushover for flattery as every other bozo.

      Jillian’s respectful efforts to act more formal with Weston Babansky in Paige’s presence: wasted. Read as patronizing. Though it wouldn’t have helped had she acted in another manner instead, as any alternative approach would have backfired, too.

      The point was, if Jillian Frisk couldn’t tell the difference between a shy, diffident, openhanded new acquaintance and a nemesis gunning for her most precious asset from the get-go, she shouldn’t be allowed out in public.

      The near agoraphobia following that awful August was aggravated by a still more pernicious mistrust. Launching into the outside world requires feeling faintly palatable. At the least, in social settings you have to adopt the default assumption that others’ initial reaction to you will be neutral, and healthy characters walk into a room expecting to be actively liked. But for months, Jillian felt hateable. Lest she appear “showy,” she dressed in small colors, wearing slack T-shirts and tired jeans that disguised her figure. She kept her hair bunched, and often skipped showers so that its tendrils wilted. Lest she seem “self-involved,” she conducted all phone calls with such a paucity of autobiographical content that her mother in Philadelphia accused her of being secretive. When she met the disappointing tennis partners, she volunteered little enough about her off-court life that they stopped asking, and consigned the relationship to the sports friendship, a perfectly agreeable but utilitarian arrangement whereby you never saw one another other than to play. In general, Jillian tried to say and do as little as possible, because whatever she expressed and however she behaved was bound to inspire disgust.

      Mind, one of the primary reasons most people dislike someone is that the other party doesn’t like them; thus so many antagonisms come down to a chicken-and-egg issue of who started it. Yet Jillian found Paige Myer strangely difficult to despise in return. There simply wasn’t that much prospectively odious material to work with. Baba’s renunciation naturally feeling like a betrayal, Jillian might have taken refuge in righteous indignation—alas, a deflective, huffy emotion, in this case hopelessly subsumed by sheer woundedness. She couldn’t hate him, either, which would only pile betrayal upon betrayal. You were supposed to love a wife more than a pal, right? So it made sense that Baba had thrown their friendship under a bus, the way earlier generations of gallants threw capes over puddles.

      Consuming the better part of a year, her bereavement was so deep and enduring that she might have wondered whether, as Baba had insinuated that dreadful Wednesday, the undercurrents of the friendship were indeed improper. Except that no romance had wrecked her this thoroughly for this long, regardless of how besotted she’d been to begin with. In the end, the unique severity of the loss seemed to exonerate their amity as innocent after all.

      Inevitably, she would catch sight of him. He did give their old courts wide berth; it was tacitly understood that she’d been awarded Rockbridge, as if having been bequeathed no. 3 in a divorce settlement. But downtown Lexington was tiny, its eateries few. The first time she spotted Baba coming out of Macado’s on Main Street, she ran away, cowering around the corner on West Henry. Not an adult response. She got better at fielding these intersections, nodding from down the block if she caught his eye, sometimes cracking a despondent half smile. He was always the one who broke the gaze first to look down at the sidewalk. Then he’d glance back up and flutter a lifeless wave, having trouble raising his hand, as if the once keen sportsman had contracted some terrible muscle-wasting disease. On each sighting, he looked thinner—unattractively so. All that vegetarianism.

      By late spring, however, Jillian started to feel hardier, and reconsidered the plan she’d conceived over the winter to pick up stakes. She had a sweet arrangement with the Chevaliers that she was unlikely to duplicate elsewhere. She loved her cottage, its floors refinished with darker lines patterning the edges of the rooms like tribal tattoos. Her reputation as a lively, infectiously enthusiastic tutor had spread widely enough—to nearby Kerrs Creek, Mechanicsville, and Buena Vista—that she didn’t want for work, even if her secret with the boys was that most of them developed crushes. It was a comely, close-knit municipality that she had made her home, and on the face of it, the rejection of a tennis partner was a lunatic reason to leave town.

      As the weather warmed and her skin turned golden, she began to feel braver, donning more revealing skirts and the flouncy thrift shop tops she had shunned for months. She went back to wearing hats—wide brimmed, straw, with ribbons. She let her hair down in every sense, and kept it washed. She rediscovered that a broad grin in Sweet Things Ice Cream Shoppe was all it took to win an extra-generous scoop and free sprinkles. A widowed client raising two sons, who by the by was rather dishy, had started asking her to stick around after lessons for a glass of wine. The only individual in her orbit who appeared to find her “hateable” was Jillian herself. So she tried the Ice Cream Shoppe smile in her bedroom mirror, and the reflection smiled right back.

      Whether she precisely forgave Baba—whom she was starting to think of as Weston—was a moot point. The purpose of forgiveness was to lay planks over a gorge in the interest of forging ahead, and instead her erstwhile soul mate had raised one of those stark black-and-yellow end signs meant to alert motorists to the termination of a cul-de-sac. How she felt about Paige, likewise never again actively germane to Jillian’s affairs, was equally irrelevant. Although forevermore a particular place in her mind was destined to ache when she brushed against it, she was apparently capable of moving on.

      But as the loss of her best friend gradually healed over, another hole in her life continued to gape.

      The back right quarter of her living room was empty. She had never chosen to rebalance the room by returning the armchair there. What was done was done: Weston had forsaken their friendship to appease his wife. But one injustice could be righted.

      On the exact date at the end of July marking the one-year anniversary of a big mistake, Jillian wrote the following email:

      Dear Weston,

      I hope you don’t mind my contacting you this way. While I do miss you sometimes, I am well, and I am not trying to stir up trouble. I trust that you and Paige are very happy.

      A year ago, I gave you and your fiancée a wedding present that cost me a great deal of time, energy, and love. The materials I used to construct it, like my own wisdom teeth, are irreplaceable. So it was very difficult for me to give away my handiwork—which was literally imbued with my own DNA. Had things gone differently between the three of us, however, rest assured that I would still be delighted to have given my creation a new home, where I could be certain it would be cherished.

      As it happens, you accepted the gift under false pretenses. The evening I bestowed it, you were already planning to bring our friendship to a permanent close. You were also keenly aware that your wife-to-be disliked me, a fact that you concealed from me, allowing me to make a fool of myself by proceeding as if she and I had warm, harmonious relations. Had I benefited