He wonders how he did not see it in the slant of her shoulders or the hollow of her back. She had always been a slip-through-the-cracks kind of girl, but he never imagined that she would ever sink all the way to the other side. He had seen her walk to the end of numerous corridors, and wondered where each farewell would take her. Nobdy had expected her to evaporate the final time that she looked over her shoulder, but she did.

He wonders whether he had not been reading the postures correctly. She always stood stiff-still in a way that would allow you to read the tightness of the muscles in her back through her clothes. He had assumed that the way she held herself upright meant that she was firmly planted in the ground, like the weeds that grow in between paved stones. He knows now that he missed the fragility in all of that forced erectness. After all, only something hoping to stand so tall can be trampled like a flower pressed into the ground by the heel of a boot.

Everybody asks how she did it because disappearing is not easy. Nothing is ever truly gone, he knows, thinking of the shadow in that Vermeer painting with the sleeping girl. Yet he has looked everywhere to find some stain or imprint of her influence and found nothing. He resigns himself to the belief that if someone knew how to vanish so completely, then it is none of his business, and never was, to have tried and kept her from being erased.