When you last came to ask for this story, I’d already been hiding out in Barcelona for years. I live in an airy studio on the top floor of a five-story building, with tile floors and a big sliding glass door that opens onto a patio; the patio is lined with terra-cotta pots too heavy to move, left by the previous tenants and overflowing with succulents. The apartment is inexpensive and private; the neighbors keep to themselves and the landlord likes her checks in the mail. It took a little while, but now I feel safe enough here that on hot nights I don’t close the patio door, leaving my bedroom open to the breeze whispering up from the city streets and to the phantom intruders that used to haunt my dreams.

I love this apartment the way astronauts love their ships. My only complaint is the display in the window of the pharmacy downstairs, which I pass every day on my morning run. It features three female mannequins with rounded onyx surfaces where their faces should be, their arms and legs cut off at the biceps and thighs. They’ve been arranged in come-hither poses, hips torqued out as though they were modeling bikinis—but instead, they model first-aid equipment. The one closest to my apartment door has a black lumbar support belt strapped around her waist like a corset and a blue sling for a broken arm draped around her neck. Perched in a wheelchair to her left, another has a knee brace attached at the thigh. The third leans stiffly against the far wall, a sleep mask covering the place where her eyes should be.

For months and months now, this display hasn’t changed. Try as I might to look away, I can’t help glancing at it as I pass, the way a woman in a horror movie can’t resist going upstairs. Don’t take this the wrong way, but whenever I look at the mannequins I think of you. My oldest friend, you have always stood by me in the face of casual misogyny and bad taste.