Rage rises in Laertes's throat, thick and acrid. If Hamlet were here, he thinks, Laertes would demand satisfaction--face him down with a blade and all the hot bile surging within him, and force him to apologize or to bleed. A vicious part of him has been craving a slight that he can avenge; it seems so long that he's carried his anger at Luo Binghe, unsatisfied, hooded and tame like a falcon whose claws were meant to rend.

But Hamlet isn't here. Ophelia is. Ophelia is here, in this miraculous place where lives are remade. "He hurt thee," he says, hushed. "Didst love him."