“I can’t imagine some of the things you must have been asked to do,” Win muses.

“During my internship as a social worker, I was paged to the ER for a man who was brought in dead on arrival—along with his kids’ sixteen-year-old babysitter. He was having an affair with her, and they decided to do meth, and since he’d already taken Viagra he had a stroke and died. The girl was hysterical, and the nurses were trying to get in touch with his family. The wife and kids showed up, but the dead guy still had an erection, so I had to ask the doctor to figure out a way to hide it so the kids wouldn’t see it. We wound up taping it to his leg and covering him with six blankets. Six. Then I slipped out of the room to put the babysitter into a taxi. She asked me if I thought she should go to the funeral. I told her I thought she should reconsider her life choices in general.”

Win bursts out laughing. “I promise you that you categorically will not have to tape down my erection when I die.”

“Well, if I do, I’m charging extra.” Win is someone I could see myself being friends with, had we met under different circumstances. That alone is probably enough reason for me to realize I need more distance; yet I somehow know she will become my client. “Is there anything I can get you right now?” I ask.

“Time,” Win says immediately.

“I was thinking more along the lines of a pillow, or a chocolate chip milkshake,” I answer. But if she is worried about time, it is likely because of the fear of leaving people she loves behind. Felix. Or her son. “We could Skype Arlo.”

“If you can do that,” Win says, “I will leave you everything in my will.”

“Arlo’s gone,” Felix explains. “He died three years ago.”

“I’m so sorry. I’d like to hear more about him.” But for the first time in our visit, a wall has come up between us, and Win shifts subtly away from me. Eager to change the subject, I try a simpler question. “What have you been doing today?”

She looks up, allowing me to draw her back out. “I’ve been reading up on Willard Wigan, the microsculptor.”

“Microsculptor?”

“He’s an artist, but his art fits inside the eye of a needle or on the head of a pin,” Win explains. “You need a microscope to see it.”

“Felix tells me you’re an artist, too.”

“Wigan’s quite famous. I…only dabbled,” Win demurs.

“Past tense.”

She ignores what I’ve said, choosing instead to talk about the artist. “I’m fascinated by the idea of walking past a piece of art because you can’t see it with the naked eye. Imagine all the times you’ve told yourself, Oh, it’s nothing. Well, nothing can be pretty goddamned big.”

I look at Win and know she is seeing the trajectory of her disease: that first twinge, that dull ache, the way she dismissed it at first. I look inside myself, and I think of Brian.

Lifting my chin, I smile at Win and Felix. “Tell me how you fell in love,” I say.

* * *

—

FELIX TELLS ME that Win was wearing a yellow sundress that looked like electricity wrapped around her body, and he couldn’t turn away. Win says that’s not accurate. He couldn’t turn away because he was paid to make sure she didn’t drive off the road or into a tree.

They swap off, telling their story. They finish each other’s sentences, as if the words are a sweet they’re trading bite by bite.

Win says she had never met someone who was so steady. Ten and two, he had told her. That’s how you keep your hands on the wheel so nothing surprises you. Somehow, she had gotten to her late twenties without anyone imparting that life lesson.

Felix says that he knew he was in love when she told him she knew all the words to “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

Win says he had kind eyes.

Felix proposed after he took her bowling. Win had grown up with candlepins in New England, and had never used a big, heavy ball. When she drew her arm backward, the ball popped off her fingers and smacked Felix in the mouth, knocking out his two front teeth.

He asked her to marry him at the emergency dental surgeon’s office.

It was a sure thing, he tells me. If she didn’t love him, he figured she could still be guilted into saying yes.

* * *

—

ON MY WAY home from Win’s, I pull into a lot near Boston Harbor. It is by no means on my way, but it’s the place I go when I want the world to stop spinning.

On any given day in the summer, you can see the whale watching boats, as large and steady as the prey they search for, tourists streaming on board like krill through baleen. There are ice cream vendors and couples with selfie sticks and men dressed up like Colonial patriots promoting historical tours. In the distance you can see the USS Constitution, and in the other direction, the angled roof of the New England Aquarium, where my mother would teach kids who weren’t us about mollusks and sea stars and tide pools.

My mother was the first person to bring me here. She had Kieran in a baby sling across her chest and she held my hand so tight it hurt. “When I first came to Boston,” she told me, with her lilting accent—which always reminded me of summer, and the way bees would bounce from blossom to bright blossom—“it was the last place I wanted to be. I’d come to this spot every day because I thought maybe, if I looked hard enough, I could still see home.”

There was no way that Ireland was visible, even on the clearest of days, but it didn’t stop her from hoping.

“One day I couldn’t wait anymore, and I jumped into the harbor from this very place and started swimming.”

None of this had surprised me. My mother was meant for the ocean. In Ireland, she used to swim off the coast of Kerry each morning, no matter how cold the water. She told me that dolphins followed her and that sometimes she would swim for hours and wind up so many miles down the coast that her father would have to come and pick her up in his old truck. When she was pregnant with me, she swam for hours at a YMCA. I was a breech baby, the midwives said, because I had no idea what gravity was, which way was up, which way was down.

My mother said that for a while, no one noticed her in the water. Her stroke would have been clean and sure, slicing between buoys and boats until the waves turned darker and choppier, the invisible line where the harbor turned into ocean. She told me that a cormorant guided her, its elegant white belly an arrow forward as it flew overhead. She told me that night had already fallen when she was picked up by the captain of a tugboat who only spoke Portuguese and who kept pointing to her legs and shaking his head, as if he were otherwise convinced she was a mermaid.

“Here’s the thing, Maidan,” she told me, using her nickname for me, the Irish word for morning. “I almost made it. The ocean’s different in Ireland, you know. Sweeter, less salt. And I could see the shoreline. I was that close.”

I believed her, when I was little. Now, of course, I know it is impossible that one small woman might have swum across the Atlantic in a matter of hours. But that doesn’t really matter, does it? We all have stories we tell ourselves, until we believe them to be true.

My mother spent most of her life wondering who else she might have been, if she hadn’t left Ireland. An Olympic swimmer, maybe. Or just someone who worked in her father’s pub. A different man’s wife, a different girl’s mother.

I’ve thought about that, too. If you had asked me fifteen years ago, I would have said that by now, I’d be published and well established in the field of Egyptology. Maybe I would be a curator for the Met, living in Chelsea, with subway maps memorized and a little dog I took running in Central Park. Maybe I’d be a professor with my own concession in Egypt, taking students twice a year and pulling secrets out of the dusty earth. Maybe I’d teach at Queen’s College at Oxford, wandering the stacks of the Ashmolean or presenting at the annual conferences for Current Research in Egyptology in Madrid or Prague or Krakow.

Maybe I would be at the Grand Café on High Street, scrambling through my purse to find a few pound coins for my latte, when the man behind me in line offered to pay instead.

Maybe that man would be Brian, in town to give a guest lecture on multiverses at Oxford’s physics department.

This is what I tell myself: that we were inevitable.

That it was meant to be.

* * *

—