If you had asked me back then where we would be ten years later, I would have laughed and asked why, when we had today? I would not have admitted to you, to anyone, that every now and then when I lifted my head from your shoulder and peered into the future, I could imagine you, and me, but not us.

I guess that’s the part no one ever tells you. You can love someone so much your teeth ache, so much that it feels like he is carrying your heart in his own rib cage, but none of it matters if you can’t find a practical way to be together. It’s like learning that you would be immortal if you could breathe nitrogen, but knowing you are bound to the oxygen of Earth.

I was the meteor that crashed into your life when you were already living it. I didn’t have any more control over my landing than you did when you froze, looking up at the inevitable sky. You had a past and a plan and responsibilities. You had someone who already loved you. We were gasoline poured onto fire. With you I burned twice as high and hot.

This is why you and I could never have stayed together. We would have consumed each other until there was nothing left.

When I met the man I would eventually marry, I almost blinked and overlooked him. He was quiet and thoughtful and steady and sure, all the things you weren’t. This is boring, I thought at first. Where are the bursts of color? Why doesn’t he talk over me when I’m talking because we have so much to say? When you’re used to flying, it’s hard to walk with your feet on the ground. But the strangest thing happened. Moving so deliberately, I noticed things I never had before: the way he never backed out of a parking spot unless my seatbelt was fastened; the way he asked before he kissed me, as if what I had to give was not his to take; how, when I got appendicitis, he was more worried about me than I was about myself. How he would order food that he knew I wanted, instead of his favorite meal. How he charged my phone daily, when I forgot to plug it in. How, when he held my hand, I didn’t just feel things. I felt everything. He wasn’t staid and slow. He was steady. When I stopped careening between the highs and lows of emotion, I didn’t feel bored. I felt safe.

For a while I was angry at you, because I had almost missed this—someone I didn’t just want to be with, but someone I wanted to be more like. You were the bright shiny thing at the corner of my consciousness. I made myself look away.

* * *

—

KIERAN IS SO busy as a neurosurgery resident that weeks at a time go by without my seeing him, and yet, I know him so thoroughly that the minute we meet up at Saks in Copley Square, I see something is wrong. I also know he can’t talk about it without getting more agitated. “I don’t understand why you need a suit,” I say casually, as we wander through the store, fingering cashmere blazers as soft as a dream and shirts so fine they slip through my hand.

“Because I can’t present my research at a conference in scrubs,” Kieran says. He glances at a price tag and goes pale. “That’s more than I make in a month.”

“I thought neurosurgeons were rolling in dough.”

“Residents aren’t.”

He’s fidgeting, the way he used to when he was younger and nervous—when he had to take his SATs or when he finally came out to me. So I do what I used to do—I grab his hand and squeeze once, like a pulse. I wait for him to squeeze back. We keep this little heartbeat between us.

If I ever needed proof that I had made the right decision to stay in Boston after my mother’s death, instead of going back to Egypt, all I had to do was think of Kieran. He excelled as a student, he went to Harvard undergrad and then Harvard Medical School; he was a resident at Mass General; and now, he’d been invited to present his research—aneurysmal therapy using retrievable Guglielmi detachable coils—at age twenty-eight. I know what a big deal this is for him. But I want to just smooth back his hair, like I used to when he had a fever, and tell him he can breathe.

“Hey,” I say now, softly, “you’re going to be great.”

He looks at me with my mother’s eyes. He nods and swallows, but his fingers are still clenched in mine.

“You could wear a burlap sack,” I tell him. “No one is going to even notice what your tie looks like, once you open your mouth.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Kieran mutters. “You’re not the one being judged. I know my shit, but I don’t know if I can explain it to a whole auditorium full of people.”

“You teach med students all the time.”

“In groups of five. Not five hundred.”

“Imagine them in their underwear,” I suggest.

“The med students?” he says. “The ones I know don’t wear any, because they have no time to do laundry.”

He is joking, but his pulse is still racing. It’s my job to read a human body, to see how close it is to crisis.

“Are you going to tell me what’s really wrong?”

He stops wandering through the racks. “What if this is it? I’ve been number one in my class. Twice. I got the match I wanted. Everything’s gone according to plan. Doesn’t it seem like it’s time for me to take a stupendous fall?” He drops his head. “It’s a big deal to be asked to present research this early in my career. Maybe I shouldn’t have said yes.”

“Kieran, you’ve gotten where you are because you work hard at it. Take a deep breath,” I suggest, and I inhale deeply, to model the behavior.

And nearly jump out of my skin, because I smell Wyatt.

Sugar and sunlight and something expensive. I yank my hand out of Kieran’s and turn around like I’m being hunted.

“Dawn?” Kieran asks, but his voice sounds like it’s coming from miles away.

I’m tangled in white sheets, in his arms. I am pulling his shirt around me like a robe. I breathe him in all around me.

The Ancient Egyptians believed that when a god came in its true form, there was an irresistible aroma. In the creation scene of the female king Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, Hatshepsut’s mother conceives when Amun comes to her. Even though Amun is taking the form of her husband, she knows he is really a god, because of his scent.

I feel Kieran’s hands on my shoulders, shaking me back to reality. “Dawn? Are you okay?”

I want to be strong for him, the way I have been for years now. But to my shock, my eyes fill with tears. “No. I don’t think so.”

He drags me deeper into the men’s department. He finds the fitting room, tugs me inside, and closes the door behind us. “What the hell is going on?”

I am shaking so hard that I cannot stop. Once I open my mouth, the words pour forth like an inundation. I tell him about Gita and Brian and the fight we had the night of Meret’s birthday. I tell him everything, beginning with the moment I left home and ending with Brian behind me, staring over my shoulder at Wyatt’s face on a screen.

I tell him I’ve made a mistake.

“You mean looking up Wyatt,” he clarifies, and I shake my head.

“How many times have I heard Brian talk about alternative universes?” I pick at a thread on the bottom of a coat hanging behind me. “It’s like I’ve opened Pandora’s box…inside my mind. I can’t unsee it.”

“Unsee what?”

“What my life might have been.”

My neck prickles with shame. What mother, what wife admits this? The only solace I have is that Kieran can’t possibly hate me any more than I hate myself right now.

But he doesn’t tell me I’m a monster. He curls his hand around mine. He squeezes. He waits for me to squeeze back. When I don’t, he tries again, and then I respond, and suddenly, there’s a beat between us. Thready, erratic…but present.

I look into his face, seeing the boy he was when he cried himself to sleep after our mother died, the teenager who delivered the valedictory address, the man who’d just suffered his first heartbreak. “You,” I say, “are going to be a great doctor.”

Kieran lifts his hand and I think he’s going to stroke my hair or my cheek, the child caring for the adult. Instead, he reaches behind me to the coat that is hanging on the dressing room wall. He flicks his finger to turn the price tag, and smiles wryly. “Fuck this,” he says. “Let’s go to T.J.Maxx.”

* * *

—

I thought about you whenever I painted. When I went to a museum. I wondered how you told the story of us, how different it was from the way I framed our story. To you, I was there one minute and then I was gone. You probably think that I stopped loving you. You didn’t realize that the reason I left was because I loved you too much.

I didn’t want to be a cliché and I didn’t want you to be one either. But mostly, I didn’t want to be the one left behind, and the only way to ensure that is to be the one who leaves. I kept thinking about your wife, about how she would feel if in the end you were mine. It was too easy to put myself in her shoes. I couldn’t let myself be the reason you made a woman feel that way, so whether I stayed or not, I lost.