I text Wyatt to tell him Win has died, and then I text Brian, but neither of them responds.

When I enter my house, I witness something I never expected to see. Brian and Meret and Wyatt are all sitting around the kitchen table, eating pizza. Wyatt and Brian have bottles of beer, and Wyatt is telling a story about how, as a graduate student, he licked something fossilized to figure out if it was bone or rock, and had a coughing fit and inhaled it. “I’m likely walking around with a piece of a pharaoh in me,” he says, and then he looks up when I walk through the doorway.

Immediately he gets to his feet, reacting to something written across my features. He takes two steps forward, and there’s only one more before he can reach me and let me fall apart in his arms—but then he stops abruptly and jams his hands in his pockets, remembering where he is. “Your client…?”

“Died,” I say, and for the first time the word is not a statement or a fact but something as delicate as an egg that I have to deliver over rough terrain.

“I’m so sorry, Olive.” The endearment slips out. Brian’s eyes narrow when he hears it.

Brian rises, too, and takes a plate from the cupboard. On his way back to the table, he squeezes my shoulder. “Sit down. I’ll get you a slice.”

Even Meret is sympathetic. She brings me a paper napkin and hugs me. She is the glue, I realize, that connects this oddly shaped group of people before me.

I push my grief behind a curtain, the ugly sweater I will take out and try on later, before closeting it for the next time. I force a smile. “I hope you got sausage.”

“God, Mom,” Meret says. “You realize pigs have been taught to play videogames and are smarter than chimpanzees?”

And just like that, everything should be back to normal. As normal as it can be to have Wyatt and Brian sitting on either side of me at a table. To be methodically eating pizza even though a wide swath of my hair has been shaved away. And the most important point: I am here. Win is not.

I hope that Abigail takes care of Felix. I hope he can make it through this first night in an empty house, which is always the worst.

If my clients are afraid of dying, then my clients’ caregivers fear being alone. There is something bleak and barren about a world that is missing the person who knows you best.

As Brian relays an explanation of an experiment in his lab, I stare at him. He would win, if that were a contest. He knows the tiny details that make up a life: where I hide the gingersnaps, so no one else will eat them and leave me with an empty box. Which drawers hold my socks, my bras, my sweaters. How to pick the cilantro off my food, because it tastes like soap. Where my back always hurts the most, when he offers to rub it. How to undo the clasp of the necklace I can never manage myself.

But Wyatt, he knows who I could be. An academic. An author. An archaeologist.

A colleague whose ideas he seeks out, whose vision he trusts.

A woman who comes apart so easily in his bed that I have to sink my teeth into him, sometimes, just to stay grounded.

The mother of his child.

The person he sees first in the morning, and last at night.

When I remember to pay attention to the conversation again, Meret is talking about her next tennis match. “I’m not great, but—”

“You’re not great yet,” Wyatt corrects.

She rolls her eyes. “There are kids who’ve been playing since they were three.”

Brian lifts his beer. “Then the fact that you’ve improved so fast in so little time is even more impressive.”

Maybe this is what Meret has needed all along. An extra parent to build her up, when she is certain the world is tearing her down.

“I may not be entirely objective,” Brian says, “but she’s smart, you know? She doesn’t just have a hundred-mile-per-hour serve—”

“I don’t have a hundred-mile-per-hour serve—”

“—so she makes up for that with strategy.”

Meret turns to me. “He hasn’t missed a meet. He even changed his summer session’s final exam time so he could come to the last one.”

Brian smiles at her. “She’s really something to see.”

“I bet she is,” Wyatt says.

There is an uncomfortable silence as we process why Brian is the only one who’s seen Meret play tennis.

Brian begins to fold his napkin into quarters, then eighths. “I meant to tell you, Meret. I think my perfect track record’s about to get shot down. I can’t make the match on Thursday. I tried, but there’s a tenure review meeting.” He clears his throat. “Maybe your mom and…and Wyatt could go.”

It is one of the purest, humblest gifts I have ever received.

When I was a social worker doing my clinical rotations, I was called to a hospital room where all hell had broken loose. A girl who barely looked old enough to be in high school was still in stirrups, having just delivered a premature baby. Beside her was a shell-shocked boy with peach fuzz on his upper lip. The delivery suite was crammed with medical professionals who were performing a full code on their impossibly tiny daughter. I was paged because the teen mother was hysterical, and no one else had time to deal with her. I immediately grasped her shoulders, trying to get her to look at me, and when she wouldn’t I followed her stare to her baby.

The skin of the newborn was blue and as thin as tissue. With every compression of CPR, it tore, and a new wound started to bleed. The air was ringing with the girl’s shrieks and the terse fugue of lifesaving, but it was clear that the effort was futile. The doctor glanced at me over his shoulder, still pressing down on the tiny rib cage, his hands covered in blood. “Do something,” he ordered.

I let go of the girl. Instead, I touched the boy’s shoulder. “You have to be the dad,” I said firmly. “They are looking to you to make a decision.”

His face crumpled. “I thought…I thought we’d have more time.”

“Everyone thinks they’ll have more time. But a father has to give away his daughter, and you’re doing that today.”

The boy looked up, his eyes dead. “Stop,” he said. “Just stop.”

Now, Wyatt smiles at Meret. “I would love to come to your match. Tell me your camp colors, so I can paint my face and wear Mardi Gras beads and be obnoxiously loud in my cheering.”

She laughs, and I think: He is so good at this; at gaining a child.

But my eyes drift to Brian, who is so gracious at losing one.

* * *

—

AFTER DINNER WHEN Wyatt goes back to his hotel, I walk him to the car. We lean against it and Wyatt pulls me close, stroking the uneven sheet of my hair. He is solid and strong and vital, the best argument against death anyone could give. “I wanted to do this when you came in,” he murmurs. “You looked so…crushed.”

I tighten my arms around him. “I wanted you to do this when I came in,” I reply. “But I know why you didn’t.” He is painted against the night sky, wearing a crown of stars. “I almost died myself, when I saw you at the table with Brian.”

“I must admit, I wasn’t expecting that invitation.” Wyatt hesitates. “He’s…he’s a good man, Olive. If I couldn’t be with you, I’m glad he was.”

I know how much it cost Wyatt, with all his casual confidence, to admit this.

“But not that glad,” he adds, and he kisses me.

I don’t know how or why it always feels like the first time, when this happens. I press even more close to him, craving him, desperate. It shouldn’t surprise me anymore, but it does: after I fill my senses with Wyatt, I am only hungrier.

He rests his forehead against mine. “Easy, Olive,” he murmurs. “You don’t have to try to crawl under my skin. You’re already there.”

“I miss sleeping next to you,” I say.

“I miss waking up to you. This is a bit like some gothic fairy tale, isn’t it, where you’re mine during the day, but he gets you after sundown.” He brightens. “Let’s take a nap tomorrow and break the curse.”

If only it were that simple. If only it weren’t a curse of my own making.

I watch him get into his car and drive off. Instead of going inside, I sit on the porch swing. I think about Win, and about Meret, and then—as if I have conjured him—Brian steps outside.

He doesn’t say a word, just sits down next to me. I can hear the whistle of crickets, and the peepers calling from a pond in the woods. “It’s late for them,” Brian muses. “Almost fall.”

I wonder if our conversation will be boxed into things like weather and flora and fauna, because it’s safer that way, until there’s virtually nothing we can talk about at all.

I force myself to look him in the eye. “Thank you for doing that.”

He knows I am talking about stepping aside, so that Wyatt can go to Meret’s match. One of Brian’s shoulders lifts and falls. “Well. I can’t undo it.” Meaning: Wyatt. “So.”

He leans forward, clasping his hands together between his knees. “About Win.”

“Yeah.”

“Was it peaceful?”