“I suppose. Her husband was there when it happened.” I glance at Brian. “I didn’t deliver her letter, just so you know.”

He looks at me, surprised. We sit in the pool of porch light and watch as one prematurely red leaf lifts in the wind and detaches from a tree, beginning a death spiral.

“Dawn,” he says, “I’m sorry.”

I smile a little. “I think we’ve both exceeded our lifetime quota of those two words.”

He continues as if I haven’t spoken. “I feel like that,” he says, gesturing to the leaf, which looks like a splash of blood on the grass. “There are so many winds pushing me around, but they’re all feelings.” He says this as if it is a curse word. “For a scientist, that’s like kryptonite.”

I sit very still, giving him the space to finish. “I was mad at you,” he admits. “When you left, I was so angry. I couldn’t wait to tell you off. But then, I almost didn’t get the chance, and that changes everything. It was like I was seeing from a completely different vantage point, from a view I hadn’t considered. We have fifteen years of a foundation. Maybe the hurricane has knocked down the house, but the bones, they’re still there.” Very slowly, so that I have time to draw away if I want, Brian threads his fingers through mine. “We can build on it again, and this time, it’ll be twice as strong because we know where the flaws were, and how to fix them.” His eyes hold me captive. “You can’t discount what we had, Dawn. I know you can’t.”

Once, when Meret was in elementary school, she came home and burst into tears because she had told a friend about a secret crush she had on a boy, and by the end of recess, everyone knew. I will never trust anyone again, she sobbed. My first instinct was to tell her Yes, you should only trust me, forever and ever. But instead, I asked Meret how she decided if someone was trustworthy. She thought about this for a few moments, counting down her small list of friends. One girl had shared half her Kit Kat. Another slid to the side of her seat at the lunch table when there wasn’t any more room, so Meret could sit with her. Such tiny acts, and so critical. You trust someone who makes space for you in his or her life…so much so that if you leave, they will feel the absence. You give someone your vulnerable, unshelled heart wrapped in a question: What will you do with it?

“It’s hard not to see this as Fate—you surviving a plane crash, so you can be with him,” Brian muses. “But if Fate is the notion that you’re destined for a given outcome, based on who you are and what you were meant to do, then a quantum physicist has to say that’s bullshit, by definition. On the other hand, if Fate means the lack of free will—the idea that you have no control over which timeline you wind up in—then you’re just a pawn experiencing whatever the multiverse throws at you.” He glances up. “In which case the chances of you winding up with him, or you winding up with me, are completely random.”

“You’re saying this isn’t my fault?”

He smiles ruefully. “Well. In a quantum sense. That doesn’t make it hurt any less.”

When Brian leans forward and kisses me, I let him. In that quiet, simple touch of his lips to mine are fifteen years of knowing how he folds his T-shirts, and buying satsumas the one time of year they show up in the grocery store because they are his favorite, and feeling him press a packet of M&M’s that he’s smuggled from home into my hand at the movies. It’s his shoulder against mine while we watch Meret’s back rise and fall in her crib, and the smell of his skin and the way my snow tires magically appear on my car every year without me thinking about it.

His hands frame my face for another moment. “Tell me that means nothing to you,” Brian says, “and I’ll let you go.”

But I can’t.

He leaves me alone on the porch, where I sit for an hour, or maybe a lifetime.

* * *

—

WHEN WIN’S OBITUARY is printed in the newspaper, I read it twice. It is a pale imitation of the friend I knew, but words are like that. They never quite capture what you need them to, the way a panoramic photo of a mountain range somehow misses the vibrance and the grandeur.

I take out the pair of scissors we keep in the kitchen drawer with all the other bits and pieces that don’t fit, and cleanly snip the column of text.

I put this into an envelope and write down a name and an address in Richmond upon Thames. I do not write down my own return address. I add stamps and slip this into the mailbox.

I find Brian reading the paper with a big hole in the middle. Somehow, this feels fitting. As if everyone will have to imagine the singular story that once fit into that space.

* * *

—

WHEN YOU LOSE someone you love, there is a tear in the fabric of the universe. It’s the scar you feel for, the flaw you can’t stop seeing. It’s the tender place that won’t bear weight. It’s a void.

But the universe tends toward Ma’at, toward order, so even though there’s a rip, it gets camouflaged. The edges overlap, and after time, you might even forget that this is the spot where something went missing, the spot where—if you push—you’ll fall through. And then there’s a scent or a thought or a heartbeat and suddenly it’s clear as day: the light behind that ragged tear, so blinding that you cannot imagine how you ever mistakenly believed it had woven itself back together.

On the fourth day after I arrive home, I attend Win’s funeral. There is red velvet cake and sidecars crafted with excellent cognac. It is held at night, because there are fireworks. People wear a rainbow of colors, and take turns telling stories about her. Wyatt comes with me to the funeral, holding tight to my hand and passing me a handkerchief when I tear up.

Win will haunt me, even if it’s not in the way she thinks. When you lose someone, you see them everywhere in a hundred different ways. I will think of her when I go to an art museum, or a dog park. On a blank canvas. When I eat a buttermilk biscuit.

The sky is bruised. Purple in the center, blue at the edges, an unaccountably pretty record of damage. I watch the injury spread, staining the whole sky. Win’s friends and relatives sit on blankets, waiting for the fireworks. Wyatt and I lie down to watch them. I tuck myself beneath his shoulder and pretend that those shooting stars never fall; that they become a whole new constellation with Win at its center.

Gradually, everyone disperses. I give Felix a strong hug and tell him I will check in on him in a few days. But instead of leaving, I shake out the blanket again, and sit down.

Wyatt settles beside me. “Making a wish?”

I reach for his hand. “Looking for the Big Dipper.”

I scout out the star in the middle of its handle. Along with a second star in the Little Dipper, it revolves around due north. Because they never set, these undying stars were a perfect metaphor for the afterlife of an Ancient Egyptian soul. Just as the deceased wanted to be integrated into the solar cycle with Re, he also wanted to join the circumpolar stars.

“Those Who Do Not Know Destruction,” Wyatt murmurs, using the Ancient Egyptian term for those stars. “That’s what we are.”

“I want to believe that.”

“I want the fifteen years I didn’t have with you,” he says.

“Only fifteen? Then what?”

“Then I’ll renegotiate.” I turn to find him looking at me, sober. “How long?”

I know what he is asking. How long will we be here, in this limbo?

“It’s only been a few days,” I hedge. “I just need…I need to catch my breath.”

He rubs his thumb over the back of my hand. “I know. But I lost fifteen years. And then I almost lost forever. I spent so much time thinking that you’d disappeared off the face of the earth that I can’t let you walk away again, and if that makes me a bastard, so be it. You and I, we’re still young. There are plenty of Egyptologists who don’t strike the motherlode until they’re ancient and doddering. There’s a lot we missed out on, Olive. But there’s so much ahead of us.”

It is easier to dream about the future with him than it is to untangle the messy knot of the present. Maybe that is what’s so appealing: the simplicity. The effortlessness.

“I don’t want to leave Meret,” I say.

“Then don’t.”

“I can’t take her away from Brian.”

“Then I’ll move. I’ll defect to Harvard.”

I shake my head. “You were not meant to sit in a classroom, Wyatt. And Harvard doesn’t own the concession in Bersha.”

He sits back. “You’re having doubts.” He speaks slowly, as if he has never heard those words in his life.

“Not about you,” I say quickly, because he needs to hear it, and so do I. “About…the logistics of home.”

Wyatt kisses me so gently it already feels like a memory. “Home isn’t a where, Olive. It’s a who.”

There’s an ancient text, the story of Sinuhe, who flees his native country. When he leaves Egypt, he says, My heart is not in my body. To the Ancient Egyptians, for whom the heart was the site of intellect and emotion and faith, it was the same as saying: I have lost my mind.