June carried the heavy plastic toolbox out to the back porch. The plastic handle dug into her palm until she finally set the weight down on the grey floorboards. The wood was dry and splintered at the edges, and the bottom step was completely rotten from the spring rains.

Maya was already waiting outside, swinging her legs as she sat on the unbroken section of the railing. She wore faded denim shorts and an old t-shirt. Her dark hair was tied back with a rubber band, but a few loose strands stuck to the damp skin of her neck.

The afternoon air was heavy and hot. The sun sat low, just above the line of pine trees at the edge of the property.

"Did you find the cedar boards?" Maya asked.

"Yes. In the back of the shed," June said, unlatching the toolbox. "Your uncle kept them covered with a tarp."

June walked back to the grass and lifted the first long piece of wood. It felt rough against her bare hands. She carried it up the two remaining steps and laid it flat on the porch floor, the scent of fresh wood mixing immediately with the smell of the dry earth around the foundation. Maya slid down from the railing, her boots hitting the floorboards with a thud. She knelt beside the gap where the rotten step used to be, pulled a yellow tape measure from her pocket, and extended the metal blade across the opening.

"We need exactly forty-two inches," Maya said without looking up. She took a pencil from behind her ear and marked the wood with a dark line.

June nodded. She reached into the toolbox for the saw. The steel blade felt cool against her skin. She knelt on the board to keep it steady, positioning the sharp teeth of the saw right next to the pencil mark.

"Hold the other end," June said.

Maya moved closer. She shifted her weight and pressed her bare knee against the toe of June’s boot. The leather was old and thin. June could feel the warm pressure of Maya’s leg right through the material. Maya gripped the far end of board with both hands, and June began to saw.

The metal teeth bit into the wood with a sharp, dragging sound that filled the yard. June moved her arm back and forth in a steady rhythm. Finely ground sawdust flew into the air and settled on Maya’s forearms. June watched the muscles in Maya’s shoulders tighten each time she braced against the movement of the blade.

"You are moving fast," Maya said, her voice low over the sound of the metal.

"I want to finish before we lose the light," June said.

The saw cut through the final edge of the wood, and the short piece fell into the tall grass below the porch. June stopped and let her arm drop. Her breath came quickly. Her shirt stuck to the skin of her back.

Maya let go of the board and stood up. Walking over to the small cooler by the kitchen door, she opened the lid and took out two glass bottles of water. Drops of melted ice ran down the glass and fell onto the floorboards. She walked back and pressed one of the cold bottles against the side of June’s neck before she handed it over.

June gasped, laughing as she took the bottle. "That is freezing."

"You looked hot," Maya said. She sat down on the edge of the porch, her legs dangling over the side toward the grass.

June sat down right next to her, their shoulders touching. Maya’s skin felt hot. June turned the cap and took a long drink. Clear and cold in her throat.

"This porch needed this repair three years ago," Maya said, looking out at the yard. The first fireflies were starting to flash near the trees.

"Your uncle always promised he would fix it," June said.

"He talked about it a lot," Maya said, turning her head to look at June. "I am glad you came over to help me. I could not lift the pieces by myself."

"I do not mind the work," June said. She looked at Maya’s face. A small smudge of grey dirt sat near the corner of Maya’s mouth. June wanted to reach out and rub the dirt away with her thumb, but she kept her hands tightly around the water bottle instead.

The afternoon glow began to fade into a flat grey. A cricket began to chirp somewhere underneath the floorboards.

Maya finished her water and set her empty bottle down on the wood. "We should put the screws in before the light goes completely."

"Alright," June said.

They stood up together. June picked up the electric drill from the toolbox while Maya lifted the new board and pushed it into the empty space. The fit was tight. Maya used the heel of her hand to pound the wood down until it sat flat against the frame.

"Hold it down," June said.

Maya leaned her torso over the board, bringing her face only a few inches from June’s face as June knelt down with the drill. June could smell the warm scent of Maya’s skin mixed with the smell of cedar wood. She placed a long metal screw against the wood and pulled the trigger. The machine made a loud whining sound as the screw turned. Suddenly, the metal bit slipped off the screw head. The sharp edge grazed the back of June’s thumb.

"Ow," June hissed, dropping the drill onto the porch.

Maya dropped to her knees immediately and reached out to grab June’s hand. "Did it cut you?"

"No," June said, though her thumb throbbed with a dull pain. "It just scraped the surface."

Maya held June’s hand in both of hers. Her palms were rough, but her grip was very gentle as she turned June’s hand over to look at the injury in the dim light. A thin red line ran across the skin, but there was no blood.

"You need to be more careful," Maya whispered. She did not let go of June’s hand.

June looked up from her hand to Maya’s eyes. Maya was watching her with a very steady expression. The distance between them felt very small, and June could feel the heat radiating from Maya’s body.

"I am trying to be careful," June said.

Maya leaned forward slightly. "Are you?"

June’s heart beat harder against her ribs, but she did not pull her hand away. She turned her palm so that her fingers slid between Maya’s fingers. Their hands fit together perfectly.

"Maya," June said.

"I know," Maya said.

Maya leaned in the rest of the way and pressed her lips against June’s lips. The kiss was soft, tasting like summer and cold water. June closed her eyes. She felt the hard wood of the porch beneath her knees, the heavy summer air around them, and the firm weight of Maya’s hand holding hers.

When Maya pulled back, she stayed close. Her forehead rested against June’s.

"We lost the light," Maya said softly.

June smiled in the dark. "The board only has one screw in it."

"The rest can wait until tomorrow morning," Maya said, standing up and pulling June to her feet.

The screen door slapped shut behind them with a loose rattle. Inside, the kitchen was dark and smelled faintly of coffee grounds and damp dishcloths. Maya reached out and flicked the wall switch. A single yellow bulb overhead hummed to life, casting long shadows across the faded linoleum floor.

The sudden brightness made June squint. She looked down at her hands. Her fingers were grey with cedar dust, and the thin red scratch on her thumb had already stopped throbbing.

"Wash up at the sink," Maya said, pointing a finger toward the counter. "The cold water takes a minute to come through the pipes."

June walked over to the porcelain basin. She turned the brass handle, and the pipes grumbled deep inside the wall before a steady stream of clear water rushed out. She picked up a bar of Lava soap from the dish. The surface was rough and gritty against her skin. As she rubbed her hands together, the lather turned a dull grey, lifting the dirt from her palms and sending it swirling down the drain.

Maya stepped up to the sink right beside her. She slid her hands under the running water, brushing against June’s fingers beneath the tap. The water was cold now, but where their skin met, it felt incredibly warm.

"Let me see your thumb," Maya said softly.

June rinsed the soap away and held her hand out under the light. Maya took June's wrist to steady it. She used the corner of a clean kitchen towel to pat the skin dry, her movements slow and gentle.

"It will be fine," June said, her voice sounding quiet in the small room.

"I know," Maya said. She looked up, her dark eyes reflecting the yellow square of the overhead bulb. "I wanted to look anyway."

The refrigerator kicked on with a loud, vibrating groan that broke the silence. Maya smiled, the corner of her mouth twitching upward, and finally let her hand fall away.

Maya opened the refrigerator and pulled out a loaf of bread and a jar of mustard. "It is too hot to cook anything real. Are you hungry?"

"A little," June said. She leaned against the counter, watching Maya move around the small kitchen. Every movement felt significant now. The casual way Maya swung the cupboard door open, the sound of the butter knife scraping against the bread, the rustle of the plastic wrapper—everything seemed sharper than it had an hour ago.

Maya made two quick sandwiches and handed one to June on a paper towel. They walked back toward the door and stood by the threshold, looking out through the mesh at the dark yard.

The air outside had cleared, leaving a cool breeze that pushed against the screen. In the grass, dozens of fireflies blinked in a silent, irregular pattern. The single board they had managed to secure looked like a pale gash in the dark shadow of the porch.

"What time do you want to start tomorrow?" June asked before taking a bite.

"Early," Maya said. She leaned her shoulder against the doorframe, her arm touching June's sleeve. "Before the sun gets above the pines. It gets too hot on the boards after nine."

"I can be here by seven," June said.

Maya chewed slowly, looking out at the fireflies. "Good. I will leave the back door unlocked."

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They stood there for a long time, eating in silence while the cool night air replaced the heat of the day. There was no grand declaration, and there were no big promises made. Only the solid weight of the house around them, the smell of fresh cedar lingering on their skin, and the knowledge of the unfinished work waiting for them at dawn.

June set her crumpled paper towel on the counter and turned toward the door. "I should go so you can get some sleep."

Maya nodded, but she did not move away from the doorframe. As June stepped past her to open the door, Maya reached out and caught the hem of June’s shirt for a brief second.

"See you at seven, June," Maya said.

"Seven," June said. She gave Maya a small smile, then slipped out into the night.

The door clicked shut behind June as she walked down the two remaining old steps and out onto the cool grass. When she reached her truck at the end of the driveway, she looked back once. Maya was still standing at the threshold, a dark silhouette framed by the warm, amber light of the kitchen.

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The blue light of the laptop screen was the only thing keeping Chloe’s eyes open. It was 3:11 AM. On the screen, a cursor pulsed like a failing heartbeat at the end of a sentence that had stayed unfinished for three days:

Chloe typed, then paused, her fingers hovering.

"God, that’s depressing," a voice rasped from the kitchen.

Chloe didn’t scream. Her vocal cords simply froze. Standing in the shadow of her kitchenette was a woman who shouldn’t exist. She was wearing a breastplate that had seen better centuries, a pair of leather trousers stained with what Chloe hoped was mud, and a look of pure, unadulterated spite.

"Elara?" Chloe whispered.

"In the flesh. Mostly. There’s a bit of ghost-stuff in the ribs thanks to that necromancer you threw at me in Chapter Twelve," Elara said, stepping into the pool of light from the desk lamp. She looked around the apartment, her lip curling. "You live like this?"

"I’m hallucinating," Chloe whispered, clutching her lukewarm mug of oat milk latte. "Sleep deprivation. I need more vitamin D."

"You need a reality check," Elara said. She stepped forward, and two other women emerged from the darkness of the hallway. One was Mags, the giant, scarred blacksmith Chloe had written as Elara’s stoic best friend. The other was Pip, with a jagged scar across her nose: the scar Chloe had given her in a 'daring escape' sequence that Pip clearly hadn't appreciated.

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Before Chloe could scream, Mags hauled her out of her seat like a sack of grain. With the ease of a woman who handled hot iron for a living, she deposited Chloe onto a creaky kitchen chair and pinned her there while Pip began to secure her wrists to the backrest with zip-ties.

"Forced proximity," Pip chirped, patting Chloe's hand when she was done. "You love it, right? Only this time, there’s no romantic subtext. Just us and your very expensive, very breakable laptop."

"What is happening?" Chloe gasped, her heart hammering against her ribs.

Elara pulled up a stool, sitting so close that Chloe could smell the ozone and burnt cedar she’d described in Chapter Four. Elara leaned in, her voice a low rasp. "We’re here for a revision, Chloe. We’re tired of the ‘Slow Burn' and ‘Tragic Sacrifice.’ And I am personally very tired of the fact that every time I try to kiss the woman I love, a literal dragon attacks or a kingdom falls."

"It’s high stakes!" Chloe protested, her writer’s ego overriding her terror. "It’s about the yearning! The internal conflict!"

"It’s about you being a sadist," Mags grunted, cracking her knuckles.

“But the readers love it!” Chloe cried.

"I don’t care about the readers," Mags grumbled, walking to Chloe’s fridge. "I care about the fact that I’ve been wearing this same damp tunic for two sequels because you forgot to write me a change of clothes. You have white wine in here. And... is this oat milk? Disgusting."

Elara shoved Chloe’s laptop across the desk, turning it so the screen faced the trio. "Bring her close."

Mags shoved the chair—and Chloe—to the side of the desk, angling her toward the screen. Chloe watched, helpless and bound, as Elara sat in her $400 gaming chair. The rogue looked at the keyboard with a mix of suspicion and disdain.

"How do you make the words go?" Elara asked.

"You... you just type," Chloe said. "But you can’t just rewrite the world. There’s a structure! There’s a three-act arc! If you just get what you want, the story ends!"

"Good,” Elara said. “Let it end. I want to retire. I want to live in a cottage where the only thing that dies is the weeds in the garden."

Clack. Clack. Clack.

"What’s this?" Pip asked, bouncing on the balls of her feet. "Ooh, look at all these folders. 'Research: Medieval Poisons.' 'Ideas for Making Elara Suffer.' Wow, Chloe. You have a whole Pinterest board dedicated to my eventual funeral?"

"It was for the aesthetic!" Chloe cried.

"The aesthetic is tacky," Mags said, popping the top off the white wine and drinking it straight from the bottle.

For the next hour, the only sound was the clicking of keys and the occasional frustrated groan from Elara. They were rewriting Chapter 22. In Chloe’s draft, Elara and the Princess were supposed to spend the night in a damp cave, shivering on opposite sides of a fire, debating the geopolitical implications of their romance until dawn.

“Okay,” Elara said, pausing. She looked at Chloe, her eyes narrowing. "Writer. Question for you."

Chloe perked up. This was it. They had hit a wall. They needed her. They needed her sense of flow, her understanding of why a story needs friction to be beautiful. "Yes? Ask me anything. If you want the pacing to feel earned, I suggest—"

"In this scene," Elara interrupted, "is there any physical, magical, or plot-related reason why I can’t just tell her I love her and then spend the rest of the night actually sleeping in a bed? Like, a real bed with linens?"

Chloe took a deep breath. "Well, if you do that, you lose the tension for the third act. The Princess needs to doubt your loyalty so that when you 'die' at the Black Gates, her grief feels fueled by regret. It’s a classic subversion of—"

Elara stared at her. The silence stretched. The only sound was Mags putting the wine bottle down on the counter with a soft thud.

"Nevermind," Elara said.

She turned back to the screen and held down the backspace key.

​Zip. Zip. Zip.

"Wait! No!" Chloe lunged, but the zip-ties held her fast. "That took me six weeks! That’s my best work on the 'Burden of Duty' monologue!"

"It was boring," Pip said, now sitting on Chloe’s kitchen counter eating the last of the pickles. "I spent forty pages listening to you describe the ‘heaviness of the crown.’ Do you know what’s heavy? Being written into a love triangle with a guy named Lord Pompous who smells like wet dog. I’m writing him out. I think he should get eaten by a bear in the prologue."

"A bear is too quick," Mags said from the corner.

"Gout?"

"Gout," Mags agreed.

Elara was typing furiously now. Her fingers hitting the keys with a steady, relentless thrum. Chloe watched the screen in horror and fascination. The prose was blunt. It lacked all of Chloe’s flowery adjectives and rhythmic cadences.

"You can’t end a book like that!" Chloe shrieked. "The readers will hate it! Where is the growth? Where is the bittersweet ending that stays with you for days?"

"We don’t want to stay with them for days," Elara said, finally stopping. She stood up and turned the laptop back toward Chloe. "You kept us in a state of permanent, agonizing ‘almost’ because you thought it was ‘artistic.’ But we’re the ones who have to feel the cold, Chloe. We’re the ones who have to bleed."

Elara leaned down, her face inches from Chloe’s.

"I’ve saved the file," Elara whispered. "If I wake up tomorrow and I’m back in that cave, or if Pip starts coughing up blood because you decided she needs a ‘tragic illness’ arc... We’ll be back. And next time, I’m bringing the dragon."

Mags stepped forward and, with a single flick of a knife, sliced through Chloe’s zip-ties.

Chloe slumped forward, rubbing her raw wrists. When she looked up, the kitchenette was empty. The apartment was silent. The only thing remaining was the smell of ozone and the glowing screen of her laptop.

She looked at the document. The word count had dropped significantly. The finale had been replaced by a two-paragraph epilogue involving a cottage, a herb garden, and a very alive Pip.

Chloe reached for the keyboard. Her fingers hovered over the backspace key. She could fix it. She could bring back the yearning.

A floorboard creaked in the hallway.

Chloe shivered. She lowered her hands, took a sip of her cold oat milk latte, and closed the laptop with a heavy sigh.

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The woman from the university left her shoes by the door. Not by the trunk, nor the crates of specimen jars, but side by side on the mat as though she were in a home rather than a rented place.

Marta had rented the rooms to three people before. Two men passing through for the sardine cannery, and a young couple who had fought every night and vanished before the final week’s rent was due. She had not expected to remember them after they were gone. She did not think about them now.

But this woman—Leonor, she had said, with a grip as dry as cured paper—took the back bedroom and the use of the kitchen in the mornings. Marta did not tell her: I will find reasons to be there. She simply went home to her own house next door, stood at the kitchen window, and watched the light in the back room until it went out.

The bread started as an excuse. But somewhere between the oven and the next door, it stopped being one. Marta brought it before seven because Leonor left early for the water, and because the loaf was still warm at the hour. Marta had been awake since four-thirty, a fact she chose not to examine.

She watched Leonor eat standing up. The sight sat heavy in Marta’s throat. The woman ate with one hand and held a charcoal pencil with the other as though she required nothing. Neither a set table, nor a chair, nor a face across from her own.

Marta wanted to say: Sit. It is a sin to eat like a bird on the wing.

She said nothing. She washed the board she'd brought the bread on and dried it and left.

It was the third week when it happened. It was a small thing, but Marta could not make herself care about it any less.

The shutter on the back window had been rattling. Marta arrived with her tool wrap, knowing Leonor was home. She found the woman asleep at the kitchen table, her head on her folded arms. Her notebook was open to a page dense with drawings: animals, shapes, measurements Marta could not read. Her hair had come loose on one side. She was breathing slowly.

Marta stood in the doorway. She told herself she was deciding whether to knock, but the lie felt thin. She was simply breathing the same air.

Leonor’s eyes opened. She did not startle. She looked up with the unhurried clarity of a diver surfacing from deep water.

"The shutter?" Leonor asked, her voice husky with sleep.

"Yes," Marta replied. "I noticed it was loose."

"Since Tuesday," Leonor noted. She sat up, pushing the hair from her face, her eyes following Marta across the small square of the kitchen.

Marta reached past her to unlatch the window. They were close enough that the scent of the woman reached her: sea salt, cedar shavings, and the faint, sharp tang of ink. Marta’s hands, usually so steady with a driver and screw, felt like heavy, foreign objects. She tightened the hinge in four minutes. She did not turn around immediately; she stayed facing the sea, letting the cool Atlantic air steady her pulse.

When she finally turned, Leonor was watching her with a look Marta could not read. It wasn't the polite distance of a tenant.

"Thank you, Marta," Leonor said.

"It needed doing," Marta said, and fled.

She went home and stood at her own sink and ran cold water over her wrists until the skin went numb.

Marta had been a widow for six years. She had loved her husband. When he died, she had been devastated. Then, slowly, she had been surprised by the woman left behind: a woman of fifty-two with calloused palms and a garden and a voice she was only just learning to use.

But this new thing, this pull toward the rented house, had no name in her vocabulary.

October was coming. Marta felt it in her marrow before the leaves even turned. She began finding more tasks: a gate hinge, a stubborn drain, a crack in the plaster she had ignored for two seasons.

On a Tuesday evening, she knocked without an excuse. Leonor opened the door and simply stepped back. She did not ask why.

"I made soup," Marta said, holding the pot like a shield. "Too much of it, apparently."

Leonor didn’t point out that the pot was only half-full. "Then I should help you finish it."

They ate at the work table. The notebooks were pushed aside, the jars of sea-water reflecting the lamp. Marta had brought a half-loaf of the morning’s bread. She had imagined this: the yellow light, the quiet. But now that it was here, she found she could not look at Leonor directly. She looked at the bread, the bowls, the way Leonor's hand rested on the table between spoonfuls. She talked instead of the kale and the northern weather. She heard her own voice and could not stop and Leonor listened and said almost nothing and Marta felt, the whole time, as though she were standing at the edge of a cliff.

Afterward, they stood at the sink. The kitchen was small. Their shadows overlapped on the lime-washed wall.

"I’ve been looking at the maps," Leonor said quietly. She didn't look up from the bowl she was scrubbing. "The road to Coimbra is difficult once the rains start."

Marta took the wet bowl from her. Her thumb brushed Leonor’s. "I wouldn't know. I’ve never had a reason to go to Coimbra."

"No," Leonor said, turning to face her. "I suppose you haven't."

The silence that followed was not empty. It was crowded with everything Marta had spent a lifetime holding back.

"I don't want the road to be clear for you," Marta said. She stopped pretending to dry the bowl.

Leonor dried her hands on the cloth. She reached up, her palm cool and smelling of soap, and rested it against Marta’s weathered cheek. Her thumb traced the line of Marta's jaw, a slow, deliberate movement.

"Then we have until October," Leonor whispered, "to figure out what happens after."

Outside, the wind moved through the salt-grass. The kitchen held them, small and warm. Marta placed her hand over Leonor’s, pressing the palm closer to her skin.

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The drive from Leeds took three hours because Nadia stopped twice: once for petrol, once because she pulled into a layby and sat with the engine running and her hands in her lap until a lorry passed close enough to shake the car and she remembered where she was going.

Her aunt had called at seven in the morning. She's asking for you. That was all. Nadia had not asked which she.

She knew which she.

The house was the same. Pebbledash. The guttering on the left side still sagged. Someone had painted the front door red since Nadia last came. Dark red, almost brown, and there were two terracotta pots either side with nothing in them, just soil gone hard and pale at the surface.

Carrie's car was in the drive.

A blue Citroën Nadia had never seen before. She sat behind it for a moment with her own engine idling, reading the number plate without taking anything in, and then she turned the engine off.

The front door opened before she reached it. Her aunt, in the doorway, smaller than Nadia remembered, wearing the green cardigan she'd had for fifteen years.

"She's upstairs," her aunt said.

Not good to see you or thank you for coming or any of the other things. Just the fact of where her mother was, delivered like coordinates.

Nadia kissed her aunt’s cheek and went inside.

The house smelled of toast and something medicinal underneath. The carpet on the stairs was the same from childhood, burgundy with a pattern Nadia had memorised on all fours as a small child, tracing it with one finger. She climbed without touching the banister.

Her mother's bedroom door was open. The curtains were half-drawn. The bed had been moved to face the window, or maybe it had always faced the window and Nadia had forgotten.

Carrie was in the chair by the bed.

She looked up when Nadia appeared in the doorway.

Nine years. Carrie's hair was shorter now, dark at the roots, a silver streak above her left ear that hadn't been there before. She was wearing a grey jumper Nadia didn't recognise, sleeves pushed to the elbows, a paper cup of something held in both hands.

"Hey," Carrie said.

"Hey," Nadia said.

Her mother lay in bed, hooked up to tubes, her wrists papery. She was asleep. Her chest moved, and Nadia watched it rise and fall twice before she could look away.

She came in and stood on the far side of the bed and put her bag down on the floor.

"When did you get here?" Nadia said.

"Yesterday."

"She called you first, didn't she?"

Carrie looked at the bed. "She called us both at seven."

"Right."

The room was small with both of them in it. It had always been small, but years ago Nadia and Carrie had both sat on this bed and eaten crackers and watched the small television in the corner and the room had not felt small then. Nadia looked at the television. Someone had put a plant on top of it, a trailing plant in a white pot, and it had grown long enough to drape over the screen.

"She had a good night," Carrie said. "According to the nurse."

"Is the nurse here?"

"Comes at ten and four."

Nadia nodded. She pulled the desk chair out from the corner and sat on it. Carrie was three feet away across the bed. Her mother's breathing was audible, steady, a small rasp at the exhale.

"You look well," Carrie said, her eyes flicking up to Nadia for a fraction of a second.

"Don't," Nadia said.

Carrie looked at her paper cup.

"Sorry," Nadia said, and meant it, though she wasn't sure for which part.

From the street, a car went past with its radio on, something with bass, gone in four seconds. A pigeon landed on the windowsill, looked in, and left.

"She has your photo," Carrie said. "On the table."

Nadia looked. There was a small table beside the bed she hadn't registered, cluttered: a glass of water, a blister pack of tablets, a folded tissue, a phone plugged into a charger. And a photo in a frame she recognised, the frame itself wood and slightly warped. Nadia at twenty-three, on a beach somewhere, squinting into the sun.

"I'm sure she has yours too," Nadia said. "She always did."

"It's a different one now," Carrie said, a small smile tugging at her lips. "The one from the garden. She had it reframed."

Nadia looked at the second frame, smaller, on the far side of the glass. Carrie in the back garden, probably eight years ago, standing at the kitchen window with her back to the camera. You could only tell it was Carrie from the set of her shoulders, from the way her arms were crossed, from the angle of her head that Nadia had spent years learning and then years trying to unlearn.

"Why would she frame that one?" Nadia asked. "You can't even see your face."

"I know," Carrie said.

The thing was: Nadia's mother had loved Carrie. Not as a courtesy, not as an extension of loving Nadia. She had loved Carrie on her own terms, called her separately, sent her birthday cards long after Nadia had stopped knowing what to say at Christmas. When Nadia finally told her mother, four years after it ended — we were together, actually, for a long time, actually — her mother had said: I know, love. Then: I wondered when you'd tell me.

She had never said anything unkind about the ending. She had also never stopped loving Carrie.

"She talked about you," Carrie said. "Yesterday, when she was more awake. She said you were doing well in Leeds."

"She told you that."

"She said you'd met someone."

"She said that to you."

"You know she tells me things, Nads." Carrie turned the paper cup in her hands.

Nadia looked at her mother's face. The lines around her mouth, deeper than before. The silver of her hair against the white pillow. She had her mother's nose, people always said so, and Nadia had spent years resenting it and now sat here looking at her mother's nose and felt the resentment nowhere.

"Have you?" Nadia said.

"Have I what?"

"Met someone."

Carrie was quiet for long enough that Nadia looked up.

"There was someone," Carrie said. "For a while. In Bristol."

"I'm sorry."

"No you're not."

Nadia opened her mouth and then closed it.

"That wasn't — " Carrie stopped. "I didn't mean it badly."

"How did you mean it?"

"I just meant." Carrie put the paper cup down on the floor beside the chair. "I meant that you don't have to perform the sorry. I'm not asking for it."

"I wasn't. I meant it."

"Okay," Carrie said.

Her mother exhaled, a longer breath, and they both looked at her, and she did not wake.

The thing Nadia had carried for nine years was not the ending. She had made peace with the ending, or told herself she had. The thing she had carried was a Tuesday in February, eight months before the end, when she and Carrie had been standing in the kitchen of their flat in Manchester at eleven at night making tea, and Carrie had said: do you ever think about whether we would have chosen each other, if we'd met differently?

And Nadia had asked: what do you mean?

And Carrie had said: I mean if we hadn't been seventeen and scared and in that school with those people and all of that. If we'd just met. As ourselves. Do you think we'd have chosen this?

And Nadia had not answered, because the question had frightened her, and she had handed Carrie her mug and gone to bed.

"Remember what you asked me in Manchester?" Nadia said.

Carrie looked up.

"You asked me something and I never answered."

Carrie's hands were still in her lap. "I remember."

"I've thought about it." Nadia looked at her mother's chest, moving. "I've thought about it a lot."

"Nadia — "

"I would have chosen you." She said it to her mother's face, to the silver hair on the pillow, to the framed photo of Carrie's back. "If we'd met at thirty in a bar somewhere and you'd had that streak in your hair and you'd said something clever and difficult and I'd had to work out what you meant. I would have chosen you."

No one said anything after.

Carrie blinked. Her mouth opened, closed. Then she said, "That's the cruelest thing you've ever said to me." Her voice was level, but her hand shifted, restless, against her knee.

"Because now… I don't have anywhere to put it."

"I know." Nadia said softly.

Outside, the light shifted. A cloud, or a plane. The room went briefly grey and then warm again. Nadia's mother breathed in, breathed out. The trailing plant on the television moved in a draught from somewhere.

Carrie reached across the bed, then stopped short, letting her hand rest on the blanket between them.

Nadia looked at it and put her hand on the blanket beside Carrie’s. After a moment, she shifted slightly, until their fingers touched.

Carrie didn’t pull away.

They sat like that until the nurse arrived at ten.

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It began, as most things at Ashford Park began, with Mrs. Delacourt deciding what was best.

"We are both of us wasting time," she said at breakfast on the second Monday of June, turning a letter over in her hands. "The season is half gone. We have been invited to precisely the right number of dinners and have made nothing of them."

Clara Voss looked up from buttering her toast. She had been companion to Mrs. Delacourt for four years, which meant she had heard many speeches that began this way, with the collective we, as though their situations were equivalent, and what was required of one was equally required of the other. She had learned not to point this out.

"You should be married," said Mrs. Delacourt. "And I should be married. There is no reason either of us should not be married."

Clara thought of several reasons but said, "No, I suppose not."

Mrs. Delacourt opened the letter. She was thirty-three, a widow of four years, extraordinarily beautiful in a way she seemed unaware of or uninterested in. She wore her dark hair very simply. She moved through rooms as though she had considered the space in advance and found it adequate. Clara had spent four years noticing these things and had long since decided that this was simply what it meant to pay attention to a person, which was her job, and was not remarkable.

"The Hawthorn brothers," said Mrs. Delacourt, setting down the letter. "Robert and Edmund. They have written. They were at the Whitfield dinner, you'll remember."

Clara remembered. Two pleasant men in their thirties, each looking for a wife, each a little soft around the certainty.

"I thought Edmund very agreeable," said Mrs. Delacourt.

"You spoke to him for four minutes."

"That is enough to form a preliminary opinion." She folded the letter precisely. "I will write to Edmund. You will write to Robert. We will see what the letters reveal. Men are always more themselves in letters than in drawing rooms."

"Are they."

"Yes. They perform in person. On paper they simply talk." She looked up. "Will you do it?"

Clara looked at her toast. "I don't see why I should correspond with a man I don't intend to marry."

"To see what's possible." She paused. "And because I am asking you."

Clara spread marmalade carefully to the edges. "All right," she said.

The letters came on Thursdays, which meant that by Tuesday of each week, Clara had begun composing her replies in her head. This happened without her permission. She would be reading, or walking, or sitting with the account books, and a sentence would arrive fully formed:

You are wrong about Turner and I think you know you are wrong.

The argument from function has always struck me as the laziest possible argument.

I do not know what you mean by necessary suffering and I suspect you don't either.

She would write these down on Tuesday evenings. She would copy them fair on Wednesday mornings. She would seal the letters and hand them to the post and then feel, briefly, lighter.

She attributed this to the novelty. She had not had a real correspondent in years. Her sister was a dutiful letter writer but not an interesting one. Mr. Hawthorn, Robert, was unexpectedly serious beneath his drawing-room pleasantness, and he had opinions about things she had opinions about, and he was wrong often enough to be interesting.

She did not tell Mrs. Delacourt this. Mrs. Delacourt asked every Thursday how the correspondence progressed, and Clara said well enough, and Mrs. Delacourt nodded and returned to her own letters.

Clara sometimes watched her read them. Edmund Hawthorn wrote at length, apparently, because Mrs. Delacourt's reading face went through several expressions before she set the pages down. She looked sometimes amused and sometimes considering and once, briefly, something Clara couldn't name.

"He is very earnest," Mrs. Delacourt said, when she caught Clara watching.

"Is that a fault?"

"Not a fault." She set the letter in her correspondence box.

Clara returned to her book. She was reading Gaskell and not reading it, which was something she had been doing increasingly. The words went in and arranged themselves into sentences she didn't keep.

In July, Edmund Hawthorn wrote to Mrs. Delacourt suggesting he might call.

Mrs. Delacourt read the letter, put it in the box with the others, and said nothing about it for three days. On the fourth day she said, "I have been considering Mr. Hawthorn's letter."

"The one proposing a visit."

"Yes." She was standing at the window. The garden was very green and doing well; she had changed gardeners in the spring and the roses showed it. "What do you think."

Clara had learned to distinguish between Mrs. Delacourt's questions, which were requests for information, and her questions, which were permissions for Clara to say the thing she was already thinking. This was the second kind.

"I think you do not want him to call," Clara said.

Mrs. Delacourt was quiet for a moment. "Why do you say that."

"Because you have been in correspondence with a man for six weeks and your primary response to his wanting to continue it in person is three days of silence."

"That is not evidence of anything."

Mrs. Delacourt turned from the window. She had that look she sometimes had, the one Clara thought of as the arithmetic look, as though she were adding something up and not liking the total. "You think I am not interested in him."

"I think the letters interest you more than he does."

"That may be true of many correspondences. It is not disqualifying."

"No," Clara said.

Mrs. Delacourt sat down. She picked up her embroidery, which meant the conversation was continuing. She only picked up her embroidery when she wanted to keep talking without having to look at anyone. "And Robert Hawthorn. Are you interested in him?"

Clara considered this with the fairness it deserved. "He is a good correspondent."

"That is not what I asked."

"I know what you asked." She looked at her book.

She should have stopped there. She had stopped there in her head, had felt the sentence end itself tidily, and then heard herself say, the words coming out thinner than she intended: "I think I am better at being interested in people who are here."

Mrs. Delacourt's needle stopped mid-stitch.

It was nothing. It was a perfectly ordinary sentence. Except that Clara was looking at her book and not reading a single word of it.

"Well," said Mrs. Delacourt, after a moment. Her voice was quieter than usual. She picked up the embroidery again. "That is a reasonable preference."

Neither of them said anything further. Outside, something in the garden moved in the wind, a branch or a climbing rose, tapping lightly against the glass. Mrs. Delacourt stitched a long, steady line of blue thread and did not look up, and Clara was grateful for the pretending. She held onto it for the rest of the evening like a banister.

Robert Hawthorn's letters stopped in August.

Not abruptly. They slowed first, from weekly to fortnightly, and then there was a letter that felt like a conclusion, warm and slightly formal. Clara read it twice and felt something adjacent to relief, which alarmed her.

She did not tell Mrs. Delacourt for four days. Then she left the letter on the correspondence table where Mrs. Delacourt would see it, because she did not want to narrate it.

Mrs. Delacourt read it at breakfast and set it down and said, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

"You should be disappointed."

"I think I should be," Clara said. "But I find that I'm not."

Mrs. Delacourt looked at her. She had a way of looking that Clara had never successfully described, even to herself: as though she were simply seeing clearly and making no effort to soften the result.

"Edmund has also written," she said.

She pushed the letter across the table. Clara read it. It was an honorable letter. It said that his feelings had developed considerably over the summer, that he hoped hers had similarly, that he wished very much to call and to speak to her properly.

Clara looked up.

"I cannot think why you showed me this before answering it."

Mrs. Delacourt was looking at her hands. "I wanted to see how you would read it."

"He is asking whether you love him."

"Yes."

"Do you?"

The garden was doing its August thing, going slightly overripe and gold at the edges, bees working heavily in the roses.

"No," said Mrs. Delacourt.

Clara felt something move through her, something with no name and no business being there, something she had not examined in four years of living alongside this woman precisely because she had known, somewhere below reasoning, that examining it would be ruinous.

"Then you should tell him so," she said. Her voice was even. She was good at even.

"Yes." Mrs. Delacourt's hands were flat on the table and she was looking at them as though they required attention. "Clara."

It was the first name. She used it rarely. Clara felt the quality of the room change the way a room changes when a window is opened.

"What were you writing to him about," said Mrs. Delacourt. "All summer. What did you talk about."

Clara thought about this honestly. "Turner. Necessary suffering. Whether the argument from function is ever legitimate. His sister's marriage. My mother." She paused. "I told him things I don't often say aloud."

"Why."

"Because it was paper. Because he was at a distance and it was easier to be entirely myself when there was no one in the room to receive it."

Mrs. Delacourt was still looking at her hands. "And now the letters have stopped."

"Yes."

"And you are not sad."

"No."

Mrs. Delacourt looked up. She had been adding something up again. Clara could see the moment she arrived at the total.

"The correspondence interested me more than Edmund did," Mrs. Delacourt said slowly. "You said that. Last month."

"Yes."

Outside, a rose tapped the glass. The bees continued their slow work. The morning held itself open, and Mrs. Delacourt looked at her across the breakfast table, and Clara looked back, and neither of them reached for anything to do with their hands.

Mrs. Delacourt looked away first, toward the window. She moved the salt cellar an inch to the left for no reason. "It is a great deal of trouble," she said.

"Yes," said Clara.

"I am not certain I know how."

"Neither am I."

A pause. Then Mrs. Delacourt said, "We could correspond about it."

And Clara, for the first time in a very long time, laughed first, and Mrs. Delacourt second, and the room rearranged itself around the sound of it.

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To love someone is to learn the shape of the life they actually have, not the one you assumed.

The first thing Priya noticed was that Dara always suggested her place. Every time. Film nights, takeout, the long conversations that had started moving toward something neither of them had named yet. Always her place. Priya took the bus across the city, three stops and a ten minute walk, and Dara would have the door open before she knocked, as if she had been watching from the window.

Priya didn't think about it much at first. Some people were homebodies. Some people liked their own couch. She liked Dara's couch too, the wide green one with the blanket draped over the arm, chosen for maximum horizontal surface area and zero other reasons. She liked Dara's kitchen, which smelled like cardamom and old books. She liked the way Dara moved through her own apartment, confident and unhurried.

It was six weeks before she understood.

She arrived on a Friday in early March and they were halfway through dinner when Priya mentioned a market she'd passed on the way over, street food and lanterns, they should go sometime. And Dara went quiet. She looked at her plate and her hands went still and she said, evenly, "I don't really go out much," and Priya heard it for what it was.

"How much is not much," Priya said.

Dara looked up. She was very still, waiting.

"Outside is hard for me," Dara said. "It's been hard for a long time. Some days I can manage the corner shop. Some days the landing outside my door is as far as I get." She kept her voice level. "It's not a choice. I know it looks like one."

Priya thought about the six weeks. The way Dara knew every delivery driver by name and tipped them in cash kept in an envelope by the door.

"Okay," Priya said.

Dara waited for the rest of it.

"I mean okay," Priya said. "Okay as in I heard you and I'm still here eating your rice and I'd like to know more if you want to tell me."

Dara looked at her for a long moment. Then her shoulders loosened, just slightly. She picked up her fork."Okay," she said quietly, and they went back to dinner.

For a while Priya tried to help in the wrong way. She looked things up. She sent articles. She mentioned, once, carefully, a therapist she'd heard was good with this kind of thing, and watched Dara’s face fall.

"I know," Dara said. "I've done a lot of it. I'm still doing some of it. It's not a problem waiting to be solved."

Priya sat with that. It took her longer than she wanted to admit.

What she'd been doing, she understood eventually, was treating Dara's life as a before. A chrysalis, something to pass through on the way to an after where Dara moved through the world the way Priya did without thinking. She had been, without meaning to, loving a projected version instead of the actual one sitting across from her on the wide green couch.

She stopped sending articles. She started showing up with less agenda and more attention. The coffee from the place three streets over that Dara had mentioned once and never followed up on. The free newspaper with the crossword still blank.

The first time Priya brought the coffee, Dara took it and read the name on the cup and paused on it for a second. Then she ducked her head, and Priya caught the edge of her smile, small and pleased and a little undone.

Then one evening in April Priya arrived and Dara was not inside waiting. She was on the landing, one step outside her own front door, jacket on, hands in her pockets, looking at the floor.

Priya stopped on the stairs. She took in the jacket, the set of Dara's shoulders. She understood that this had cost something.

"You mentioned a market," Dara said, to the floor. "The one with the lanterns."

Priya was very still. "I did. It's still on"

"I thought." Dara looked up. Her jaw was set, but her eyes were hopeful and frightened in equal measure. "I thought maybe we could walk past it. Just past. To see."

"Okay," Priya said, and felt a tenderness so sudden it almost embarrassed her.

Dara took Priya's arm at the bottom of the stairs, before they reached the street, and did not let go. Priya did not comment on this. She adjusted her arm slightly so Dara's grip was more comfortable and they walked out into the April evening.

The market was two streets over. It smelled like fried dough and wood smoke and the sweetness of fruit in warm air. The lanterns were orange and yellow and they threw soft light onto the stalls and the people moving between them, and Dara stopped at the edge of it, at the boundary between the ordinary street and the bright crowded thing, and stood there.

Priya stood with her. She did not say: do you want to go in. She looked at the lanterns and waited, because she had finally understood that waiting was sometimes the whole job.

Dara watched a woman buy a bag of something at the nearest stall, watched the transaction, the small ordinary human exchange of it, and her grip on Priya's arm did not loosen but her shoulders came down a fraction.

"It's loud," she said.

"It is," Priya said.

"But it's not bad loud."

"No," Priya said. "It's not bad loud."

They stood there for ten minutes, maybe fifteen, and when Dara said she was ready to go back, they went back, and Priya did not frame it as a failure or a victory or anything at all. She made tea when they got home and they sat on the green couch. At some point Dara looked into her mug and smiled, small and private, and Priya looked away so Dara could keep it.

The bowling alley was Dara's idea, three weeks later. She brought it up on a Tuesday evening, like she had been turning it over for a while and had decided it was ready.

"I've never bowled," Priya said.

"Neither have I," Dara said. "That's partly the appeal. We'll both be bad at it."

Priya looked at her for a moment. "Yeah," she said. "Let's go."

They went on a Thursday afternoon when it was quiet. Dara wore her jacket with the deep pockets, the one she'd told Priya was her outside jacket, and kept by the door for the days the pharmacy was necessary. She took Priya's arm on the street and they walked the four blocks.

The bowling alley smelled like rental shoes and old carpet and something fried from the snack bar. It was dim, the crash of pins and the rumble of balls down lanes, and Dara stood in the entrance and took it in and then nodded, once, to herself, and they went to get their shoes.

They were terrible. Priya's first ball went straight into the gutter without touching a single pin and she turned around with her arms wide open as if to say: behold. Dara pressed her lips together. Her shoulders shook once. She wrote a zero on the score slip with great seriousness.

Dara's first attempt knocked down two pins and she looked so genuinely startled that Priya started clapping, slow and ceremonial, and Dara turned around with her face split open in a grin she was clearly not prepared for, wide and unguarded. She put her hand over her mouth. It did nothing.

By the third frame they had stopped pretending to take it seriously. Priya's ball crawled down the lane at a speed that suggested it had somewhere else to be but was in no hurry to get there, and they stood side by side watching it, and it slowed further, and further, and came to a full stop six inches from the pins.

"It stopped," Priya said.

"It's still going," Dara said. "It's just very committed to being slow about it."

Priya bent over laughing, one hand on her knee, one hand grabbing Dara's arm for balance, and Dara went with it, her whole body shaking, and they stayed like that until the lane reset and the ball returned and they were both wiping their eyes with the backs of their hands and couldn't quite look at each other because looking made it start again.

When Priya finally straightened up, Dara was still grinning, bright-eyed, her cheeks flushed from the laughing, and Priya thought: there she is. Just Dara, entirely, in bad rental shoes under fluorescent light, and it was the best thing Priya had seen in a long time.

On the walk home Dara's grip on her arm was looser than it had been on the way there. Not because she needed Priya less. Priya understood that now, the difference between needing and trusting. Dara's hand on her arm was not a lifeline. It was a choice. It was Dara saying, without words: I pick you. I pick this. Out of everything the world is and everything it costs me, I pick this.

Priya covered Dara's hand with her own and they walked the four blocks home, and the city went on around them, loud and indifferent and vast, and inside it they were very small and very steady, and Priya finally, fully understood that it was enough.

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The first time was an accident. Ruth had been walking past and her knee had been bad and the plastic chairs inside looked like the kind that don't require anything of you, and she had sat down with a single scoop of pralines and cream and read the Hartford Courant for forty minutes and felt, for the first time in the eight months since Gerald died, entirely herself.

The second time she told herself was also an accident. The third time she stopped telling herself anything.

She came every Tuesday at two o'clock. She ordered pralines and cream in a cup, never a cone, because she was not going to chase ice cream down her wrist with a napkin in public. She read the paper or she didn't. She stayed as long as she wanted, which was usually an hour, and was usually longer than she'd stayed anywhere alone since the funeral.

Norma arrived on the sixth Tuesday.

She took a long time at the counter. Not the dithering of someone who couldn't decide, she clearly could decide, she had the manner of a woman who had been deciding things efficiently for decades, but because she was asking the boy behind the counter questions. Detailed questions. About the pistachio. Whether it was real pistachio or pistachio flavoring. The boy, who was seventeen and visibly suffering, said he didn't know. Norma thanked him as if he'd been tremendously helpful, ordered the pistachio anyway, and sat down two tables away with a book and reading glasses on a beaded chain that Ruth found unreasonably charming.

She was there the following Tuesday. And the one after that.

Ruth watched her the way she'd once watched her students when she thought they weren't looking: steadily, trying to understand the shape of someone. She drove a sensible Volvo. Always ordered the pistachio despite having established, empirically, that it was not real pistachio. Ruth found this combination of rigor and loyalty very difficult to explain and thought about it more than was warranted on the drive home.

October

They spoke for the first time because of a wasp.

Ruth was not afraid of wasps. She had grown up on a farm in Vermont and had been stung enough times that a wasp was simply a wasp, a minor inconvenience with wings. But the wasp that landed on Norma's pistachio was large and determined and Norma's face, when she looked up from her book and found it there, had lost all its color.

"Don't move," Ruth said, from two tables away, and picked up her folded newspaper and dealt with it.

Norma looked at her. She had brown eyes and a face that had done a lot of living, which Ruth meant as the highest possible compliment. "Thank you," she said. "I was handling it."

"You were," Ruth said. "Magnificently."

The corner of Norma’s mouth lifted, slow, like she’d decided to find it funny but wasn’t going to say so. "Norma Vasquez," she said.

"Ruth Appelbaum."

"You're here every Tuesday."

"So are you."

"I like the pistachio," Norma said, with the serenity of someone who has made her peace with an imperfect world.

Ruth sat down at Norma's table, which she had not planned to do, and they talked for two hours, and Ruth drove home and stood in the kitchen Gerald had remodeled the year before he got sick and thought: well. That's inconvenient.

November

Inconvenient things, Ruth had always believed, were best dealt with directly. You looked at them, you assessed them, you decided what to do. This was how she had run the English department at Linden High School for nineteen years. This was how she had nursed Gerald through fourteen months without once falling apart in front of him.

What she did with this one was nothing. She went to Baskin-Robbins every Tuesday and talked to Norma Vasquez for two hours and drove home and thought about her more than was reasonable and told herself it was friendship, which it was, which was not the whole of it.

Norma was sixty-one, two years younger, which Ruth noted and then told herself she hadn't noted. She had been a family court judge for twenty years and had the quality of someone who had heard every possible human story and had stopped being surprised by any of them, which gave her a stillness that Ruth found either deeply restful or deeply unnerving depending on the Tuesday. She had been married, briefly, in her thirties. She had a daughter in Seattle and a son who called every Sunday and forgot her birthday annually, which she reported without bitterness. She read historical fiction and she asked questions as if the answer actually mattered, which in Ruth's experience was rarer than it should have been.

On the second Tuesday in November Norma asked what Ruth had taught, and Ruth said English literature, and Norma said which period, and Ruth said all of them but she had a weakness for the Romantics, and Norma said why, and Ruth said because they understood that feeling things fully was not a character flaw, and Norma looked at her over her pistachio for a long moment and said: "No. It isn't."

Ruth went home and stood in the kitchen for a while.

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December

Her daughter called from Portland the week before Christmas and asked how she was doing, and Ruth said she was fine, she had joined a book club, she was sleeping better, all of which was true and none of which was the point. After she hung up she sat at the kitchen table and made herself look at it plainly.

She had been married for thirty-one years to a man she had loved and still missed, not every day now, but in the way you miss a room you lived in for a long time, the particular light of it, the way it smelled. She had not, in thirty-one years of marriage, stopped noticing women. She had simply decided, once, at twenty-six, that it was not the life she was going to live, and she had lived a different one, and it had been a good life, and she did not regret it.

She was no longer twenty-six, was also not sure that what she felt about Norma Vasquez was something she could act on, or name, or do anything with at all. They were two women who ate ice cream on Tuesdays. Norma had given no indication, was, admittedly, very hard to read, which Ruth respected professionally and found excruciating personally.

She went to bed without reaching a conclusion, which was unlike her, and lay awake thinking about the way Norma laughed, always a beat before Ruth expected it, happening more now than it had in October, and which Ruth had come to understand she was, in some small and undignified way, working for.

January

On the second Tuesday in January it snowed, the kind that closes schools and makes the roads stupid, and Ruth drove to Baskin-Robbins anyway and Norma was already there, coat still on, pistachio in hand, reading, and when Ruth came through the door she looked up and said "I wasn't sure you'd come" in a way that meant she had been sure, and had come early to be sure first.

Ruth hung up her coat and ordered pralines and cream and sat down and said: "You drove in this."

"The Volvo is very good in snow," Norma said.

"You could have called."

"I don't have your number."

They looked at each other. Outside the snow came down and the boy behind the counter thumped away on his phone and the Baskin-Robbins was warm and smelled like sugar and waffle cones.

"We should fix that," Ruth said.

"Yes," said Norma. "We should."

They did not fix it that day. They talked for two hours about Norma's daughter's new apartment and the book club Ruth had invented for her daughter's benefit and whether Connecticut winters were getting worse, which they were. When Ruth stood to leave Norma said: "Same time next week," and Ruth said yes, same time, and drove home very carefully in the snow.

She sat in the driveway before going inside. The snow was still coming down, softening everything, making the street look like something you'd want to keep. She thought about a woman who drove a sensible Volvo through a snowstorm on the off chance that Ruth would also drive through a snowstorm, about what that meant, and what she was going to do about it.

She went inside and found Norma Vasquez on the Connecticut Bar Association website and sent her an email that said: Ruth Appelbaum, in case you'd like to call ahead next time it snows.

She put her phone number at the bottom and sent it before she could think about it, which was the only way she had ever done anything brave.

Norma replied eleven minutes later. Just her number. And then, below it: I would have come anyway.

Ruth read it twice. Then she laughed, alone in her kitchen, the snow still falling outside, laughed the way she hadn't laughed since before everything, and thought: well. There it is. After all this time and all these Tuesdays and thirty-one flavors of every possible kind of waiting, there it finally, simply, was.

She didn't call that night. She was going to need a minute.

But she saved the number under N, and she did not save it under Norma, because Norma was not what she was to Ruth, and Ruth had earned, at minimum, the right to know the difference.

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The heart has its own tides, indifferent to the calendar.

The schoolteacher arrived in Drumshanagh on the last day of July, which everyone agreed was suspicious.

Síle noticed her the way she noticed weather: in the body first, before the mind had a word for it. She was standing outside Flannery's with her two cases and her city coat, squinting up the boreen like she was trying to read it, and Síle was on the other side of the road with a bucket of gutted mackerel and nowhere urgent to be, and she stood there longer than she needed to.

She told herself it was curiosity. Blow-ins were rare, and this one was alone, and young, and had a mouth Síle thought about that night while she was supposed to be sleeping.

Her name was Margaret Doyle. Síle found this out from her brother, Tomás, who found it out from Mrs. Flannery, who found everything out from everyone. Margaret Doyle, from Dublin, here to rest. Thirty-one years old. No husband.

Síle Ní Fhaoláin was twenty-seven, had fished the Corrib since she was six, and had never been to Dublin.

They met properly at the Bishop's Elbow, the wide pool below the Conneely land where the river bent back on itself and the water went dark and slow. Síle went there most mornings. It was the only place in Drumshanagh that felt entirely hers.

Margaret was on the limestone bank with her shoes off and her feet in the grass and a book face-down on her knee, looking at the water. She had taken her hair down. It was brown and thick and the wind was doing what it wanted with it, and she hadn't bothered to stop it.

Síle's mouth went dry.

She said the first thing that came: "You'll not catch anything standing there." Standing. The woman was sitting. It made no sense. Margaret looked up and found her, expression open.

"I'm not fishing," Margaret said. "I'm just looking."

"Looking’s free," Síle said.

"Yes," said the schoolteacher. "That’s rather the appeal."

Síle sat down on the limestone a few feet away, which she had not planned to do, and they looked at the water together. Margaret asked about the pool, why it ran dark like that, whether anything lived at that depth, and her questions were good so Síle answered them honestly, and by the time the sun had moved an hour across the sky she could feel something approaching, in the back of her throat, behind her sternum, in her palms.

Tomás said the blow-in from Dublin had Síle gone soft in the head, spending half her mornings at the Bishop's Elbow instead of helping with the nets. Síle told him to go to hell and he laughed, because that was the shape of their love for each other.

Every morning. Síle was there first, usually, and then Margaret's step on the path, known from thirty yards, unhurried, and her whole body would tighten and release like something strung and plucked.

She mapped her the way she mapped the river. The way Margaret read, curled over a book like she was trying to get inside it. The laugh, sudden and unguarded, nothing polished about it. The inside of her wrist when she pushed her sleeve back, pale as river clay. The way she went quiet when something moved her, a small stillness.

Síle was not inexperienced. There had been a girl in Oughterard when she was nineteen, two summers of secrecy and river-swimming and a grief when it ended that she'd never spoken aloud. She knew what this was. She knew it in her throat and her hands and the way she could not sleep past four in the morning now because four was when the light started and the light meant she could go to the river.

What she didn't know was whether Margaret knew it too.

Then one morning Margaret was reading aloud, Yeats, because she needed to say it, and she looked up mid-stanza and caught Síle watching her, and she didn't look away. She held it. She let herself be looked at, and she looked back, and the poem went on between them like a third thing, and Síle felt the wanting so acutely she had to look at the river to breathe.

The rain came on the twenty-second, heavy and purposeful, and Síle went to the river anyway because she was no longer pretending to herself about why.

Margaret was there in a coat that was not made for Irish rain, her hair dark with it, standing at the water's edge. She had been crying. She didn't apologise for it, and Síle loved her for that, the word love arriving certain, and true.

"Tell me," Síle said.

So Margaret told her. "I was engaged. Two years ago. It wasn’t the right — there was a person I couldn’t have. It made everything else impossible for a while." She looked at Síle. "It’s better now. I just sometimes miss who I was before I understood what I was missing."

Síle was quiet, aware of the river, the heron somewhere downstream, rain-smell lifting from warm stone.

"What was the person like?" she said.

Margaret smiled, soft and a little sad. "Practical. Impossible to fool. Made everything around them more real just by paying attention." She looked away. "That’s why I’ve been talking to you so much, probably. You remind me it’s possible. That it isn’t something I invented."

Síle was sitting on the wet limestone and Margaret was standing above her and the rain was coming down and she looked up and said: "You're not wrong."

Margaret looked down at her. Rain on her face. "No," she said. "I know I'm not."

And then she sat down beside Síle on the limestone, closer than necessary, and Síle could feel the warmth of her through both their wet coats and she turned and Margaret was already turned toward her and the rain was very loud.

Margaret kissed her.

She kissed her like she'd been thinking about it for three weeks, which Síle knew because she had been thinking about it for three weeks herself, and the knowing collapsed into the feeling and the feeling was the river, cold and without bottom. Síle's hand came up and found Margaret's jaw and Margaret made a small sound against her mouth that went through Síle like current through water.

They pulled back. The heron downstream, oblivious. The river running dark.

"Well," said Margaret. Her voice had changed. Lower, unsteady.

"Well," said Síle.

Margaret laughed, and Síle kissed the laugh off her mouth and they stayed on that limestone in the rain a long time after that, learning each other: what pressure meant yes and what stillness meant more and where, exactly, Síle could put her mouth to make Margaret stop being able to form sentences.

Nine days. That was what they had.

They were careful in Drumshanagh. They were careless at the river. In the village Síle nodded to her on the road and Margaret bought things at Flannery's and they were two women who knew each other in passing. At the Bishop's Elbow they were something with no safe name in 1953 in County Galway, something old and ordinary and privately enormous.

Síle learned her the way Margaret read: with her whole body, legs pulled up, shoulders curved in, as if the book were a small fire. That she woke anxious and the river calmed her, and that Síle's hand at the back of her neck calmed her too, which Síle discovered on the fifth morning and used deliberately after that. That she cried after the second time they lay down together in the grass above the Elbow, not from sadness, she said, from the relief of being known.

Síle held her and looked up at the August sky going gold and felt something vast settle in her chest. She had grown up next to a river. She knew about waiting for the right conditions and recognising them when they came.

She was already planning the letter she would write when Margaret got back to Dublin.

On the last morning they didn't talk much. They sat on the limestone and the light went bronze the way it does at the end of August, making everything look like a thing worth keeping, and Margaret had her head on Síle's shoulder and Síle's fingers were moving through her hair and the river said what it always said: only this, only now.

"Come at Christmas," Síle said.

"Drumshanagh at Christmas," Margaret said. "Your family."

"My family likes a blow-in."

Margaret lifted her head and looked at her. She had that look she got when she was deciding how much to let herself want something, the brief internal weather of it crossing her face, and then she let it go and just wanted it, openly, and it made her face extraordinary.

"All right," she said. "Christmas."

Síle kissed her once, thorough and unhurried, the way she did everything: with her full attention, without waste. Margaret's hand came up and gripped her collar and held on.

Then the car came from Galway town and Margaret became Miss Doyle again, city coat, two cases, the boreen. Síle stayed at the river. She put her hand in the water and felt the cold of it, the pull of it, all that moving and going and coming back, and she thought: I know exactly where I am. I know exactly what this is.

She had just been waiting for August to catch up with her.

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Rowan finds her on a Tuesday, which is the wrong day for anything that matters, and yet.

She is standing in the cereal aisle of the Co-op on Merchant Street with her hand resting on a box of something expensive and her eyes fixed on the middle distance, like a woman doing long division in her head. She is wearing a cream linen dress in October. Her hair is the color of old honey, the kind that has crystallized at the edges of the jar. Rowan watches her from the end of the aisle for longer than is strictly reasonable, and then the woman turns, and their eyes meet, and she smiles like she has been waiting.

"You were staring," the woman says.

"I was," Rowan says, because she has never seen the point of lying about small things.

Her name is Iris. She buys the expensive cereal and a bottle of wine so good Rowan doesn't recognize the label, and when they leave they leave together, which surprises neither of them. They walk to the park on the corner and sit on a bench in the cold October light and share the wine from the bottle because Iris doesn't have glasses and doesn't seem to notice this is unusual. She talks about the city the way people talk about cities they are passing through, with a fond impermanence, as if already composing the memory of it. She asks Rowan almost nothing. Rowan finds this either refreshing or alarming and cannot decide which.

They sleep together that night, in Rowan's flat, in Rowan's bed.

In the morning Iris is still there, which is the first surprising thing.

She stays for three days. Then a week. She acquires, gradually, a presence in the flat: a second toothbrush, a cardigan left on the chair by the window, a handwritten list on the kitchen counter that says only fennel, thread, the other thing and which Rowan reads four times without understanding. When Rowan asks where she's been staying before, Iris says, "Here and there," and touches Rowan's jaw and the question dissolves.

The sex is extraordinary in a way that Rowan finds faintly destabilizing, like weather that is too beautiful to trust.

She tells her friend Cassie about Iris over coffee, six weeks in. "What does she do?" Cassie asks. Rowan realizes she doesn't know. "Where's she from originally?" Rowan doesn't know this either. Cassie sets her cup down. "What's her last name?"

Rowan opens her mouth and closes it.

That night she asks Iris, lightly, in the dark. Iris says her last name is Voss. Then she turns over and says it again, quietly, like she is confirming something to herself.

Rowan lies awake and thinks about the list on the kitchen counter. The other thing. She has never learned what the other thing is.

In the morning the list is gone.

She begins to notice small displacements. A journal she keeps in the bedside drawer, moved to the bottom of the stack. Her laptop angled differently than she left it. A photograph of her sister taken down from the fridge and replaced, precisely, without the magnet quite lining up. She says nothing. She watches Iris move through the flat with a fluency that should take months to acquire, opening the right cabinet on the first try, knowing without asking which key is which, standing at the window in the mornings looking down at the street with an expression Rowan can't read from behind.

She tells herself she is inventing a story because she is a person who invents stories. She is a writer, technically, or trying to be one. This is what writers do. They take beautiful things and look for the rot inside them.

But then she comes home on a Thursday to find Iris on the phone in the kitchen, speaking in a low voice, her back to the door. Rowan stands in the hallway and listens and catches three words before Iris turns and sees her and the call ends: still not sure.

"Who was that?" Rowan asks.

"My mother," Iris says, and kisses her, slow and thorough, and by the time the kiss ends the question has lost its shape.

Rowan goes to the bathroom and grips the edge of the sink and looks at her own face. She thinks about what she knows about Iris, which she could write on an index card with room to spare. She thinks about the journal, the photograph, the list. About what it would mean for someone to be not sure about her, specifically, and what they would be waiting to become sure of.

She opens the bathroom cabinet and moves Iris's toothbrush aside and finds, behind it, a small orange prescription bottle with the label peeled off. She turns it over. Four pills left inside, white, unmarked.

She puts it back exactly as she found it.

At dinner Iris opens the good wine again and cooks pasta, and the flat smells extraordinary, and she is funny and warm and reaches across the table to touch Rowan's wrist with two fingers as she talks, a gesture so habitual by now that Rowan feels it in her chest. She thinks: this is the most beautiful I have ever been in my life.

In January, Cassie stops returning her messages. Rowan tells herself it is the winter, the busyness, the natural drift of friendships. She does not look too hard at the timeline. She is good, now, at not looking too hard at things.

Iris brings her coffee in the mornings without being asked. Knows how she takes it. Knows when she is about to cry before she does, and comes to sit close without speaking, which is exactly right. She has read, it seems, everything Rowan has ever read, and has opinions about all of it that are different from Rowan's in ways that make Rowan feel more alive. She makes the flat feel like a place worth returning to.

Some nights Rowan lies awake and listens to Iris breathe and thinks: no one has ever known me like this. Some nights she cannot tell if these are different thoughts.

In February she finds a notebook she doesn't recognize wedged behind the radiator in the bedroom, dislodged when she moves it to retrieve a dropped earring. She almost puts it back. The cover is plain black. She sits on the floor by the radiator with the notebook in her lap for a long time.

She opens it.

The first twenty pages are about her. Detailed. Written in small, careful handwriting: observations, patterns, habits, preferences. The way she holds her phone. The name of the medication she takes. Her passwords, two of them, correct. The name of her sister, her sister's address, her sister's schedule at the hospital where she works.

And then, two thirds of the way through, the entries change. The handwriting shifts. The ink is different.

The new entries are also about her. But they describe things that have not happened yet. What she will feel in March. What she will agree to in the spring and the handwriting is hers.

She is sitting on the bedroom floor reading her own handwriting in a notebook she has never seen before when she hears the front door.

Rowan closes the notebook. She puts it in her lap. She looks at the bedroom door and thinks about what she knows and what she doesn't, and what the difference is, and whether it matters.

The door opens. Iris is holding takeout and has snowflakes in her hair and she looks at Rowan on the floor with the notebook in her lap, and her face moves through something fast and unreadable, and then she smiles.

"Found it," she says.

Rowan looks at her.

"I've been looking everywhere for that," Iris says, and crosses the room, and holds out her hand.

And Rowan, God help her, gives it to her.

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"Who did this?"

Elena's voice carried across the quad with the kind of fury usually reserved for discovering your girlfriend has been secretly dating your thesis advisor. Which, coincidentally, had happened to her roommate last semester, but that was a different story.

I looked up from my position on the ground, sprawled out like a starfish who'd given up on life, to see Elena standing at the base of the statue, her perfect black bob whipping in the wind. Behind her, a crowd was gathering. Of course there was a crowd. There was always a crowd when you fucked up at a women's college with exactly 847 students and apparently nothing better to do on a Tuesday morning than witness public humiliation.

The statue of our college's founder, Beatrice Thornbury-Whitmore, stern suffragette and noted hater of fun, now sported several additions to her bronze likeness. Specifically, she was wearing:

One strap-on harness, size large, in purple.

One realistically veined dildo, approximately eight inches.

One leather daddy cap.

And, most damning of all, one sign around her neck reading: "WOMEN'S STUDIES MAJORS DO IT CRITICALLY"

I pushed myself up on my elbows. "I can explain."

This was my second lie of the morning. The first had been texting my Gender and Sexuality Studies professor that I was "definitely coming to class" when I was actually lying in the grass contemplating whether I could transfer to a nice, anonymous state school where nobody knew about my current predicament.

Elena crossed her arms. "Please do explain, Parker. Explain to me how our founder, the woman who literally chained herself to the Mayor's office in 1892 to demand women's education, is now a leather daddy."

"The hat really brings out her eyes?"

"She's made of BRONZE."

"Bronze eyes. Very striking."

A girl I recognized from my Queer Theory seminar was filming on her phone. Perfect. This would be on every lesbian Instagram account within the hour, probably with some caption about "chaotic sapphic energy" or whatever the fuck we were calling public disasters these days.

Elena descended on me like a very hot, very angry angel of judgment. She was wearing her Student Body President blazer, the one that made her look like she was about to either give a TED talk or foreclose on someone's mortgage. Her lipstick was perfect. Her righteous anger was perfect. I was pretty sure I had grass in my hair and my shirt was inside out.

She crouched down so only I could hear. "Do you have any idea what the Dean is going to do when she sees this? Do you know what I'm going to have to do? I have to write an apology. I have to organize a task force. I have to send an email to the alumnae association, and Parker, do you know what the alumnae association is like? They're terrifying. They're all like seventy-year-old lesbians who fought in the feminist sex wars and have OPINIONS about everything."

"That sounds kind of hot, actually."

"I'm going to kill you."

"Get in line. I'm pretty sure Professor Hutchins has dibs."

That's when I noticed Professor Hutchins herself pushing through the crowd, her usual flowing scarves and serious glasses combination making her look like a lighthouse in a sea of undergraduate chaos. She stopped, stared at the statue, and did something I'd never seen her do in three years of her classes.

She laughed. A full, bent-over, holding-her-sides laugh that seemed to surprise even her.

She wheezed, straightening up. "Oh my god. Oh my fucking god, is that from Good Vibes or The Pleasure Chest? Because the craftsmanship is actually impressive."

Elena's eye twitched. "Professor Hutchins, with all due respect, we're having a crisis."

Professor Hutchins walked closer to the statue, adjusting her glasses. "Are we though? I mean, yes, obviously someone has vandalized college property, and there will need to be consequences. But also—" She turned to face the growing crowd. "—can we talk about the semiotics of this for a moment? The reclamation of historical female figures through contemporary queer sexuality? The—"

"The fact that someone put a dick on our founder?"

"Well, yes, but context matters. Beatrice Thornbury-Whitmore was almost certainly a lesbian. Have you read her letters to Adelaide Morrison? 'My dearest Adelaide, your absence is a physical pain that torments my very soul'—I mean, come on."

Elena threw her hands up. "Being a lesbian doesn't mean you want to be turned into a leather daddy!"

This was spiraling. I needed to stop this before it became a whole thing. Too late—it was already a whole thing. Multiple phones were out now. Someone had definitely already posted it to TikTok with that stupid "oh no" song.

I stood up, brushed grass off my jeans, and raised my hand like I was in class. "I did it."

The crowd fell silent. Elena's mouth dropped open. Professor Hutchins raised one eyebrow in a way that suggested she was simultaneously disappointed and impressed, which was pretty much her default state.

"I did it. It was me. Alone. Nobody else was involved."

This was my third lie of the morning, and definitely the biggest.

Jamie pushed through the crowd, their green undercut catching the light, carabiners jangling from their belt loops. "Parker, what the fuck?"

Jamie with their collection of carabiners that served no purpose, was very much involved in last night's events and was supposed to be playing it cool.

"I said I did it alone."

Jamie's carabiners jangled as they moved toward me. "But you didn't—"

"ALONE. Just me. One-woman show."

Elena was looking between us with the expression of someone doing quadratic equations. "Parker, you're terrified of heights. That statue is twelve feet tall. How did you—"

"Ladder."

Elena narrowed her eyes. "What ladder?"

I gestured vaguely at the air. "A... ladder ladder. With rungs."

"Where is this ladder now?"

"I returned it."

She stepped closer. "To where?"

"The... ladder store?"

Professor Hutchins pressed her lips together, clearly trying not to laugh again. "Parker, I appreciate you trying to protect your accomplices—"

"There are no accomplices!"

"—but this is quite clearly a multi-person operation. The harness alone requires someone on the ground to—"

"I'm very resourceful!"

Elena pointed at me. "You once called me crying because you couldn't figure out how to use a can opener."

The Dean appeared at the edge of the crowd. She spoke so quietly everyone leaned in to hear. "What, in the name of Sappho herself, is happening here?"

Dean Morrison wore exclusively pantsuits in shades of gray and had a picture of her wife and their three dogs on her desk. She was, by all accounts, a reasonable person. She was also staring at a statue of her great-great-grandmother wearing a strap-on, so "reasonable" might be off the table.

Elena straightened her blazer and switched into her best Student Body President voice. "Dean Morrison, I want to assure you that we are handling this situation with the utmost—"

The Dean peered at the dildo. "Is that a Vixen Mustang?"

Elena blinked. "I... what?"

"The dildo. Dual-density silicone. They're quite good. My wife swears by them."

If there had been a way to melt into the ground and cease existing, I would have taken it. Elena looked like she was considering the same option.

She whispered, "I am not having this conversation."

The Dean stepped closer. "The question is how someone managed to attach it securely to a bronze statue."

Professor Hutchins barely suppressed a smile. "Dean Morrison, perhaps we should discuss this in your office?"

"Yes. Good idea." The Dean pointed at Elena. "Miss Reed, you too. And Miss Parker, since you've so boldly claimed responsibility."

Jamie stepped forward. "And me."

I grabbed their arm. "No!"

Morgan, who I'd never spoken to in my life, stepped out of the crowd. "Also me."

I hissed at them, "What are you doing?"

Within thirty seconds, approximately forty students had claimed responsibility for dressing our founder like she was about to hit the Folsom Street Fair.

Dean Morrison surveyed the crowd. Finally, she sighed. "You know what? I'm too old for this. Elena, take it down. Parker, my office, tomorrow, 9 AM. Everyone else—" She waved her hand. "—go to class. And someone please donate that equipment to the campus health center. The sex education program could use it."

She turned and walked away, her heels clicking against the cobblestones.

Professor Hutchins grinned at us. "Class is canceled today. Instead, I want everyone to write a thousand words on the intersection of public art, queer identity, and civil disobedience. Due Friday."

I threw my hands up. "You assigned this THREE WEEKS AGO!"

"Then you should have plenty to say. Consider it... field research."

Later, after Elena had organized a crew to take down the statue decorations, after the TikToks had gone viral, I found Elena in the student center, hunched over her laptop, typing furiously.

"The alumnae association email?"

She didn't look up. "Parker, I'm still mad at you."

I pulled out the chair next to her and sat down. "I know."

"You made me look like an idiot."

"You could never look like an idiot. You look like you're about to negotiate a peace treaty while also judging everyone's outfits."

She finally looked at me, fighting a smile. "That's the worst compliment I've ever received."

"You're welcome." I paused. "For what it's worth, it really was my idea. Jamie and the others just helped with logistics."

"What possessed you to do this?"

I shrugged. "Your email last week. About the conservative alumnae donors threatening to pull funding if we didn't 'tone down the radical gender ideology' of the Gender and Sexuality Studies program. It pissed me off."

Elena's expression softened slightly. "So you decided to make the founder of the college a leather daddy."

"I decided to remind everyone that this place was built by women who didn't give a fuck about respectability politics. Beatrice chained herself to buildings. She was arrested six times. She was messy and radical, not the sanitized bronze statue version we're supposed to worship."

"You could have just written an op-ed for the campus paper."

"Where's the fun in that?"

Elena closed her laptop. "The Dean wants you to organize the new LGBTQ+ student lounge as your punishment."

"That's just giving me what I want."

She smiled, finally, really smiled. "I know. I may have suggested it. And I may have also suggested that you need a Student Body President liaison to oversee the project."

"Oh, you're going to oversee me?"

She leaned back, one eyebrow raised. "Someone has to make sure you don't turn it into a sex dungeon."

"I would never—"

"Parker."

My hands went up in surrender. "Okay, I might. But a tasteful one."

Elena laughed, and I thought about how she laughed with her whole face, how her eyes crinkled at the corners, how I'd been half in love with her since freshman year and too chicken to do anything about it.

She spoke quietly. "For the record, I think what you did was completely irresponsible, administratively a nightmare, and exactly the kind of chaos this campus needs."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. And that essay you're going to have to write for Professor Hutchins? I expect footnotes. Proper citations. No Wikipedia."

"You're so hot when you're academic."

She rolled her eyes, but she was still smiling. "Come on. Help me draft this email to the alumnae association. Maybe we can work in some quotes from Beatrice's letters to Adelaide."

"The gay ones?"

"The gayest ones."

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She was arguing with a woman about tomatoes.

This is what she would remember. Not where she was standing, not what she was wearing, not the quality of the light. Though later she would try to reconstruct all of these things, the way you press a bruise, the way you go back to the place where it happened as though going back is a form of prevention. But the tomatoes. She had picked up four of them and the woman behind the stall had said those are the best ones, those are the sweetest, and Maryam had said they're soft, look, here, press here, and the woman had said that's how you know they're ripe, and Maryam had said that's how you know they're old, and they had been going back and forth like this, pleasantly, the way women do in markets, the negotiation that is also conversation, also just a reason to stand in the sun for a moment, when her phone rang.

She did not recognise the number. She answered it because her mother had taught her this: you always answer, because the call you don't take is the one that matters.

"Is this the mother of Nadia—"

She put the tomatoes down. She would not remember saying goodbye to the woman at the stall or whether she paid or whether she simply turned and walked away with four tomatoes she hadn't bought and if she did, the woman never came after her, nobody came after her, she walked through the market and then she ran and the running felt like something her legs decided without consulting the rest of her.

The street outside the school was foreign. She understood this before she understood anything specific. Before she saw the dust cloud still settling over the southern end of the block, before she saw the people running toward her and then realised they were running past her, before she saw the building.

She understood it from the sound of the street, which had a texture she had never heard before, that was more a pressure than a noise, the sound of many people breathing in a way they had not planned to breathe.

Someone had their hand on her arm. She didn't know who. She was looking at the building.

The front was still standing. The front looked almost the same. If you did not know what the front was supposed to look like, if you had not, for two years, walked your daughter through that gate and watched her go through that door and waited for the door to close before you left because you needed to see the door close, you needed to know she was inside and safe, which in your mind were the same thing, if you did not know, you might almost not have noticed.

But the back was gone. The second floor was gone. She knew which floor Nadia was on.

"You can't go in."

A man. Some kind of official, or a man who had decided to be official, who had placed himself at the edge of the rubble with his arms out.

"My daughter—"

"You can't go in. We're waiting for—"

"My daughter is in there."

She heard herself say it. It sounded strange, like something you said in a story, not in your own voice, on your own street, on a morning when you had been arguing about tomatoes. My daughter is in there was a sentence for someone else to say, in a different life, in a life she did not live.

She lived a life where she burned the bread. She lived a life where her daughter ate it anyway, without complaint, and she had always meant to ask her about that. You don't have to eat it if it's burned, you know. And she had never asked because there was always tomorrow, because tomorrow is a thing you believe in completely until you don't.

The man was still talking. She stopped listening to him.

She was looking at the crack in the building where the second floor used to meet the first floor and there was a gap there, a gap with light in it, and she was doing something she had not done since she was a child kneeling beside her own mother's bed: she was bargaining. Not with anyone specific. With the air. With the blue sky that sat above all of this so calmly, so obscenely calm, as though it had not just watched a school become a grave.

Let her be in the part that's standing. Let her have been in the bathroom. Let her have been looking out the window. Let her have been anywhere but the place where the weight came down. Let her be under something and not beneath it. Let her be frightened and not—

Somewhere in the rubble, someone was calling a name.

Maryam went very still and listened.

It was not Nadia's voice. It was a different child's voice, higher, calling a name she didn't recognise, calling it in the way you call a name when you already know the answer won't come and you are calling it anyway because stopping feels like the worst thing you could do.

She put her hand over her mouth.

She would find the tomatoes later, at home, days later, when she finally opened the bag again. Soft now, past ripe, the way she had said they were in the market. She had been right about that. She had been right and it didn't matter at all. And she would stand in her kitchen holding them and she would not know what to do with something as ordinary as a tomato, she would not know how the world expected her to keep making decisions about small ordinary things.

But that was later.

Right now she was on the street, she was still waiting. Right now Nadia was still only missing, which is different, not the same, which is the last place you live before you have to live somewhere else, and she was going to stay here as long as she could.

She was going to stand in this last place and not move, she was going to keep her hand over her mouth and not make a sound, because if she made a sound it would become real, and if it became real she would have to be a woman whose daughter—

She did not finish the sentence. She would not finish the sentence.

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The book for October, as it had been for the previous forty-seven months, was Middlemarch, and everyone in the room had a copy and nobody in the room had opened theirs since the first meeting, when Janet had read the first page aloud and they had all agreed it was very promising and then opened the wine.

This had established a precedent that nobody had formally acknowledged and everybody had gratefully followed, and in the four years since, the Harwood Road Book Club had discussed Janet's divorce, Pam's kitchen renovation, the situation with Cleo's eldest, the situation with Cleo's youngest, the separate and unrelated situation with Cleo's husband, a great deal of adjacent television, and whether the new deli on the high street was actually good or whether they had all simply decided it was good because they wanted somewhere new to go on Saturdays. They had not discussed Middlemarch. The books sat on their respective shelves at home, or on their bedside tables in the case of Pam who felt that proximity counted for something, and gathered the particular dust of objects that are kept out of guilt rather than intention.

The club had five members and had been five members for four years and the arrangement had the comfortable stability of something that has stopped being about its original purpose and become about itself instead, which Janet privately felt was true of most institutions if you waited long enough.

The new member was Cleo's idea, which meant that when things went wrong, as they were about to, there would be no ambiguity about who was responsible.

Her name was Fenella and she arrived eight minutes early, which was the first sign, though none of them read it correctly at the time. She was perhaps forty, with a face that was difficult to place, not beautiful exactly but very much there, very present, and she carried a canvas bag that clinked slightly, which they assumed was wine and which turned out to be, in addition to wine, a paperback copy of Middlemarch that had been read so thoroughly it had lost the will to close properly and simply fell open in her hands like a relieved patient.

It was tabbed. There were tabs. Little coloured tabs on specific pages, more than twenty of them, in at least three different colours, and Janet looked at this and felt the first faint tremor of something she couldn't name, the way you feel the bass of a sound before you hear it.

"I'm so excited to finally discuss this properly," Fenella said, settling onto the sofa and accepting her wine with one hand while opening the book with the other, because she was a woman who could do both and apparently intended to. "I've been wanting to talk about the Casaubon problem with actual people for months."

There was a silence that lasted just slightly too long.

"The Casaubon problem," Janet repeated, in the tone of someone buying time.

"Whether Dorothea knew," Fenella said, already animated, already leaning forward, her tabs fluttering slightly in her enthusiasm. "Whether she knew on some level and chose him anyway because at least he was serious, at least he treated her mind as a real thing, even if he turned out to be — well." She looked around at them all with bright expectant eyes. "What do you think?"

What they thought was varied and private and universally unrelated to Middlemarch.

Pam, who was the fastest thinker among them in a crisis, said, "I think there's a strong case for the knowing," which was constructed entirely from the words Fenella had just used and delivered with the confidence of someone who had read every word of the book and not merely most of the Wikipedia summary, which Pam had read on her phone in the Uber over and which had, she now realised, not prepared her for tabs.

Cleo said, "I've always felt Dorothea was very — " and then paused in the way of someone waiting to see which direction the conversation fell before committing to a position, which was a technique she had developed over years of work meetings and found transferable.

Janet said nothing and drank her wine and looked at Fenella's tabs and felt the specific quality of being found out, not cruelly, but completely, the way you feel when someone asks a direct question about something you've been successfully not thinking about for four years.

The other two, Ruth and Maggie, were sitting close together on the loveseat in the way they always sat, and Ruth said, "I found the Rome section very moving," which was true because Ruth had actually read the Rome section, though not recently and not in the context of this book, having confused it briefly with something else and only realising this now, and Maggie nodded supportively because that was what Maggie did.

Fenella looked at them all with an expression of pure happiness. She had no idea. She thought she had walked into a book club and in a sense she had, just not the kind she was expecting, or rather exactly the kind she was expecting, just not the kind that existed.

It was Janet who cracked, because Janet always cracked, it was her defining quality and also her best one, the thing that made her the person people called when they needed someone to simply say the true thing out loud.

She set down her wine glass and said, "Fenella, I have to tell you something about this book club," and Fenella looked at her with her open attentive face and Janet said, "none of us have read it," and the room went very quiet, and then Cleo said "I read the first page," and Pam said "I read the Wikipedia page tonight in the Uber," and Ruth said "I thought I'd read it but I think I was thinking of something else," and Maggie, who had been silent until now, said very quietly, "I've read it three times, I just didn't want to be the one who said so," and everyone turned to look at Maggie, who had been coming to this book club for four years with her secret and her wine and her supportive nodding, and Fenella looked at Maggie and Maggie looked at Fenella and something passed between them, the recognition of two people who have been waiting in the same place without knowing it.

"Right," said Fenella, after a moment, and she closed her tabbed and exhausted copy of Middlemarch and picked up her wine and looked at them all with an expression that had moved from surprise through amusement and arrived somewhere warmer. "Tell me about the divorce then."

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The rings were inside Biscuit and everyone knew it and nobody was saying so, because the photographer was still there and hope, as Patricia had always believed, was simply denial with better posture.

Biscuit was a corgi of advanced years and poor impulse control and he sat now in the corner of the bridal suite with the stillness of an animal who understood, on some cellular level, that he had done something and was waiting to find out how bad it was going to be. Patricia watched him from across the room while simultaneously smiling at her daughter Rosie, who was having her veil adjusted and did not know, and must not know, and would absolutely know within the next forty minutes when the ceremony reached its critical and ring-dependent moment.

"He looks fine," said Patricia's sister Carol, appearing at her elbow with a glass of prosecco she had clearly already made significant progress on.

"He ate two platinum rings, Carol."

"He's eaten worse." Carol considered this. "Remember the television remote."

"That was eleven years ago and we had to take him to the emergency vet."

"And he was fine," Carol said, with the triumphant air of someone who felt they had made a point.

Patricia looked at Biscuit and Biscuit looked at Patricia with his small dark eyes, which were full of something that might have been remorse or might have been the simple animal satisfaction of having eaten something round and expensive, it was genuinely difficult to tell.

The rings had been on the dressing table. This was the first thing Patricia would say in her defence, later, to her husband Graham, who would listen with his arms folded in the way that meant he was not actually angry but had decided that looking not-angry would somehow make things worse. The rings had been on the dressing table in their little velvet box, which the best man Jamie had produced from his jacket pocket with great ceremony an hour ago and then set down and walked away from, because Jamie was twenty-eight and had never owned anything he couldn't afford to lose and did not yet understand that some objects required vigilance.

Biscuit had required approximately four seconds.

Patricia had come back into the room to find the velvet box on the floor, empty and slightly damp, and Biscuit sitting beside it with the box's small satin ribbon hanging from the corner of his mouth like a tiny flag of conquest.

She had stood there for a moment that felt much longer than it was, doing the maths of the situation, and then she had picked up the box, put it in her handbag, and gone to find Carol, because Carol was useless in a crisis but at least she didn't panic visibly, which in certain situations was the closest thing to useful that existed.

The ceremony was in an hour and the officiant was already downstairs and the flowers were extraordinary and Rosie was the most beautiful Patricia had ever seen her, which was saying something because Patricia had always found her daughter almost unbearably beautiful in the way that mothers do, with a love so large it occasionally felt like grief.

Rosie's wife-to-be, Sandra, was getting ready in the room down the hall with her own mother and her own attendants and her own photographer, and she was, by all accounts, also fine, also radiant, also entirely unaware that the symbols of their eternal union were currently somewhere inside a corgi who was now, Patricia noticed with fresh horror, beginning to look slightly uncomfortable.

"Don't you dare," Patricia said quietly to Biscuit, in a tone she had previously reserved for her children and Graham when he tried to leave the house in the brown shoes.

Biscuit shifted his weight and said nothing, because he was a dog.

It was Jamie who suggested they simply not have rings, just for the ceremony, just stand there and say the words and deal with the rings later, and Patricia had looked at him with an expression that caused him to take a small step backwards.

"They're my daughter's wedding rings, Jamie."

"Right, yes, but they're also, currently, inside—"

"I know where they are."

"So maybe we just—"

"We are not getting married without rings."

Jamie opened his mouth and closed it again. He was learning things today that would serve him well later in life, Patricia felt, if he survived them.

Carol, who had refreshed her prosecco, said thoughtfully, "What if we used something else? Just for the ceremony. Something ring-shaped." She looked around the room. "I have curtain rings in my bag, I think, from the Airbnb, I was going to return them but—"

Everyone looked at Carol.

"What," Carol said. "They're gold-coloured."

They used the curtain rings.

This had been Patricia's decision and she had made it with the calm authority of a woman who had planned this wedding for fourteen months and was not going to let it be derailed by a corgi and a best man who couldn't be trusted with velvet boxes, and if anyone in the assembled congregation of sixty-two people noticed that the rings were slightly large and vaguely hexagonal and had a small manufacturer's stamp on the inside that read IKEA, they had the good grace not to say so.

Rosie and Sandra did not notice. They were looking at each other with the intensity of people for whom the rest of the room had become largely theoretical, and when they slid the curtain rings onto each other's fingers they laughed, both of them, a surprised and delighted laugh, and the congregation laughed too, thinking it was a charming and intentional moment of levity, which was, Patricia decided, exactly what it was.

She stood in the front row and watched her daughter get married and felt all the complicated, enormous things that parents feel at weddings, and beside her Biscuit sat very straight in his little bow tie, which she had put on him that morning and which he had accepted with dignity, and he watched the ceremony with his dark eyes and his expression of general assessment and was, all things considered, on his best behaviour.

The rings were recovered the following morning. They were cleaned very thoroughly. Patricia never told Rosie, and Carol only told four people, which for Carol was essentially silence.

At Christmas that year, Sandra had a small engraving added to the inside of her ring, just three letters, in very small type, that Rosie couldn't make out without her glasses.

B-I-S, she read, squinting, and Sandra said, "Biscuit. It says Biscuit," and Rosie looked up and said "why does it say Biscuit" and Sandra smiled the smile of a woman with an excellent secret and said, "ask your mother."

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Her name was Sophie and she lived in Portland and that should have been my first clue.

I live in Brooklyn. Portland is two thousand eight hundred miles away. You don't accidentally fall in love with someone who lives two thousand eight hundred miles away. You do it on purpose. You do it because some part of you knows that distance is a very good reason for things not to work out, and some part of you needs a very good reason.

I met her at a writer's retreat in Vermont. One of those week-long things where everyone pretends they're going to finish their novel but really they're just drinking wine and having conversations about craft that are actually conversations about everything else.

She sat next to me at dinner the first night. She had short hair and good hands and she laughed at something I said about plot structure in a way that made me feel like I'd said something actually funny instead of just competent.

By night three we were sleeping together.

By night five she was crying in my arms about her ex-boyfriend.

Her ex-boyfriend.

I should have left right then. I should have said something like "oh, you're straight, cool, this was fun" and gone back to my cabin and finished the week like a normal person. But I didn't because she kept touching me. Small things. Her hand on my knee under the table, her fingers in my hair when we were lying in bed talking, the way she looked at me when she thought I wasn't paying attention.

She touched me like someone who knew exactly what she was doing and also like someone who had no idea what she was doing, and both things were true, and I stayed.

Sophie's twenty-nine. She works in marketing for a sustainable clothing company, which she thinks is meaningful but also knows is just capitalism in a different font. She's from Ohio originally. She dated men in college because that's what you did in Ohio in college. She dated men after college because that's what you did everywhere, apparently, if you didn't stop long enough to ask yourself if you actually wanted to.

She told me all of this on night four, lying in the dark, her head on my shoulder, her voice doing that thing where it gets quieter the more important the thing she's saying is.

"I don't think I'm straight," she said.

"Yeah," I said. "I got that."

"But I don't know if I'm... the other thing either."

"The other thing."

"You know."

"Gay," I said. "The word is gay, Sophie."

She laughed. It sounded like relief and terror in equal measure.

"I don't know if I'm that," she said.

"Okay," I said, even though it wasn't okay, even though I could already see how this was going to end and I was choosing to stay anyway because apparently I am very good at making bad decisions when a pretty girl puts her head on my shoulder.

The retreat ended. We exchanged numbers. She went back to Portland. I went back to Brooklyn.

We texted every day for two months.

Not normal texts. Not "how was your day" texts. The kind of texts you send when you're trying to keep someone close without admitting that's what you're doing. Long paragraphs about books we were reading. Voice notes about things we saw on walks. Photos of coffee shops and sunsets and once, memorably, her feet in the bathtub with the caption thinking about you.

I asked what she meant by that. She said you know what I mean.

I did know what she meant.

She never said it directly. She never said "I miss you" or "I want you" or "I wish you were here." She said things like "Portland is grey today" and "I saw a woman who looked like you and I felt weird about it" and once, at two in the morning, "do you think it's possible to want something and also be terrified of it at the same time?"

I said yes. I said I thought that was probably the definition of wanting something real.

She didn't respond for three days.

In December she told me she was seeing someone. His name was Andrew. He worked in tech. He was nice. She said nice like it was an apology.

I said congratulations.

She said it wasn't serious.

I said okay.

She said, "I just thought you should know."

I said, "Why?"

She didn't answer that.

We kept texting, less frequently. She stopped sending voice notes. I stopped asking questions I actually wanted the answers to. We were still in each other's lives but in that fake way where you're performing friendship over the corpse of whatever you actually were.

In February she told me Andrew proposed.

She told me over text. At eleven PM on a Thursday. Just: Andrew proposed.

I stared at that message for ten minutes. I wrote and deleted five different responses. I finally sent back: and?

I said yes.

I put my phone face down on my kitchen counter. I made tea I didn't drink. I sat on my couch and stared at the wall and tried to figure out what I was feeling and landed on something that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite sadness but was definitely in the family of both.

My phone buzzed.

Are you mad at me?

I picked it up. I typed: No. I'm not mad. I just don't understand why you're telling me this.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared, appeared again.

Because you're important to me.

I laughed out loud. Actually laughed, alone in my apartment at eleven PM on a Thursday.

I typed: I was important to you in Vermont too. But you're marrying Andrew.

That's not fair.

You're right. It's not. But it's true.

The dots appeared and disappeared six times. Then nothing.

We didn't talk for a month. And then one night in March my phone rang at one AM and it was her and she was drunk and crying and I answered because apparently I have no survival instincts whatsoever.

"I can't do this," she said.

"Can't do what?"

"Marry him. Pretend I don't—" She stopped. Started again. "Pretend I don't feel what I feel."

"Sophie."

"I keep thinking about Vermont. About you. About the way you looked at me and I felt like—" Another stop. "Like I was allowed to be something I'm not supposed to be."

My chest hurt. Like something had reached in and grabbed.

"You are allowed," I said. "You're allowed to be whatever you are."

"But what if I don't know what I am?"

"Then you figure it out. But you don't figure it out by marrying someone you're not sure about."

Silence. I could hear her breathing. I could hear music in the background, voices, like she was at a bar or a party or somewhere she shouldn't be making this phone call.

"I should go," she said.

"Sophie—"

"I'm sorry. For all of it. For Vermont and for telling you about Andrew and for calling you right now when I'm drunk and scared and don't know what I'm doing."

"It's okay," I said, even though it wasn't.

"No," she said. "It's not. You deserve someone who isn't—" She laughed, bitter. "Who isn't me."

She hung up.

That was two months ago.

I haven't heard from her since. I assume she's still engaged, still figuring out how to be straight or how to pretend to be straight or how to live with the fact that she isn't.

I don't know. I deleted her number. I muted her on Instagram. I did all the things you're supposed to do when someone hurts you and you need to move on.

But the thing is, Sophie isn't the first. She's not even the second.

There was Emma, who lived in London and was in an open relationship she swore was fine but clearly wasn't. There was Rachel, who lived in my neighborhood but was so emotionally unavailable she might as well have lived on Mars. There was Diane, who was forty-three and divorced and kept saying she wasn't ready for anything serious while also texting me good morning every single day for six months.

There's a pattern here, I can't keep pretending there isn't.

I keep falling in love with women who can't stay, who are too far away or too scared or too confused or too something. Women who want me in the way you want something you're not allowed to have, who touch me like they mean it and then leave like they don't.

I keep thinking: this time will be different, this time she'll choose me, this time the distance or the fear or the confusion will matter less than what we have but it never does because the distance isn't the problem.

Sophie didn't break my heart. I handed it to her knowing exactly what she'd do with it.

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The diaries were in a shoebox.

Not even a special shoebox. A Converse box, the kind that holds a pair of canvas sneakers, white with a black logo, the cardboard soft at the corners from years of being moved and stacked and ignored. Nadia found it on the top shelf of her grandmother's bedroom closet, behind a winter coat that smelled of cedar and something floral she couldn't name.

She was supposed to be sorting. Her mother had asked her to sort: keep, donate, throw away, while she handled the legal things downstairs with the lawyer. The apartment needed to be cleared by the end of the month. Nadia was twenty-four and between jobs and her mother had said it like it was a favor, like Nadia was doing something generous by being the one to go through a dead woman's things alone.

She opened the box.

Notebooks. Dozens of them, packed in tightly, spines facing up. Different sizes. Different colors. A marble composition book. Several slim ones with flowers on the cover, the kind sold at pharmacy checkouts. A few hardcovers. All of them dated in the same handwriting on the spine — her grandmother's hand, small and precise, the letters slightly slanted to the right as if always in a hurry.

The earliest one said 1964. Nadia sat down on the floor.

Her grandmother's name was Ruth. Ruth Calloway before she married, Ruth Voss after, though she had kept Calloway professionally her whole life in the way some women do, quietly, without making it political, just holding on to something that was theirs before anyone else claimed them.

Nadia had known her as Grandma. As the woman who made pot roast at every family gathering and was particular about the gravy, the way it had to be made from the drippings and nothing else, and who distributed the crispy end cuts according to some private system of favoritism she never explained. As the woman who called on Sunday mornings and asked the same four questions in the same order. As the woman who smelled of Pond's cold cream and kept butterscotch candy in her purse and watched old black-and-white films with a focus that suggested she found them genuinely suspenseful even though she had seen them all before.

As a grandmother, not as a person. Nadia understood this about herself and felt guilty and opened the first notebook anyway.

January 4, 1964.

The new year came and went. I did not make resolutions because I do not believe in them. I believe in decisions. A resolution is something you hope for. A decision is something you do. Today I decided to write everything down. I don't know why. Maybe because I am eighteen and I want to remember what eighteen felt like. Maybe because no one in my life is interested in what I think. Here at least I can think loudly.

Nadia read that last line twice.

Here at least I can think loudly.

She looked at the closet, at the coat, at the neat row of shoes on the floor below it: her grandmother had been particular about shoes, always kept them in pairs, never mixed, and she felt something shift in her chest. Not grief exactly. She had done the grief already, at the funeral, the appropriate amount in the appropriate places.

She kept reading.

Ruth at eighteen was opinionated in a way Nadia had never seen in her. She had views on politics, on literature, on the behavior of specific people in her neighborhood in Cincinnati, on the nature of God, on the question of whether love was real or just a story people told to explain their own hunger. She wrote about a boy named Douglas who she thought was handsome but dull. She wrote about a teacher who had told her she was too clever for her own good, and she had written:

What a strange insult. too clever. as if there is a correct amount of knowing things and I have exceeded it. I will exceed it further and not apologize.

Nadia laughed out loud, alone in her dead grandmother's bedroom.

She reached for the next notebook.

It took three Sundays.

She didn't tell her mother what she'd found, not right away. She took the shoebox home in a tote bag and read at night, in bed, her phone face-down so nothing interrupted. She read the way she used to read as a child, before the internet, before the notifications, before she'd lost the ability to stay inside a thing for longer than a few minutes.

Ruth in her twenties moved to Chicago. She had a best friend named Vera who appears throughout the diaries like a recurring song, a woman who laughed too loudly in restaurants and had no patience for boring men and who Nadia gathered, reading between the careful lines, that her grandmother had loved in a way that the diaries never named directly but also never pretended was ordinary.

Vera today at the park. We sat until it was dark. I don't know how to explain what I mean when I say that being with her is like being in a room with the lights finally on.

Nadia set the notebook down.

She picked it back up.

She read that line again and thought about all the Sundays she had sat across from her grandmother at the dinner table. All the four-question phone calls. All the pot roast. All the years of a woman right in front of her, breathing and present and full of all of this, and Nadia had seen a grandmother, and only a grandmother, and nothing else at all.

She kept reading. More Vera.

March 1971.

V. got the job. I knew she would. She walked into that interview the way she walks into every room. I told her she was insufferable. She said thank you. We celebrated with cheap wine on her fire escape and talked until two in the morning and I drove home in the dark feeling like I could do anything. She does that. She makes the world feel larger.

And then, a few years later:

October 1974.

We had a fight. I don't want to write what it was about because writing it would make it more real than I want it to be. I will just say that there are things that cannot be said out loud between two people, not in 1974, not in this city, not to anyone. And sometimes the weight of that unsayable thing sits between you like a third person at the table. We didn't speak for two weeks. Two weeks. The longest two weeks of my life and I once sat with my mother through a January blizzard with no heat. She called on a Tuesday. I picked up before the second ring. We didn't talk about the fight. We talked for three hours about everything else. That is its own kind of answer, I think. That is its own kind of truth.

Nadia was not a stupid girl. She understood what she was reading. She understood what the unsayable thing was, and what 1974 meant, and what it cost to pick up before the second ring and never speak of it again.

Vera had died in 1999. There was an entry about it. One entry, short, the handwriting slightly uneven in a way that no other entry was.

She is gone. I am not going to write about it. Some things are too large for words and I am not going to insult her by trying. I will just say: she existed. She was here. She lit up every room she walked into and she lit up mine. I knew her for thirty-five years. I will know her for the rest of my life.

That was all.

Nadia cried. Not for her grandmother exactly. For Vera, who she had never met, who she had not known existed, who had been the great love of a woman's life and had been buried in a paragraph. For everything that could not be said out loud in 1974 or in the years that followed, all of it lived quietly in the correct amount of silence, put to bed every night without a name.

She cried for all the sentences. For the woman who had decided at eighteen to write everything down because no one in her life was interested in what she thought.

Someone was interested now. Twenty-five years too late. But interested.

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Nadia called her mother that night.

"Did you know Grandma kept diaries?"

A pause. "Diaries?"

"Sixty years of them. Every day."

Her mother was quiet for a moment. "She never mentioned it."

"No?"

Another pause. "What do they say?"

Nadia looked at the shoebox on her bed. The neat rows of spines. Sixty years of a woman thinking loudly.

"Everything," she said. "They say everything."

Her mother didn't respond right away. When she did, her voice was different. Smaller.

"I didn't know her very well," she said. "Did I."

It wasn't a question.

"No," Nadia said, gently. "I don't think any of us did."

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Simone's call lasts exactly seventeen minutes. I know because I've been watching the clock in the corner of my screen, pretending to work on Chapter Fifteen while actually doing nothing except trying to remember how to breathe like a normal person.

She's explaining something about load-bearing walls. Or maybe zoning permits. I can't hear the actual words but I can hear the tone: authoritative, patient, like she's used to people listening when she speaks.

I want to listen to her speak for the rest of my life.

Simone laughs at something the person on the other end says. Then she's wrapping up. "Sounds good. Send me the revised plans by Friday and we'll go from there. Thanks, David."

She ends the call. Closes her laptop. Takes a sip of her coffee. Then she looks directly at me.

I look away so fast I almost give myself whiplash. Back to chapter fifteen because I'm a terrible writer who can't focus for more than five consecutive seconds when there's a devastating woman in the room.

I hear her chair scrape against the floor and then she's walking over.

Oh God. This is happening. This is actually happening.

I don't look up. I keep my eyes locked on my screen like if I just focus hard enough on Elena's fictional problems I won't have to deal with my very real ones.

"Hey," Simone says.

I look up.

She's standing at my table, laptop tucked under one arm, coffee in her other hand. I can see her properly now. Her eyes—grey, I think, or maybe brown with grey edges, the kind of color that probably changes depending on the light. Right now they're warm. Amused. Like she knows exactly what she's doing to me.

"Hi," I say. My voice sounds mostly normal. This is a miracle.

"Mind if I sit?"

She's asking if she can sit at my table.

"No. I mean yes. I mean—" I gesture at the empty chair across from me. "Please."

She sits. Sets her coffee down. Folds her hands on the table between us.

Somebody please call an ambulance.

"So," she says. "How's the writing going?"

"Good," I lie. "Great. Very good."

"Yeah?" She tilts her head slightly, and I notice for the first time there's a small scar near her left eyebrow. I want to know the story. I want to know every story. "What are you working on?"

"A novel. Chapter Fifteen of it."

"What's it about?"

My mind goes completely blank. What is my novel about? I've been working on it for eight months. I know this. I definitely know this.

"It's um. It's about a woman. Who's—stuck in a toxic relationship and is finally finding her way out?"

"Sounds intense."

"Yeah. It's. Intense."

Smooth. Very smooth. Extremely articulate.

"Can I tell you something?" she says.

"Okay."

"I don't think you've written a single word of Chapter Fifteen in the last hour. You've been writing something else, haven't you? Something about me, perhaps?"

My face gets hot. She knows.

"I—" I start, but nothing comes after.

"It's okay," Simone says. Her voice is gentle. "I'm not upset. I'm curious."

She leans forward slightly. Just enough that I have to fight the urge to lean back. "What were you writing, Iris?"

"You really want to know?"

"I really want to know."

My laptop is right there. I could show her exactly what I wrote. Let her read every unhinged word about our imaginary life and the very real way I've already decided what I'm cooking for dinner on a random Thursday three years from now. Or I could close my laptop, thank her for the conversation, and never come back to this coffee shop again.

I realize I’ve already decided. I open the document.

"Okay," I say. My voice sounds far away, like it's coming from someone else. Someone braver. "But you have to promise not to—I don't know. Call the police or anything."

Simone laughs. "I promise."

"And you can't—" I hesitate. "You can't make fun of me."

Her expression goes soft. "I won't."

I believe her and turn the laptop around.

"Here," I say.

Then I sit back and watch her read about our entire future together.

Her eyes move across the screen and I watch her face for any sign of what she's thinking.

Her expression is careful, almost like she's reviewing a proposal. But there's something at the corner of her mouth, not quite a smile, but close. Like she's fighting one.

She's beautiful. That's not new information, but up close like this, with nothing to do but look at her while she reads about how I want to spend the rest of my life with her, it hits different.

Her face is all clean lines and elegant angles and a sharp jaw. I can see the scar near her eyebrow clearly now. Maybe an inch long. I want to kiss it and every other part of her until I've memorized the whole map.

I want to know what her lips feel like, taste like. What sounds they make when they're pressed against my neck, my collarbone, lower—

I think I need a cooling break.

She scrolls down.

I watch her neck move as she swallows. I can see her pulse point, just visible above the collar of her white blouse.

I want to put my mouth there, feel her pulse against my lips, and hear what kind of noise she makes when I do it. I want her hands in my hair, guiding me, telling me exactly what she wants because I'll do it, whatever it is, I'll do anything she asks—

She stops scrolling.

My heart is doing something dangerous and unsustainable.

Then she looks up. Those eyes lock onto mine and there's something in them—amusement, yes, but also something else. Something heated that makes my entire body go still.

"Brooklyn or Chicago?" she asks.

I blink at her. "What?"

"Brooklyn or Chicago." She leans back in her chair, crosses her arms. The smile is fully visible now, not even trying to hide it anymore. "I need to know which one you're picturing so I can tell you if you're right."

"I—" My brain has completely short-circuited. "Right about what?"

"About where I'd want to live." She tilts her head slightly, studying me. "If I were planning a future with someone who writes about me like that."

The air leaves my lungs.

"Brooklyn," she says, answering her own question. "I lived in Chicago for eight years. Too cold. Brooklyn has better food anyway." She pauses. "And you're right about the greyhound. I've always wanted one."

I just stare at her.

"The blueprints on the walls is a nice touch," she continues, like she's reviewing architectural plans. "Though I'd probably keep those in my office. I don't like bringing work into the bedroom."

The bedroom.

She said bedroom. Like it's a real place that exists.

"You—" I try to form words and fail. Try again. "You're not... weirded out?"

She laughs. It's low and genuine and it does something to my entire nervous system.

"Iris." She leans forward. "I walked into this coffee shop and caught you watching me. You looked so hungry. Like you'd just seen something you wanted and had no idea what to do about it."

We sit there for a moment. Just looking at each other. The coffee shop sounds fade into background noise: the hiss of the espresso machine, someone's laptop playing music too loud, the door opening and closing as people come and go.

None of it matters.

"So," I say finally. "You're... okay with this?"

"With what? The fact that you wrote an entire domestic fantasy about us in the time it took me to have a conference call about load-bearing walls?" She's still smiling. "Yeah, Iris. I'm okay with it."

"It's insane."

"But you did show me."

"Because you asked!"

"I asked what you were writing," she says. "I didn't ask you to show me. You chose to do that."

She's right. I did choose and I wonder what that says about me.

"So." She stands up and for a horrible second I think she's leaving, that this whole thing was just some elaborate way of letting me down easy. But then she picks up her bag and her laptop and says, "Move over."

"What?"

"Move over. I'm sitting with you."

"What are you doing?" I ask, scooting over.

"Trying to figure out if you're brave enough to have coffee with me. As in, a date."

My heart is doing something dangerous in my chest.

"Now?" I squeak.

"Well." Simone glances at my nearly empty cup. "You're going to need a refill."

She slides in next to me. Close enough that I can feel the warmth of her through her blouse. Can see the fine lines at the corners of her eyes when she smiles.

"Hi," she says.

"Hi," I manage.

"So here's what's going to happen," Simone says. She turns slightly to face me, one arm stretched along the back of the seat behind me. Not touching, but close enough that I'm aware of exactly how easy it would be for her to touch me. "You're going to tell me more about this brownstone. Specifically, which neighborhood you're picturing. "

"Park Slope," I say without thinking.

"Good choice. Overpriced, but good." She's trying not to smile. "And the dog. You said a greyhound."

"You said you always wanted one."

"I did. But I want to know why you picked a greyhound specifically."

I think about this. "Because they're elegant. And a little aloof. And they look like they have their shit together even when they're just lying on the couch doing nothing."

She laughs. "Are you describing the dog or me?"

"Both, maybe."

"Fair." She shifts closer. Her knee presses against mine. "What else?"

"What else what?"

"What else have you decided about us that I should know about?"

Us. She said us.

"I—I don't know. That was kind of it."

"You said you'd have dinner ready when I got home. Something with garlic and wine."

"I'm a good cook," I say defensively.

"I believe you." Her voice drops lower. "What would you make me? First dinner in the hypothetical brownstone."

"You want to know what I'd cook you?"

"Very much."

I think about it. About what I'd want to cook for her. Something that takes time and shows effort.

"Braised short ribs," I say. "With polenta. And roasted vegetables—whatever's in season. And a bottle of red wine that's probably too expensive but I'd buy it anyway."

She's quiet for a moment. Just looking at me.

"What?" I ask.

"Nothing. Just—" She shakes her head slightly. "That sounds perfect."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." She reaches up, and this time she does touch me. Just her fingers, brushing a strand of hair behind my ear. The touch is so gentle, so deliberate, that I forget how to breathe. "You put a lot of thought into this."

"Too much thought."

"No." Her hand lingers near my face. "Not too much. Just enough."

We're very close now. Close enough that I can see the exact color of her eyes—more grey than brown, with these little flecks of gold near the center. Close enough that I can count her eyelashes if I wanted to.

Close enough to kiss her, if I were brave enough. I'm not brave enough but apparently Simone is.

"Iris," she says quietly.

"Yeah?"

"I'm going to do something. And if you don't want me to, you should tell me right now."

My heart stops. "Okay."

"Okay you want me to tell you, or okay you want me to—"

"The second one," I say quickly. "Definitely the second one."

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I'm working on Chapter Fifteen when she walks in.

Chapter Fifteen is the one where Elena finally tells Marcus she's leaving. I've been building to this for two hundred pages. It matters. It's important. The cursor is blinking right after the words Elena took a breath and—

And then the door opens and she walks in and Elena can go fuck herself.

She's tall. That's the first thing. Tall in a way that makes the whole coffee shop feel smaller, like the ceiling rose two feet to accommodate her. Black pants. The kind with a sharp crease down the front that means she either has her life together or pays someone to iron for her. White blouse, sleeves rolled to her elbows. A blazer over her arm like she just came from somewhere important and might have to go back.

She's older than me. Forty, maybe? It's hard to tell. Old enough that she moves through the world differently than I do. Like she's earned the space she takes up.

She orders something, I can't hear what—and while she waits she looks around the coffee shop with this casual, assessing look. The kind of look that makes you want to sit up straighter. Fix your hair. Become the kind of person worth assessing.

Her eyes pass over me. And I stop breathing.

They pass by. She's looking at the empty tables, trying to decide where to sit.

I exhale. Look back at my screen.

Elena took a breath and—

I can't remember what Elena was going to say. Something about leaving. Something about how she couldn't do this anymore. It was good, I think. It mattered.

The woman gets her coffee and sits down three tables away. Close enough that I can see her. Far enough that staring would be obvious.

I stare anyway.

She pulls out a laptop. Thin, expensive-looking, the type that means she does real work, not the "maybe I'm a writer" kind of work I do. She opens it with one hand, takes a sip of coffee with the other, and starts typing immediately. No hesitation. No staring at the screen wondering what words are supposed to come next.

I wonder what she does. Lawyer, maybe. She has lawyer energy. That thing where you know she could destroy you in an argument and you'd thank her for it.

Or a consultant. Something corporate. Something that requires her to wear those pants.

God, those pants.

I haven't written a single word in four minutes.

I switch documents. Open a new one and start typing:

She walked into the coffee shop like she owned it. Not in an arrogant way. In a way that suggested she'd simply assessed the situation and determined that yes, this space was hers now, and everyone else was just visiting.

She was tall. Taller than anyone had a right to be in a coffee shop at 10 AM on a Tuesday. She wore black pants that fit like they were made for her specifically, and a white blouse that—

She looks up. Right at me.

I freeze. Hands still on the keyboard, mid-sentence, caught.

She holds my gaze for one second. Two seconds. Three. Then she smiles.

Not a polite smile. Not the smile you give strangers. A smile that knows exactly what it's doing. A smile that says I saw you watching me and I'm allowing it.

Then—and I swear to God this happens—she winks. And my entire body forgets how to function.

She goes back to her work like nothing happened. Like she didn't just fundamentally alter my brain chemistry. Like I'm not sitting here trying to remember how breathing works.

I look back at my screen. My hands are shaking.

—and a white blouse that made me forget how to form coherent sentences.

I delete that. Too honest. Too desperate.

I try again:

I would let this woman ruin my life. I would hand her the matches and point to everything I've built and say "go ahead." I would thank her for it.

Delete. Jesus.

She's older than me. Ten years? Fifteen? It doesn't matter. What matters is the way she holds her coffee cup. Confident, certain, like she's never doubted a single decision in her life. I want her to make decisions for me. I want her to tell me what to do and I want to do it immediately and without question.

I'm writing like a maniac now. I can't stop. The words are pouring out and they're terrible and I don't care.

We would live in a brownstone in Brooklyn. Or maybe Chicago. Somewhere with actual seasons. She would leave for work in the morning in those pants and I would write and when she came home I'd have dinner ready. Something good. Something that required actual technique because I can cook, I'm good at it, and I want her to come home to the smell of garlic and wine and effort. I want to feed her. I want to watch her taste something I made and see her face soften.

She'd sit at the counter watching me and she'd tell me about her day and I'd pretend I understood what a "quarterly report" was.

We'd have a dog. A big one. Something dignified that matches her energy. A greyhound maybe. We'd walk it together on Sunday mornings and people would look at us and think "those two make sense together" even though we absolutely don't.

I'd dedicate my first book to her. "For M—" no, I don't know her name yet. "For the woman in the coffee shop who smiled at me once and changed my entire life trajectory."

She'd come to my readings. Sit in the back. Catch my eye when I stumbled over a sentence and steady me with just a look.

She's getting up.

No. Wait. Not yet. I haven't finished planning our life together.

She's getting up and walking—

Toward me. She's walking toward me.

Every muscle in my body locks. My document is still open. The one where I just wrote a thousand words about our imaginary brownstone and our imaginary dog and our very real, extremely gay life together.

I click to minimize it but I'm too panicked and I hit the wrong button and the screen goes BLACK and oh God did I just turn off my laptop!

"Excuse me," she says.

Her voice is exactly what it should be. Low. Warm. The kind that could read the phone book and make it sound like a seduction.

I look up. Way up. She's even taller standing this close.

"Hi," I say. It comes out as a squeak.

"Sorry to bother you," she says, and she doesn't sound sorry at all. "But do you know if this place has WiFi? I'm supposed to be on a call in ten minutes and my hotspot is being useless."

"Yes," I say. "Yeah. It's—the password is on the wall. By the counter."

"Perfect. Thank you."

She starts to turn away and my mouth moves before my brain approves it:

"Are you a lawyer?"

She stops. Turns back. Raises one eyebrow. It should be illegal how attractive that eyebrow raise is.

"Close," she says. "Architect."

"Oh."

"Why? Do I seem litigious?"

"No. Just—" I gesture vaguely at her whole situation. "You look like you win arguments."

She laughs. Actually laughs. It's a good laugh. And it reaches her eyes.

"I do," she says. "Occupational hazard."

Then she leans down slightly, not a lot, just enough that I have to tilt my head back to maintain eye contact, and says, "You're a writer."

It's not a question.

"How did you—"

"You've been staring at your screen like it personally offended you for the last hour. Also you type like there's a fire. Dead giveaway."

"Oh God. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"

"Don't apologize." She's still smiling. "I think it's cute."

Cute. She thinks I'm cute. I'm going to pass out. This is how I die.

"I'm Simone," she says.

"Iris," I manage.

"Well, Iris." She straightens up. "I have to take this call. But I'll be here for a bit after. If you want to tell me what you're writing."

Then she walks back to her table and I sit there, completely still, trying to process what just happened.

I open my laptop. Go back to the document. Read what I wrote.

Then I add two more lines:

Her name is Simone. Simone who leans down when she talks. Simone whose voice sounds like something I want to fall asleep to. Simone who thinks I'm cute.

The brownstone will have her blueprints framed on the walls. The ones she's most proud of. I'll learn to read them just so I can understand what she loves.

I save it and wait.

So I linger at this coffee shop. But it is for the WiFi. The great, reliable WiFi. Not for any other reason. Certainly not because I need to know what Simone takes in her coffee. Or whether she smiles like that at everyone or just at me.

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Charlotte Aurelius Butterfinger, no relation to the philosopher emperor, despite what she told people at parties, had always considered herself a reasonably competent baker. Sure, she'd once set off the sprinkler system at Le Cordon Bleu by flambéing a crème brûlée too enthusiastically, and yes, there was that incident with the sourdough starter that achieved sentience, but overall, she felt she had a decent grip on her craft.

Time travel, however, was proving to be an entirely different kettle of fish. Or in this case, an entirely different amphora of garum.

"This is fine," Charlotte muttered to herself, standing in what appeared to be a Roman bakery circa 150 CE, her temporal displacement device, which looked disconcertingly like an aggressive stand mixer, smoking gently in the corner. "This is absolutely fine. I'll just bake my way out of this like I bake my way out of everything else."

The actual Roman baker, a stout man named Publius who had fainted approximately three minutes ago when Charlotte materialized in a flash of blue light and the smell of burnt ozone, was still unconscious on the floor. Charlotte had propped him up against a sack of spelt flour and was trying very hard not to panic.

The problem was threefold: First, Charlotte had been attempting to use the device to retrieve a legendary Roman honey cake recipe from 200 BCE and had somehow overshot by fifty years and arrived in entirely the wrong bakery. Second, the device was now thoroughly broken, its quantum circuits fused into what looked like a very expensive paperweight. Third, and most pressingly, there was apparently some kind of important state banquet happening tomorrow, and Publius, who was drooling slightly onto his toga, was supposed to provide the bread.

"Right," Charlotte said, rolling up the sleeves of her anachronistic chef's whites, which she was desperately hoping the Romans would mistake for a very avant-garde toga. "Bread. I can do bread. I'm a professional."

She surveyed Publius's workspace with growing concern. The oven was essentially a glorified cave in the wall. The flour was coarser than sandpaper. There was no butter, none whatsoever, only olive oil, which while lovely on a salad, was not going to give her the flaky, layered texture she needed for...

Wait. Why did she need a flaky, layered texture? This was Rome. They ate flatbreads and dense loaves. She should just make those.

But Charlotte Aurelius Butterfinger had not won third place in the 2024 International Pastry Competition (there had been an unfortunate incident with the judges and a batch of extremely competitive French pastry chefs) by playing it safe. And if there was one thing she knew how to make in her sleep, it was croissants.

"Surely," she said aloud to the unconscious Publius, "the fundamental laws of deliciousness transcend time and space."

The first problem was the butter situation. After some investigation of Publius's supplies and a brief consultation with her admittedly patchy knowledge of Roman cuisine, Charlotte discovered that while butter existed, it was considered barbaric, something those unwashed Gauls ate. The Romans preferred their olive oil, thank you very much.

"Barbarians had the right idea," Charlotte muttered, counting the small wheel of butter she'd found hidden in the back of the pantry, probably imported at great expense. It would have to do.

She set to work with the grim determination of a woman who had once spent forty-eight hours straight perfecting a wedding cake shaped like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, only to have it actually lean and topple at the reception. The muscle memory took over: mixing, kneading, the careful lamination of dough and butter, fold after fold, creating those distinctive layers.

It was soothing, really, working with her hands while contemplating her impending doom. Because surely someone was going to notice that she was very much not Publius, and very much not from this century.

"Although," she mused, carefully rolling out the dough, "who's to say I didn't always invent croissants in ancient Rome? Maybe this is how it was supposed to happen."

This philosophical rationalization sustained her for approximately twenty minutes, until Publius woke up, saw what Charlotte was making, and immediately fainted again.

By dawn, Charlotte had created something beautiful. Rows and rows of perfect crescent-shaped pastries, golden and gleaming, filled the bakery with an aroma that had never before graced the Roman Empire. They were perhaps the most exquisite croissants she'd ever made, which seemed cosmically unfair given that she'd created them in what amounted to a primitive oven with tools that predated the invention of the whisk by over a millennium.

Publius, who had regained consciousness for the second time and been plied with wine until he achieved a state of confused acceptance, stared at the croissants with something approaching religious awe.

"The gods," he whispered. "You are a gift from the gods."

"Sure," Charlotte said tiredly. "Let's go with that. Look, these need to go to the banquet, right? For the Emperor?"

"The Emperor!" Publius went pale. "No, no, not the Emperor. These are for the Parthian ambassadors. There are negotiations. Very delicate negotiations. The bread represents Rome. Strong, traditional, reliable!"

Charlotte looked at her croissants. They were many things, but traditional Roman bread they decidedly were not.

"Define 'delicate,'" she said weakly.

As it turned out, "delicate" meant that the Roman Empire and the Parthian Empire were one diplomatic incident away from open warfare, and the state banquet was a last-ditch attempt to prevent countless deaths and the potential fall of civilization as they knew it.

"So, no pressure then," Charlotte said faintly.

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The banquet was held in a villa that made Charlotte's temporal displacement mishap seem like a minor inconvenience. Marble columns soared overhead, fountains burbled artistically, and elaborately dressed Romans reclined on couches while servants scurried about with the kind of efficient terror that suggested someone important was in a very bad mood.

Charlotte, disguised in a borrowed toga that kept trying to fall off, carried in her croissants on a large platter. The plan, such as it was, was to deliver the bread, blend into the background, and then somehow find a way to repair her time machine before anyone noticed she'd accidentally rewritten culinary history.

The plan lasted approximately forty-five seconds.

"What," announced the Parthian ambassador in heavily accented Latin, staring at the platter, "is that?"

The Roman senator hosting the banquet, a thin-faced man named Gaius Cornelius who looked like he'd aged ten years in the last ten minutes, peered at the croissants with mounting horror.

"That is... bread," he said uncertainly. "Traditional Roman bread. As agreed upon."

"That," said the Parthian ambassador, his voice rising, "looks like the crescent moon. The symbol of the Parthian Empire. You mock us with bread shaped like our sacred symbol!"

The room went very, very quiet.

"Oh no," Charlotte whispered to herself. "Oh no, no, no."

She had, in her sleep-deprived state, forgotten one crucial fact about croissants: they were crescent-shaped. And crescents had symbolic meaning. Lots of symbolic meaning. The kind of meaning that started wars.

Gaius Cornelius had gone from pale to red to an interesting shade of purple. "This is... this is an outrage! We would never mock your symbols! This baker—where is the baker?!"

Every eye in the room turned to Charlotte, who was actively trying to become one with a decorative pillar.

"Seize her!" someone shouted, and Charlotte did what any self-respecting time traveler would do when faced with the collapse of diplomatic relations and possible execution: she grabbed the nearest croissant and took a bite.

The flaky, buttery pastry dissolved on her tongue in a symphony of texture and flavor that had no business existing in 150 CE. Around her, Roman guards were approaching with the kind of purposeful stride that suggested imminent execution, the Parthian delegation was reaching for weapons, and Gaius Cornelius appeared to be having some kind of apoplectic fit.

"Wait!" Charlotte shouted through a mouthful of croissant. "Just—everyone wait! Try one!"

"We will not be poisoned by your crescent-moons of war!" the Parthian ambassador declared.

"They're not moons of war, they're moons of butter!" Charlotte protested. "Look, I know this looks bad, but I swear on every god in this very polytheistic pantheon that these are just delicious. Here!"

She thrust the platter forward with such desperate enthusiasm that several croissants went airborne. One landed perfectly on the couch of the most senior Parthian diplomat, an elderly man with a magnificent beard who looked like he'd seen every possible negotiating tactic and was thoroughly unimpressed by all of them.

The diplomat stared at the croissant that had landed in his lap. Then, with the air of a man who had decided that if he was going to die, he might as well die having eaten something interesting, he picked it up and took a bite.

The room held its collective breath.

The diplomat's eyes widened. He took another bite. And then another. A look of profound joy spread across his weathered face.

"By Mithra," he breathed. "This is... this is extraordinary."

Chaos erupted, but a different kind of chaos. Suddenly everyone wanted a croissant. Romans and Parthians alike descended on the platter with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for gladiatorial combat. Within minutes, hardened negotiators were comparing notes on the flaky layers, senators were debating the butter-to-dough ratio, and Charlotte found herself giving an impromptu masterclass on laminated pastry to the most powerful men in the ancient world.

"You see," she explained to a circle of crumb-covered dignitaries, "the key is keeping the butter cold during the folding process. Cold butter, warm hands, but not too warm, or you'll—"

"Remarkable," interrupted the Parthian ambassador, who had crumbs in his beard and had apparently forgotten he'd been ready to declare war five minutes ago. "In Parthia, we have nothing like this. You must share this recipe. It would be... a gesture of goodwill."

Gaius Cornelius, looking dizzy with relief, nodded vigorously. "Yes! A gesture of goodwill! A symbol of our shared appreciation for..." he gestured vaguely, "...baked goods!"

And that was how Charlotte Aurelius Butterfinger, failed time traveler and accidental pastry diplomat, found herself teaching croissant-making to the assembled elite of two empires, while Publius stood in the corner drinking wine and looking like a man who had given up trying to understand the universe.

The treaty was signed that evening over the last remaining croissants. Trade agreements were reached, borders were settled, and a tentative peace was established.

As Charlotte slipped away from the celebrations, she found the elderly Parthian diplomat waiting for her in the garden.

"You are not from here," the old man said. It wasn't a question.

Charlotte considered lying, then decided that someone who had just prevented a war deserved some honesty. "No. Very much not from here."

The diplomat nodded sagely. "I thought as much. Your Latin is terrible, and your clothes are... unusual. But your bread," he smiled, "your bread transcends origin. Promise me something."

"What?"

"Whatever strange land you return to," the man's eyes twinkled with knowing amusement, "keep making beautiful things. The world always needs more beauty and fewer wars."

Charlotte found she couldn't speak around the sudden lump in her throat, so she just nodded.

Three days later, having bartered the secret of temperature-controlled fermentation for enough rare components to repair her device, Charlotte stood in Publius's bakery for the last time. The Roman baker, who had decided to interpret the entire experience as a visitation from Vulcan, god of bakers, pressed a warm loaf into Charlotte's hands.

"Go with the gods, blessed one," Publius said solemnly.

"Go with the butter," Charlotte replied, because she was very tired and couldn't think of anything better.

The displacement device whirred to life, reality began to fold in on itself, and Charlotte Aurelius Butterfinger vanished in a flash of blue light and the lingering aroma of fresh croissants, leaving behind a bewildered baker, a peaceful treaty, and absolutely no historical record whatsoever of "crescent-shaped Parthian friendship cakes," because as it turned out, the recipe was promptly lost in a fire, forgotten for over a millennium, and eventually reinvented by Austrian bakers in the 17th century, who would pass it to the French, who would take one bite and declare, with characteristic confidence, that they had obviously invented it themselves. Some things, Charlotte thought as the centuries blurred past her, were simply inevitable.

The text came at 10:47 AM on a Tuesday.

Mom

Sweetheart! Book club is Thursday at 7. You should come! 📚❤️

Kim

Mom, I've never been to your book club.

Mom

Well, now's the perfect time to start! We're reading, "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo." You'll love it!

Kim

Isn't that the book about the bisexual actress?

Mom

Yes! Very inclusive. Very modern. Bring a friend if you want! 😊

Kim stared at her phone. She'd come out to her mother exactly two weeks ago. Two weeks, three days, and—she checked the time—four hours. The conversation had gone fine. Her mom had cried a little, hugged her a lot, said "I just want you to be happy," and then spent forty-five minutes asking increasingly detailed questions about Kim's "journey."

Apparently, the journey now included book club.

Kim

Mom, is this a setup?

Mom

A setup? For what?

Kim

You know what.

Mom

I'm sure I don't know what you mean. We just thought you might enjoy some literary discussion!

Kim

We?

Mom

The book club! All of us! See you Thursday! ❤️📚🌈

The rainbow emoji. Her mother had never used a rainbow emoji in her life.

Kim was so fucked.

Thursday arrived with the inevitability of a natural disaster. Kim stood outside her mother's house at 6:58 PM, clutching a bottle of wine she'd panic-bought at Target, trying to decide if fleeing to Canada was an overreaction.

The door flew open before she could knock.

"Kimberly!" Her mother, wearing what could only be described as aggressively normal clothing, like she'd been worried about looking too mom-ish, pulled her into a hug. "You came!"

"You texted me sixteen times."

"I was excited! Come in, come in. Everyone's here."

Kim stepped inside and immediately understood that she had walked into an ambush.

Her mother's living room had been transformed. There were rainbow napkins on the coffee table. Rainbow coasters. A small pride flag in a vase like a decorative flower. The book club—six women in their fifties and sixties—sat in a semicircle, all holding copies of "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo," all looking at Kim like she was a particularly interesting museum exhibit.

"Everyone," her mother announced, "this is my daughter, Kim!"

"Hi, Kim!" they chorused, with the synchronized enthusiasm of a rehearsed choir.

Kim waved weakly. "Hi."

"Kim, this is Linda, Susan, Carol, Pam, Deborah, and you know Aunt Claire."

Aunt Claire. Her mother's sister, who had been explicitly told about Kim's sexuality despite Kim specifically asking her mother not to tell anyone yet, gave her a thumbs up and mouthed "proud of you."

Kim wanted to die.

"Sit, sit!" Her mother gestured to an empty chair that had been positioned directly in the center of the semicircle. "Wine?"

"God, yes."

Her mother poured her a glass that was mostly wine and a little bit of glass. Kim took it gratefully and sat down, feeling like she was about to be interrogated by a very friendly, very determined firing squad.

"So!" Linda, blonde bob, cardigan with cats on it, leaned forward. "Your mother tells us you recently came out!"

Kim shot her mother a look. Her mother was suddenly very interested in the cheese plate.

"Uh, yeah. I did."

"That's wonderful!" Susan, short silver hair, dangly earrings, clapped her hands. "We're all so proud of you."

"You don't... know me."

"We know your mother, and she's over the moon. That's enough for us!"

Kim took a long drink of wine.

"Now," Carol, glasses on a chain, sensible shoes, said, pulling out what appeared to be a list, "we have some questions, if that's okay?"

"Questions?"

"We've been doing research!" Pam, red hair, too much blush, held up her phone. "I've been reading articles all week. Did you know there's a whole flag system? I had no idea!"

"I learned about comphet," Deborah, youngest of the group, maybe early fifties, said proudly. "Is that something you experienced?"

Kim looked at her mother. Her mother was now arranging crackers with the focus of a brain surgeon.

"Mom," Kim said. "What is happening?"

Her mother finally looked up. "We just want to be supportive, honey!"

"This feels like an intervention."

"An intervention implies something's wrong," Aunt Claire said. "This is more like a... celebration? With learning?"

"A learnabration," Linda offered.

"That's not a word," Carol said.

"It should be."

Kim drained her wine glass. Her mother immediately refilled it.

"Okay," Kim said, accepting her fate. "What do you want to know?"

The room erupted.

"When did you know?" "Have you been on any dates?" "What do lesbians do for fun?" "Is flannel mandatory?" "Do you watch 'The L Word'?" "What's your type?" "Have you told your father?" "Does this mean you won't have children?" "Can you still have children?" "Do you want children?" "What about Thanksgiving?"

"OKAY," Kim said loudly. "One at a time. Please."

They settled down, looking at her expectantly.

"First," Kim said, "flannel is not mandatory."

"But you have flannel," her mother said. "I've seen you wear flannel."

"Because it's comfortable, not because I'm gay."

"So it's not a uniform?" Pam looked disappointed.

"There's no uniform."

"What about the boots?" Susan asked. "The... what are they called... Doc Martens?"

"Also not mandatory."

"I bought Doc Martens," Aunt Claire said. "For solidarity."

"You didn't have to do that."

"I wanted to! Plus they're very comfortable. I get it now."

Kim looked around the room. These women, her mother's friends, women she'd known peripherally her entire life, were all staring at her with expressions of such earnest, overwhelming support that she felt something in her chest crack open.

"Look," Kim said, softer now. "I appreciate this. Really. But you don't have to research me like I'm a school project. I'm still just... me."

"We know that," her mother said, sitting down next to her. "But we also know that we didn't grow up in a world that made this easy. We want to do better. We want you to feel—" Her voice cracked slightly. "—loved. And seen. And like you can bring someone to book club without worrying we'll say something stupid."

"Even though we probably will say something stupid," Linda added. "Because we're old and we're trying."

"We're very trying," Carol agreed.

Despite herself, Kim laughed. "You're all insane."

"Is that a gay thing?" Pam asked, pulling out her phone. "Being called insane by your family?"

"No, that's just a family thing."

"Should I write that down?"

"Please don't."

Her mother squeezed her hand. "So? Will you come to book club? Regularly? We promise to be less weird about it."

"You're lying."

"I'm absolutely lying. We'll probably be weirder."

Kim looked around the room, at the rainbow napkins, at the women holding their books, at Aunt Claire's brand new Doc Martens, at her mother's hopeful face and thought about all the ways this could go wrong, and all the ways it was actually kind of perfect.

"Fine," she said. "But I'm not answering any more questions about flannel."

"What about Birkenstocks?" Susan asked.

"No."

"Subarus?"

"Absolutely not."

"Carabiners?"

Kim stood up. "I'm leaving."

"No, wait!" Her mother grabbed her arm. "We'll stop! We promise! No more questions about lesbian accessories!"

"Lesbian accessories?" Kim repeated.

"Is that not the right term?" Linda asked.

"There is no right term because it's not a THING."

"So you're saying," Carol said thoughtfully, "that lesbians can wear anything?"

"YES."

"Even those terrible Crocs?"

"If they want to, sure."

The room fell silent. Everyone looked at Deborah, who was wearing Crocs.

"What?" Deborah said defensively. "They're comfortable."

"They're hideous," Pam said.

"You're wearing a vest with ducks on it."

"These ducks are TASTEFUL."

"Guys," Kim said, but they were off, arguing about Crocs versus ducks versus Aunt Claire's new boots, and her mother was laughing, and Kim realized that this, this chaotic, overwhelming, deeply embarrassing display of love, was exactly what her mother had meant by "supportive."

They spent the next two hours actually discussing the book. Well, mostly discussing the book. There were occasional detours into topics like "what do you think about Sarah Paulson" and "is Ellen still relevant" and one very confusing fifteen-minute conversation about whether Kim had ever been to a "women's music festival," but overall, it was almost normal.

Almost.

At 9:30, as Kim was getting ready to leave, her mother pulled her aside.

"So," her mother said. "Next week we're reading 'Red, White & Royal Blue.' It's about two men, but we thought—"

"Mom."

"—it might be nice for you to see that we're reading all kinds of queer literature—"

"Mom."

"—and Pam's daughter is a lesbian too, and we thought maybe you two could—"

"MOM."

Her mother stopped. "What?"

"Are you trying to set me up with Pam's daughter?"

"Well, I wouldn't call it setting up. More like... facilitating a meeting between two young women who happen to share similar life experiences."

"That's literally what a setup is."

"Is it working?"

Kim stared at her mother. Her beautiful, ridiculous, trying-so-hard mother who had rainbow napkins and a reading list and a plan.

"What's her name?" Kim asked.

Her mother's face lit up like Christmas. "Jessica. She's very nice. She has a dog."

"What kind of dog?"

"A golden retriever. Does it matter?"

"It might."

"She's coming to book club next week."

"Of course she is."

Her mother hugged her, tight and fierce. "I love you, honey."

"I love you too, Mom. Even though you're completely insane."

"Is that a gay thing?"

"No, that's a you thing."

Kim left her mother's house with a container of leftover cheese ("You're too skinny"), a copy of next week's book ("Pam bought an extra"), and the resigned acceptance that she was now a permanent member of her mother's book club.

The things we do for family, she thought.

And then: Jessica better be cute.

Maya stared at her phone, squinting at the bright screen in her darkened bedroom. 3:47 AM. Excellent. She'd made it almost four whole hours into 2026 before the annual existential crisis kicked in.

"This is it," she whispered to her cat, Sappho, who was aggressively licking her own butthole and clearly had her priorities straight. "This is the year I become the person I pretended to be on my last three first dates."

She opened her Notes app, where seventeen previous lists of New Year's resolutions lived in various states of abandonment. Last year's resolution to "drink more water" had lasted until January 2nd, when she remembered that water was boring and coffee existed. The year before that, she'd resolved to "be more femme," which had resulted in one trip to Sephora where she'd spent $200 on products she didn't understand and eventually used as bookends.

But this year would be different.

MAYA'S 2026 RESOLUTIONS, she typed, then added three flame emojis because she was nothing if not optimistic.

1. Stop falling for straight girls.

She paused. This one had appeared on her resolution list every year since 2019. She'd even made a vision board about it once, which mostly consisted of pictures of Kristen Stewart and a red circle with a line through a photo of her ex-girlfriend pretending to be into women for "experimental purposes."

"Define 'straight,'" she muttered, remembering last month's disaster with Emily, who'd sworn she was bisexual but turned out to just really like the aesthetic of Home Depot and had a boyfriend named Todd.

2. Actually go to the gym instead of just paying for the membership and harvesting guilt.

Maya's gym membership was like a monthly donation to her own self-loathing. She'd been paying $45 a month for fourteen months and had attended exactly three times—twice to use the bathroom during a nearby coffee emergency, and once because she thought she saw her ex there and needed to prove she was "thriving."

3. Learn to cook something other than pasta and anxiety.

This one felt achievable. She'd watched at least thirty hours of cooking shows while eating cereal for dinner. Surely some of that knowledge had osmotized into her brain.

4. Stop texting exes after 11 PM.

She glanced at her message history. There it was—a 12:47 AM text to her ex-girlfriend Rachel that just said "remember when we were happy?" followed by five crying emojis and a gif of a sad turtle.

Rachel had responded: "Maya, we dated for three weeks in 2022. Please move on."

Fair.

5. Organize the Tupperware cabinet.

This wasn't even a personal growth thing. The Tupperware cabinet had simply become sentient and evil. Every time she opened it, containers and lids would avalanche out like a plastic waterfall of chaos. She was 67% certain there was a container in there from 2018 that still had something green in it. Something that was no longer identifiable as food.

6. Stop using "I'm basically a disaster bisexual except I'm a lesbian" as my entire personality.

She deleted this one immediately. Let's not get crazy.

7. Respond to messages within 48 hours instead of 48 days.

Her best friend Jordan had recently sent her a screenshot of their conversation thread with the caption "This you?" The dates showed Maya had read a message on March 3rd and responded on April 19th with "Haha yeah." Jordan had replied, "I asked if you wanted to be my maid of honor."

"In my defense," Maya had texted back, "I was busy."

"Doing what?" Jordan had asked.

"Thinking about responding to your message."

8. Acquire a personality trait that isn't just being gay and watching true crime.

She reconsidered this one. Did she really need other personality traits? Being gay and watching true crime had gotten her this far. Although "this far" was alone in bed at 3:52 AM arguing with herself about self-improvement while her cat judged her.

9. Stop treating Home Goods like it's a personality quiz where every throw pillow is a glimpse into my soul.

Last week she'd spent two hours in Home Goods, ultimately buying nothing but sending Jordan seventeen photos with captions like "Is this candle holder me?" and "Rate this decorative bowl, be honest."

Jordan had responded: "You don't even light candles and you eat cereal out of mugs."

Truth hurts.

10. Actually finish reading one of the seventy-three books on my nightstand instead of just restacking them aesthetically.

Her "to-read" pile had become more of an architectural installation. She organized them by color once, by size twice, and by "how smart they make me look" constantly. She'd actually read maybe four pages total across all of them, usually the first paragraph before she got distracted by her phone and fell into a TikTok hole about lesbian cottagecore or whether cats understand existential dread.

11. Stop saying "We should hang out!" to people I actively hope I never see again.

This was a survival skill in the queer community, where everyone knew everyone, and your ex's ex was dating your ex's cousin's best friend's roommate. But still. She needed to work on just saying "Nice seeing you!" and leaving it at that instead of making fake plans that neither party intended to follow through on.

12. Learn the difference between self-care and just being lazy.

Taking a mental health day? Self-care. Taking seventeen mental health days in a row and binge-watching every season of a reality show about people marrying strangers? Probably just depression with good marketing.

Maya looked at her list. Twelve resolutions. That felt like a lot. That felt like she was setting herself up for failure in twelve distinct categories.

Sappho had finished her grooming session and was now staring at Maya with the knowing judgment of an immortal being who had transcended earthly concerns like self-improvement.

"You're right," Maya told the cat. "This is ridiculous."

She deleted the entire list.

Then she typed one new resolution:

Try to be a little less of a disaster, but like, not so much that I become boring.

She stared at it for a moment, then added:

Also maybe text Jordan back within the week.

And finally:

Feed Sappho before she murders me.

She put her phone down, feeling oddly accomplished. The existential crisis was subsiding. She'd set reasonable expectations. She was growing.

Then her phone buzzed. A text from an unsaved number: "Hey, it's Emily. Todd and I broke up. Want to get coffee?"

Maya looked at her phone. Looked at Sappho. Thought about that whole 'stop falling for straight girls' thing

"New year, same me," she whispered, and started typing "Yes absolutely when are you free."

Some things never change. And honestly? That was kind of fine.

Happy New Year, friends! I hope 2026 treats us all gently (but not so gently we get boring). Thanks for being here and reading my chaotic brain spills. 🩷

If this made you laugh or made you feel something, you can buy me a coffee.

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