—
AFTER DINNER WHENWyatt goes back to his hotel, I walk him to the car. We lean against it and Wyatt pulls me close, stroking the uneven sheet of my hair. He is solid and strong and vital, the best argument against death anyone could give. “I wanted to do this when you came in,” he murmurs. “You looked so…crushed.”
I tighten my arms around him. “I wanted you to do this when I came in,” I reply. “But I know why you didn’t.” He is painted against the night sky, wearing a crown of stars. “I almost died myself, when I saw you at the table with Brian.”
“I must admit, I wasn’t expecting that invitation.” Wyatt hesitates. “He’s…he’s a good man, Olive. If I couldn’t be with you, I’m glad he was.”
I know how much it cost Wyatt, with all his casual confidence, to admit this.
“But notthatglad,” he adds, and he kisses me.
I don’t know how or why it always feels like the first time, when this happens. I press even more close to him, craving him, desperate. It shouldn’t surprise me anymore, but it does: after I fill my senses with Wyatt, I am only hungrier.
He rests his forehead against mine. “Easy, Olive,” he murmurs. “You don’t have to try to crawl under my skin. You’re already there.”
“I miss sleeping next to you,” I say.
“I miss waking up to you. This is a bit like some gothic fairy tale, isn’t it, where you’re mine during the day, but he gets you after sundown.” He brightens. “Let’s take a nap tomorrow and break the curse.”
If only it were that simple. If only it weren’t a curse of my own making.
I watch him get into his car and drive off. Instead of going inside, I sit on the porch swing. I think about Win, and about Meret, and then—as if I have conjured him—Brian steps outside.
He doesn’t say a word, just sits down next to me. I can hear the whistle of crickets, and the peepers calling from a pond in the woods. “It’s late for them,” Brian muses. “Almost fall.”
I wonder if our conversation will be boxed into things like weather and flora and fauna, because it’s safer that way, until there’s virtually nothing we can talk about at all.
I force myself to look him in the eye. “Thank you for doing that.”
He knows I am talking about stepping aside, so that Wyatt can go to Meret’s match. One of Brian’s shoulders lifts and falls. “Well. I can’t undo it.” Meaning: Wyatt. “So.”
He leans forward, clasping his hands together between his knees. “About Win.”
“Yeah.”
“Was it peaceful?”
“I suppose. Her husband was there when it happened.” I glance at Brian. “I didn’t deliver her letter, just so you know.”
He looks at me, surprised. We sit in the pool of porch light and watch as one prematurely red leaf lifts in the wind and detaches from a tree, beginning a death spiral.
“Dawn,” he says, “I’m sorry.”
I smile a little. “I think we’ve both exceeded our lifetime quota of those two words.”
He continues as if I haven’t spoken. “I feel like that,” he says, gesturing to the leaf, which looks like a splash of blood on the grass. “There are so many winds pushing me around, but they’re allfeelings.” He says this as if it is a curse word. “For a scientist, that’s like kryptonite.”
I sit very still, giving him the space to finish. “I was mad at you,” he admits. “When you left, I was so angry. I couldn’t wait to tell you off. But then, I almost didn’t get the chance, and that changes everything. It was like I was seeing from a completely different vantage point, from a view I hadn’t considered. We have fifteen years of a foundation. Maybe the hurricane has knocked down the house, but the bones, they’re still there.” Very slowly, so that I have time to draw away if I want, Brian threads his fingers through mine. “We can build on it again, and this time, it’ll be twice as strong because we know where the flaws were, and how to fix them.” His eyes hold me captive. “You can’t discount what we had, Dawn. I know you can’t.”
Once, when Meret was in elementary school, she came home and burst into tears because she had told a friend about a secret crush she had on a boy, and by the end of recess, everyone knew.I willnevertrust anyone again,she sobbed. My first instinct was to tell herYes, you should only trust me, forever and ever. But instead, I asked Meret how she decided if someone was trustworthy. She thought about this for a few moments, counting down her small list of friends. One girl had shared half her Kit Kat. Another slid to the side of her seat at the lunch table when there wasn’t any more room, so Meret could sit with her. Such tiny acts, and so critical. You trust someone who makes space for you in his or her life…so much so that if you leave, they will feel the absence. You give someone your vulnerable, unshelled heart wrapped in a question:What will you do with it?
“It’s hard not to see this as Fate—you surviving a plane crash, so you can be with him,” Brian muses. “But if Fate is the notion that you’re destined for a given outcome, based on who you are and what you were meant to do, then a quantum physicist has to say that’s bullshit, by definition. On the other hand, if Fate means the lack of free will—the idea that you have no control over which timeline you wind up in—then you’re just a pawn experiencing whatever the multiverse throws at you.” He glances up. “In which case the chances of you winding up with him, or you winding up with me, are completely random.”
“You’re saying this isn’t my fault?”
He smiles ruefully. “Well. In a quantum sense. That doesn’t make it hurt any less.”
When Brian leans forward and kisses me, I let him. In that quiet, simple touch of his lips to mine are fifteen years of knowing how he folds his T-shirts, and buying satsumas the one time of year they show up in the grocery store because they are his favorite, and feeling him press a packet of M&M’s that he’s smuggled from home into my hand at the movies. It’s his shoulder against mine while we watch Meret’s back rise and fall in her crib, and the smell of his skin and the way my snow tires magically appear on my car every year without me thinking about it.
