He wouldn’t meet my eyes when he finally returned. His body was dark against the sky—starred and painted over with a haze of pink like whatever planet we were on was sailing through fog. The muscles at the corners of his jaw worked again and again. I’d shredded a palm leaf into strips and had been braiding and re-braiding it for hours.

He sank into the sand and the cannonball of his weight ricocheted into me. Shadows from the fire played across his face. The iridescent beetle shells of his eyes. When he finally spoke, I could barely hear his flat voice over the waves.

“Hayes, what are you not telling me?”

33

A FRAYED KNOT

His question was a trap, of course. He knew everything.

We’d jumped to an alternate version of Montréal during a festival where people had hung garlands of flowers outside their windows and all along the streetlamps of St. Catherine’s Street. Yusuf had left early one morning—I asked the Envisioner to show me what happened and it spun together a video that I only watched for a few minutes before it hurt too much—to walk the flower-bordered streets. When a voice had called out to him from a table outside a little café, he’d turned to find Kaori. Just Kaori, in a gray knit cardigan and her glasses, like they were running into each other on the Oxford campus a million years ago. She’d smiled at him and said he was right on time. He’d thought it was an alternate version of her that belonged in this world until her lopsided smile gave her away.

What are you not telling me?

He stared at the useless palm leaf in my hands and couldn’t bring his eyes up to mine. Out of everything I’ve done, the one thing I’d take back is lying to him when he asked me for the truth.

“Nothing,” I told him.

“I know you’re lying. I ran into Kaori. Our Kaori.”

“You know she’d… she’d say anything to get us to follow her back to—”

“Please. Just—stop.”

His eyes hit mine. Even in the dim light from the stars and moon overhead, the hurt that I could see there knocked into my chest and bowled me over. An Envisioner detonation behind my ribs.

“I need to hear the truth from you.”

“You wanna hear that I’m saving you?”

“Don’t do that. Don’t turn this around into you doing something heroic for me. I left our universe because you made it seem like Kaori was going to use you to change the world into whatever she wanted. Not that she needed you to fix some mistake you made.”

“The mistake being keeping you alive.”

“At what cost? I don’t want to die, but how can I live knowing that because I’m alive billions of people will die?”