My reflection rippled across the surface of the black coffee in my mug, warping my face. Sleep had sobered us up, enough for us to putter around, kind of shy, in the hotel room the next morning. Unused to our private world of a double-bed and soft sheets, of brushing our teeth together after a shower, with me bumping into him because I suddenly didn’t know how to work my body. I deleted Yusuf’s post—honestly the thing was up for five hours, tops—after some giggling can you believe we did that talk. He agreed that we’d both been wound up and he felt better after venting for a while. We said goodbye to our little honeymoon of a hotel and packed the car. I shifted our seats back so that we could lay down and feel the road glide underneath us.

“I know I don’t talk a lot,” he said, eyes locked on the gray ceiling of the car. “Or I seem like I’m not… here all the time.”

“I don’t mind. You don’t have to explain.”

“No.” He risked a glance over at me, working at something with his jaw muscles. “I want to.”

“Okay, shoot.”

He sucked in a breath.

“I’ve spent most of my life breaking things down into tiny pieces and studying them. And arguing with other people about what the pieces do or don’t do. And arguing about whether or not we can objectively even say if the pieces are there.”

He blurted this all, giving me the idea that he’d practiced this in his office back at the Compound. I could see him frowning at the whiteboard and starting over, no that’s not right. Then pressing his thumb into the center of his forehead like he always did when he was frustrated. Picturing him like this made my heart flip-flap against my ribs.

“I’ve told you about the wave-function, right?” he continued. “About how things get strange on the quantum level. Unless you’re practically staring at an electron you can’t really assume it exists in a specific place. You can think of it as a three-dimensional cloud of probability and only when it’s observed does that probability collapse and you can find the electron in a fixed spot.”

“Weird.”