“Steph,” I called. It was quiet here; I heard the sound of children playing in the park nearby, and I knew my voice had carried.

At first I thought she would pretend she hadn’t heard me, but then she turned around. She was dressed all in black—black button-down shirt, pants, shoes. It made her seem older. Like a stranger.

I caught up to her on the sidewalk. “You were just going to leave without talking to me?”

The expression on her face was unreadable. “I didn’t think it was the right place.”

“Is the sidewalk better?”

She shook her head just slightly. “Don’t make this worse.”

A hot rush of anger. I pulled The Dream of a Common Language out of my bag and thrust it at her. “I wanted to give this back to you.”

She accepted the book unhappily. She took a quick breath, then looked past me toward the park. “Let’s go for a walk.”

She headed for the trees without waiting.

I followed.

—

“It was a mistake,” she said.

She had led me down the block to a wooded picnic area. She sat down on a bench and stared at the woodchip-strewn ground. I stood in front of her, arms crossed.

“You can’t mean that,” I said.

“I do mean it. It was wrong. I’m sorry.” She wouldn’t look at me.

“But I thought we had a—a connection.” I heard the words emerging from me like the lines of a soap opera.

She looked frustrated. “Yeah, we had a connection, but it wasn’t the kind that lasts.”

“How do you know? We haven’t given it any time.”

“There’s no point. There’s no future for us.” She was twisting The Dream of a Common Language into a tube.

“Are you still with Lisa?”

She took a deep breath. “No.”

Everything I’d never allowed myself to hope for surged up inside me. “Steph—”

“Don’t,” she said, finally looking up at me. Her eyes were full of pain. “I’m not right for you. I’m just a stop on your journey. We could never begin a relationship—a real relationship—the way we started this. It’s all lies.”

I sank to my knees in front of her. “I never lied to you.”

She shook her head, looking past me.

“Please,” I said. “What I feel for you is the most honest thing I’ve ever felt.”

I reached for her hand, and she was so startled that she let me take it. The book fell out of her grasp. She seemed to struggle with something inside herself, and for a moment I thought I had won, but then she said deliberately, “You’re leaving. You’re going to MIT, for fuck’s sake, and I’m staying here.”

“We can keep in touch—”

“That’s not the answer. We can’t—I can’t.” She wrenched her hand out of mine.