“I can’t stop my phrenic brain,” I whispered, pushing back my hair and squeezing my forehead with my right hand. “Maybe you could come into my room until I get to sleep?”

He walked with me back across the apartment and into my room where we sat down on the bed.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Get under the covers. I’ll sit here and talk to you.”

I curled up under them. I still didn’t feel 100 percent safe, but I felt safer than I had in a while. Jaden. I thought about all we’d been through together since the storm, and even before that. Kids in the old neighborhood. I thought about his crush on me, what a goofy kid he’d been. That had changed so much. The man before me was tall, handsome. For the first time, I admitted to myself that maybe, just maybe, these lights on inside me when he was around meant something.

“Hey, Makayla? Did you used to think about being famous when you were a kid?” he asked.

I rolled my eyes even behind my closed eyelids. I should’ve known that Jaden would be back to the questions. He’d let them die down in the last few days, but here we were, as safe as we were going to get, and he’d started up on them again.

“Yeah,” I said. “Thought I’d marry a prince and everything. Turned out that princes don’t come to our part of Brooklyn too often. At least, they didn’t used to. I guess if you’ve got apartments like this here now, anything’s possible.”

“Always the smart-ass,” Jaden said. “Can’t you ever answer one of my questions straight?”

“Just get jawing,” I said. “Answer your own question. I’m supposed to be the one going to sleep, not the one talking.”

“When I was a teenager, I’d get myself to sleep at night by thinking about being an Olympic cyclist,” he said. “I would imagine races where no one could even come close to me. I’d think them all the way through—the aches in my legs from peddling, the shortness of breath on the hills, it was all part of this enormous feeling of victory I’d get to at the end. Then I’d imagine the medal ceremony, and standing up at the top of the platform, but knowing that even though there was a second and third place, nobody had been within a mile of me when I crossed that line. I’d think it over and over. It was like what sucking your thumb feels like when you’re little—using part of yourself to soothe your entire self—but in this case it was my imagination, not my thumb.”