When we’re in the elevator, I am shocked by how Valerie says nothing. She was my top choice for supernatural guardian, the helpful, wizened godmother with a staff made of books and sheet music that would steer me toward my fate. But at a time when she might issue counsel, she is silent, focused on the layering of her long necklaces. I find the piano music coming through the elevator speakers intensely annoying.

As she unlocks the door to her apartments, I hear my mouth say, “You aren’t going to say anything?”

Valerie inclines her head and looks at me, key paused midturn.

“What would you like me to say?”

This makes me angry. Supernatural guardians are supposed to have the answers, not ask the questions.

When I don’t speak, Valerie says, “I believe you are at a crossroads, dear. And there is not a soul in this world or the next that can make your decision for you.”

“That’s it? That’s your sage advice? I’ve got two choices and you won’t help me?”

She turns the lock and opens the door and we’re in the guest room and my shaking hands are unzipping my bag and only then does she say, “I was married at the age of twenty-one, in my third year in college. We met when I accompanied one of his opera performances as a final for my piano courses. He was wonderful and went on to sell albums and give performances all over the world.” She sighs, her eyes closed in a way that I recognize as trying to drag concrete memories from the unreliable past we carry in our heads. “We traveled the world, he and I. We ate every kind of food imaginable. He used to say it was because opera singers weren’t supposed to be so skinny.”

This makes my stomach hurt, because I am desperate to travel the world with Nolan like this but I must be lava and wind and fire. I must be immovable, so I concentrate very hard on folding clothes into my bulging duffel.

“I was a widow by thirty-two,” Valerie says, like it’s a history lesson and it doesn’t hurt her to think of it. “He died in his sleep. A brain aneurism that led to a stroke. It was all very quick and there wasn’t much to be done about it. Highly unusual for his age, but there you have it, dear. We are all victims of unlikely statistics at least once in our lives. We had a great deal of money stored up by then, enough for me to spend the rest of my days holed up in our too-large home in the big city with our only baby, Alexander, for company. I’m an orphan, you know, and George’s family did not care much for my lack of high breeding.”

This I find completely absurd, but I say nothing.