Alex beams at us, bundled in a scarf and beanie, with comically large hipster glasses that look out of place on his round face. I almost comment on the glasses—he wasn’t wearing any tonight—but I haven’t found my voice yet. Endsley glances at my face and almost smiles.

“He bought those on the street,” he says. “To annoy me, mostly. He didn’t take them off the whole time he was there.”

He takes the phone back and begins to click buttons, presumably looking for another picture to show me. I’ve stopped crying.

I want to thank him, but instead I’m hastily putting together clues about his strange, authorial existence: the flip phone, the well-made jeans faintly stained with mud around the knees and hems, the litany of photos he deems worth keeping.

Part of me wonders if he is just distracting me from Jenna. Why doesn’t he want to talk about her?

I can feel myself spiraling, so I quickly say, “Thank you for showing me the pictures.”

He doesn’t look up from his phone. “It’s fine.”

An unspoken You’re welcome hangs in the air, but he doesn’t grab it and pull it down, so we sit in silence.

I let my head fall back as I try to take in the whole mural, but I only manage to see the tip of the lighthouse, a smudge of a lantern hanging from a bookcase.

If Jenna were here, she probably would have already put herself and Endsley at ease.

“Can I see you tomorrow?” I ask the lighthouse, too cowardly to watch his face as he rejects me. “When we’re both more awake?”

My eyes focus on the painted waves that crash fretfully at the bottom of the jagged hill the lighthouse sits upon. Somewhere, an entirely new pod of whales is born and dies before N. E. Endsley—author of beloved books and potential co-Jenna acknowledger—sighs again, and says, “Maybe.”

I straighten, surprised, and we look at each other for a long time, his eyes narrow and circumspect. If this looking could be personified, his blue would be the rough gray-blue of a terrible storm and mine would be the lighter blue of the ocean rising up to meet it.

I want to make concrete plans, pick a time and place and reality when we will meet tomorrow, but trying to pin N. E. Endsley to a plan would be fatal. Storms have no masters.

His stare is unrelenting. I wonder what worlds he sees behind my eyes.