Vathorem pulled his long gray hair off his shoulder. He sighed. “You got to care less.”

“Care less? Care less about what?”

“Everything. Anything.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t,” he said. “What I mean to say is you need to learn to just see the world how it is. You’re so wrapped up in the future, in the what-ifs and might-bes. And when you’re not running the possibilities, you’re stuck in the past. Ariah, you don’t really live. You got no sense of the present, the moment to moment. And you need it. You need to learn to feel what you feel—just feel it as it unfolds—and feel what someone else feels, too, without trying to fit it in to some future life or make it make sense with some past thing.”

“Actions have consequences.”

“I’m not saying they don’t. I’m saying you spend a whole lot of time and effort trying to force yourself to feel and think and be one way instead of another. It eats up your energy. Ariah, you’ve gotten nowhere with this. Maybe you don’t know who you are in some grand, total way. Maybe you’re not a person like that. Maybe who you are changes moment to moment. That’s all right. That’s fine. But if that’s the case, let yourself change moment to moment.”

The words sunk in. They felt true. Later that night I tried to write Dirva about it. I wrote him about everything, partly for him, and mostly for me. It helped me to process the things Vathorem said, which often seemed simple at first and grew increasingly complex as I tried to implement his advice. I was curled up on the couch scratching away at a pad of paper when Sorcha came home. “Writing to Lor?”

“Yeah.”

“That old bastard do something awful again today?”

“No, he did something good, maybe.” I put down the half-written letter and looked at him. There was a confused pang of something, some unnamable want, some line waiting to be crossed between us. I looked away again, at Liro’s painting above the mantle. “Do you think I live in the present?”

There was a slight pause. “Fuck, Ariah, are you a seer? I swear, every other day you’ve got some new talent.”

“No! No. It’s something Vathorem said. He thinks I dwell too much on the past. And the future.”

“Yeah, that sounds like you.”

“He thinks I should change that.”

“Well, maybe. You’re fine the way you are,” he said, “but you might be wound less tight.”

He dropped his violin case in a chair and sat down next to me. He held my feet in his hands to warm them up. “It’s getting on to winter. It gets cold here, you silly bastard. Why don’t you ever build a fire?”

“It’s a lot of work.”