“I don’t know. You don’t stop loving someone because they lack the means to love you back. A spouse remains a spouse, although you’ve agreed to be friends. A lover remains a lover, although they lie unconscious for months at a time, unable to breathe, their heartbeats rationed by machines.” His touch does not excite her, but it excites something nonetheless, a frisson of animal instinct, plucked wholesale from a shelf in the back of the brain. “I want… I want to love them better, I suppose.”

The devil slots cartilage and tendon together, one joint after another, silent until at last, “It won’t bring them back.”

“I know. And even if it could, I would not want them this way. Some loves are homes, some are halfway houses. Rest stops, gap years. They were meant to only stay for a while, so their breath loosens enough to let them live.” She sits up, a spill of strings pooling in her navel. “I wish I wasn’t merely that. I wish this was easier.”

The devil says nothing.

“Remake me,” she tells him for the hundredth time. “With a heart that has no room for want, no space to disgrace itself with selfish impulse. Fill it with ice. Fill it with lead, heavy as hope. Let that heart beat with something better than blood, something less hot, less hungry. I want…” She wets her mouth. “I want to want less.”

The devil says nothing still. This was the bargain she’d made on that cold blue night, and the one he’d fulfill. She’d asked him for a new heart. He’d told her, dressed then in the bones of an old man, the calcium papered with moss, that there was only one way, that he’d have to build it from the one she wears behind her breast.

And she said: Yes, oh yes.

He stares. For one lucent moment, he thinks of telling her no, of a dialogue with the one who’d split her open, who’d left a map for him in her ventricles, dotted lines where they’d run their knife, their hands, where they’d bruised the muscle with a love malformed and tender. But she’d paid in promises, the only currency that matters. And besides, who was he to speak? Humanity, if one is lucky, is a hundred years of hurt and hope.

“I pray he’s worth it,” the devil says, his harvest pocketed.

“One day soon, I think he will be.”

The devil nods. Contrary to what many believe, devils do not like to lie. “I will see you tomorrow night.”

And just as she has every night before, she sighs and whispers without contempt:

“Yes.”

some breakable things