Tupper gazed out the window at the gray industrial landscape. It wasn’t a nice view, but it was a view.

He sighed deeply. “That’s the thing about Elizabeth.”

Roy checked the time on his phone, hating to interrupt his lonely neighbor when he might be about to bare his soul. “I’m so sorry, but I have a meeting.”

“It’s great. I mean, it has the potential to be great. But you’ve only just begun. You have to keep going, fill it out and finish it.” Peaches thrust Roy’s flimsy pages across the bar. They were dirtied with what looked like mustard and coffee and tomato soup, and there were scribbles in green crayon, or perhaps eyeliner. “I made notes. Don’t feel like you have to listen to any of them.”

Roy took back the manuscript. It was even thinner than he remembered. Forty-seven pages was not a book. He sniffed it. Not mustard, curry. He’d given the pages to Peaches yesterday, printing them out and waiting in the bar, pretending to write until she turned up. She’d said she was an English major, and he’d much rather she read it than someone he lived with and had to see at breakfast, like Wendy or Shy. They wouldn’t be able to hide their shame and disappointment if it was terrible. Peaches had not been party to his cinnamon bun binges or his ability to look at a blank wall, thinking about Starbuck and Apollo and Cylons and Jane Seymour, for minutes on end. And he never had to speak to Peaches again if he didn’t want to. He’d thought about giving it to Tupper, but he didn’t want to depress him even more.

Peaches was honored that a renowned author had asked for her opinion. She’d been thinking about Roy’s pages all day. They were a welcome distraction from her embarrassment over catching Stuart Little and his wife, high on their stoop, and her annoyance at her husband, Greg, who would not shut up about it.

“The whole boy-girl thing is like The Blue Lagoon in space, which I love. I mean, it’s genius that they’re up there without their families. They are their family now. But at the same time, they have these urges. I just think you need to be careful to keep it fresh and not like, too Blue Lagoony. Like, Bettina should not get pregnant and the baby should not eat bad space ice cream and almost die. And maybe neither of them should be white. In the future, no one is white, everyone is beige.”

It was too much to take in. Roy shook his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know it. The Blue Lagoon, what is that?”

“Oh! Woo!” Nurse Peaches blew her wispy strawberry blond hair out of her face and blushed, presumably because she was making sounds, not words.