Once the reading was under way, Leslie found it impossible to stay focused on what Megan was saying. The essay was as amorphous as advertised. It seemed to be about her body, and … icebergs? And her father, who was … also an iceberg? Leslie checked her phone and was disconcerted to see that she already had a response from Marcus. She had imagined—hoped was too strong a word—that he wouldn’t reply at all, that her email would simply be registered in her karmic ledger without any need for it to be acknowledged in actual reality. But here was Marcus, alive in her in-box. She looked up and saw that she was attracting a glare from her seatmate, an older woman with a long braid of white hair whom she’d seen at past readings. The woman pointed at Leslie, then at the reader at the lectern. Leslie pointed at her phone.

“I’m texting!” she said in a stage whisper. “Sorry, I’m too busy texting!”

This drew smirks from her friends sitting in the row in front of them, but she did put her phone in her bag. She wasn’t as rude as she pretended to be.

“If the heart is located outside the body, is it still of the body?” Megan read. “If ice is no longer solid, will it cease to be my heart? When I melt, who will drink what is left behind? Thank you.”

Amid the applause, Leslie returned to her phone. Marcus’s email was short. “Les,” it said. “Very glad you sent this. I think of you often. Can’t wait to catch up. Till soon, M.”

She was torn between hating her past self—the very recently past self who had sent that email—and enjoying the surge of gratitude she felt for Marcus’s response. She was skeptical of gratitude. Like humility, it was what people told you to feel after you’d been fucked over. Marcus had been awful, drugged-out and petty and selfish in the most unjustifiable ways. But the sheer reminder of his existence broadened her outlook. The world was not Missoula.

She felt something cold against the back of her neck and turned around.

“Cold Smoke?” Cal said, holding a beer. “There’s a couple IPAs left, too.”

“This is great,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Thought she was pretty good,” Cal said. “Really poetic language.”

“Definitely,” Leslie said. She sipped her beer, which was not as cold as it had felt against her neck.

“Hey!” Cal said to a retired UM professor. “So glad you could make it, Jim.”

“I’m still alive, aren’t I?” Jim said. He cuffed Leslie on the shoulder, harder than was necessary. “Got a cigarette for an old man?”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to have any, Jim,” she said.

“I’m eighty-two goddamn years old,” he said. “Nobody gives a fuck what I do.”