“Not really,” Emily said. “It’s . . . kind of a mess.” The waves crashed in front of her, cresting and falling. “I’m here with Rob, actually. But not romantically. We’re sleeping in different bedrooms.”

“Whoa,” Priya said. “Well. I can do the thing where I pretend to be a normal person and support you even if you’re doing something problematic. Or we can really talk.”

Emily laughed softly. “I think I might be beyond the normal-person response now. I feel like I keep making stupid decisions even though I know they’re stupid. I convince myself they’re right, that they’re the thing I’m meant to do, but in my heart I know they’re complicating everything even more.”

“What do you mean?” Priya asked.

“I think . . .” Emily thought about it; she thought about her life as if it were someone else’s. “I think Ezra disappointed me so deeply when he wasn’t there after our miscarriage that I keep testing the boundaries of his love for me. Kind of like—will you still love me if I do this? Or that? If I fly to Mexico? If I become a musician? If I show you all of the really messed-up parts of myself? I feel like I want him to prove to me that he loves me anyway, and he keeps showing me the opposite. So I push harder. I love him, but I think I’m afraid he doesn’t love me—he loves a particular version of me, but when things get tough he runs. What if he doesn’t come back?”

Priya cleared her throat on the other end of the line. “I could see how what you’ve been doing falls into that paradigm. And I think it’s quite possible that you’re doing some of this as a reaction to Ezra, but it seems to me that some of this is about your own happiness. For the last few months, you haven’t seemed happy at work—I really realized it when you were talking about being a sin eater. I was going to talk to you, but then you had the miscarriage and it didn’t seem the right time. Anyway, now you were given a chance to do something you used to love, so you went. You could’ve stayed, but you chose to leave, to go to Mexico and see if your dream was there. It’s not all about Ezra.”

Emily sat down in a little chair that had been placed on her balcony. “My mom always used to say that everything turns out the way it’s supposed to, that the decisions you make are the ones you were supposed to make.”

“Huh,” Priya said. “So we think we have free will, but we don’t?”