It’s probably Gertrude, Esther thinks. Esther decides that it is Gertrude. It makes her jaw lock so tight it hurts.

* * *

There is a story Esther tells herself, one she is still telling herself, where she meets Anais a little older.

Anais is conducting a book signing, and Esther is, for Anais, just one in a number of people. Esther sits down at her table—she gives her a broad, wooden library table, not one of those cheap folding ones. Anais’s smile curls delicately at its corners, and her gray hair is thick and lovely. Anais does not mind taking the time to listen, and so Esther thanks her with great grace. She says something that sounds more perfect and original than anything anyone has ever said about a book they love, and Anais knows exactly what she means.

Cora has a movie coming-out story. Counselor at a summer music camp, just broken up with her boyfriend, teaching a bunch of sixth-graders to play the oboe, and falling for the flute teacher. One of the senior counselors caught them making out in a shed that smelled like rosin and brass instruments. Cora told Esther that story on their first date. Of course she did; it’s a first-date story.

Esther envies Cora’s unwavering moment of recognition, how kissing a girl was such clear evidence, how everything being dealt with from there began from that point of certainty.

Esther believes, a little, that Cora got this story because she looks like she could be cast in one of those movies. It is easier to tell a story about a beautiful woman. Of course, Esther had crushes, had Hope and her Algebra II tutor, whom she liked to imagine giving things to: pretty notebooks, packaged pastries from the corner store, a necklace. She had an entire adolescence of baffled, stomach-aching love. She would have preferred the sharp and clear-cut moment instead of the silence and then the language unspooling uselessly into it. Long phone calls with her mother during college in which Esther layered explanation over explanation until she had to hang up or risk faltering, asking for reassurance: I mean, it’s there, right? You see it too?

When she was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, the truest stories Esther could tell about herself were Anais’s. The women were not only queer but also like Esther and grander and lovelier and more beautiful than Esther. Anais Casey, in her gray stone apartment, seated at her rolltop desk and writing across time.

* * *