“Ash, I love Layton,” she told me. “But relationships are complicated. You of all people should know that.”

And while I knew how relationships can be full of gray areas, I also knew that certain things were black and white. Still, she shut me down, as she always did, and refused to discuss it. It was as if anyone who questioned her about Layton was the enemy. Why she would defend him and subject herself to that kind of treatment was beyond me. It’s not beyond me anymore.

21

Larger Than Initially Reported

Out beyond the orbit of Neptune, there’s shit no one knows what to do with. Asteroids, planetoids, comets, and objects that they ridiculously decided to call “centaurs,” because they’re neither one thing nor another.

Pluto’s bouncing around out there. That sorry rock was stripped of planetary status in 2006. But scientists do believe there’s an actual ninth planet hiding from us.

Or at least they used to think it was a planet.

A few years back, a theory emerged that planet nine was actually a primordial black hole, left over from the big bang. Seriously, I’m not making this up. We can’t see it, of course; we can only guess at its existence from its effect on the orbits of other random stuff. And at the heart of its darkness is a super-dense rock fifteen times the mass of Earth, but only about the size of a baseball.

Astronomers see this as a glorious facet of the universe. But they don’t get it. They don’t know what it really is . . . But I do.

It’s the drain at the bottom of the tub.

An article about the above-mentioned celestial oddity popped up on my news feed on Thursday morning, sandwiched between “Three Senators Indicted for Money Laundering,” and “Sixteen Adorable Dog Fails.” The headline read, “Primordial Black Hole May Be Larger Than Initially Reported.” But the article vanished from my feed before I could tap it. You know how that is. Once an article is gone, you can search for it for hours and never find it again.

Primordial black hole may be larger than initially reported. Today it was just clickbait for nerds. Tomorrow it might be the biggest understatement in the history of the world.

I didn’t sleep well on Thursday night, knowing how close the clock was ticking to Friday’s game. My dreams were vivid and troubled. I can’t remember them all, but I do remember one where I had a conversation with Angela. I was standing with her looking at her grave, but the date of her death was left blank.

“You’re not the reason I’m down there,” she said, “but actually, you are.”

I apologized. It was real and heartfelt, but she wasn’t having it.

“Don’t apologize, Ash,” she said, not angry, but firm. “Just do something about it.”