I remember how tightly he held on to my hand sometimes, when I was touching him and he didn’t want me to stop. I remember the wide fit of his fingers through mine, the lock of our mouths, the bellows-strength of our breathing. It hurts to remember that now, just like the bruises. It’s hard, like I’ve said already. A fist in the chest.

Because bubbles burst. Heads get pulled out of the sand. Love is magic. But reality is the wall you wake up driving toward, with bad brakes. You can’t avoid it. It’s always coming. I know that much.

I woke up next to him, sun flooding warm through the skylight above my bed. I woke up and he was smiling and so beautiful. In that moment, he was the sum total of all the things I thought I wanted. Right then, I would have gone anywhere, without a doubt, without a backward glance, with him. And he knew it.

“Jude,” he said.

“Novo.”

I curled in closer to his body, the body I swear I will be able to draw from memory until the day I die. Every mark and crease and curve of muscle. Every bump and scar and stretch of flesh. He breathed out. He rested his chin on the top of my head.

The knock on the door was sudden. Hard. We both flinched. Both held ourselves dead still.

“Who is it?” I said.

Henry’s voice on the other side of the door was thick with panic. The sound brought the rest of the world back with a jolt. I hadn’t thought about him, or my mum, not really, not much. It could have been a year since I had seen either of them. Or a minute.

“Something’s happened,” he was saying. “I can’t stop it. Quick.”

I got up and opened the door. Henry was ragged and disheveled. Out of breath.

“What is it?” Novo said, still lying in my bed. I looked back at him and even then, even in that moment, I thought: Just stay there. Don’t move. Ever.

“Something snapped,” Henry said. “It’s not working. Jude needs to come home. Now.”

NINETEEN

“I am home,” I said. “Look,” and I sat back on my bed next to Novo, grabbed a handful of my sheets, felt the breeze from the window above us on my face, heard the gulls. My room, clean and spacious and sunlit at the top of the house. “I’m so here,” I said.

“No,” Henry told me. “You think you’re here but you’re not. You’re with him. In between things. Outside them. You know this, don’t you? He told you this is how it works?”

“Obviously he has,” I said, but of course, I knew I didn’t fully understand it.