“I don’t know, Jude. Dulcie wouldn’t have done it either, if she’d known. It’s why I didn’t tell her. And we both paid for that. It broke her heart to leave me.”

“I love him,” I said.

Henry smiled at me. He took my hands in his, and those seen-everything eyes burned into mine. “And how will you do that, Jude? How will you prove it?”

In that moment, I realized the truth. But I could barely get the words out. “I have to let him go,” I said. “I have to,” and I felt it then, the sheer scale of that. The lifelong pain and weight as soon as I heard myself speak.

Henry just looked at me. Deeply sad, and deeply alone.

“Is there another way?” I said. “Can I go with him?” but even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t that simple.

“If only it worked like that,” Henry said. “But it doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because you are the planet and Novo is your moon. If you left, it would change everything. Reality would feel it. Like a scar. You’ve seen. He can only come to you. He is here only for you. And you’ve got a whole life here.”

I remembered the sight of my mother then, colorless with grief when she thought I’d gone missing. And I knew Henry was right.

It was below me, ahead of me, all around me, the Grand Canyon of loss. But still, I knew what I needed to do. For Novo. And it was the last thing on earth I wanted.

TWENTY-TWO

The last time I saw Novo, he knocked on the window above my bed. I opened my eyes and it came to me like a wrecking ball how much I loved him, how I had never wanted to feel that way about someone in my life, and now that I had, how I never wanted to stop feeling it either.

“Let me in, sleepyhead,” he said, and I opened the window and he lowered himself down and pulled his shirt off, up over his soft swell of stomach, the deep cage of his ribs. The solid truth of Novo always shocked me. Larger than life. Physical magic. He lay down behind me, stretched himself out against the length of my back, his arm threading the space between my side and my elbow, his breath on the back of my neck.

I didn’t know what time of day it was. I didn’t even know I’d been asleep.

“Where have you been?” I asked him.

“Walking,” he said.

I turned toward him, touched the planes of his face with my fingers. He still didn’t know yet, what Henry had told me, what I had decided. I didn’t ask any questions. And I didn’t tell him.

“I missed you,” I said.