For a moment, in my mind, I let us go, like birds leave the land or swimmers push off gently from the side of the pool. I let us out, together, into the air, so we were heavy, and the rushing of it past me was so quick and quickly over that I felt every part of it, can feel it still, the weight of us, the flat of the water rushing upward. I could never tell a soul well enough what that was like. In my mind, I could have done it forever, falling and not landing. It is insatiable, oblivion. Addictive, action without consequence. Falling without landing is an impossible habit to kick.

But in the real world, I stepped back from the edge. Novo didn’t see it coming until it was done, my choice made, our last chance over, and there was nothing else but the word in the black air as I found my voice and told him, “No.”

TWENTY-THREE

Neither of us spoke as we walked back the way we had come, to the beach. So cold. The wind pulled at the top of the water, pulled at the sand. The moon was high now, the land and the water both silver, and Novo’s face when he looked at me was lightless and empty. Three cargo ships on the horizon, gray Lego blocks in the haze. We sat down on the cold ground and I stared at the line of stuff left by a higher tide—shell fragments and matte cuttlefish and the weeds lying brown like dead bracken, wet and rotten and all of it the lace-edged shape of the gone water. The sand was large and gritty. I picked up a fistful and let it leak between my fingers, and it left the palm of my hand white with fine, soft dust.

There was a cold, dark well where my stomach should have been. I swallowed and I could taste its blackness and I hated everything then. I felt it bloom in me and it was ugly, knife-sharp, and I wanted to press the whole world out like a flame. The mass of the universe never changes, and you can’t have something for nothing, and loss goes hand in hand with gain, and I knew all that but it didn’t make it any better. The gulls were screaming and my spine was stretched tight as elastic and the water slapped hard at the ground. Everything in that Now was cruel. Everything tasted bitter. I wanted to scream. I wanted to break things.

Novo put his mouth against my wrist. I felt him there, his lips warm, and the soft of his tongue. He spoke into me.

“Henry told you,” he said, and I said, “Yes.”

He shook his head, my wrist in his hand, his mouth still on my skin. He breathed out, slow.

“Don’t hate him,” I said.

“Why not?”