I was quiet then. I hated how awful doing the right thing made me feel.

“Those pins on the map,” he said. “They were places Dulcie and I could only talk about, at the end. Could only dream about seeing. The grief she felt, every day, when she saw what was going to happen to me, without her. I had her. A whole lifetime. And now I’m stuck. I can never move. Never change. Only grow older and never die. And I would do it again. I would give her everything. I had no choice. But she did. She just didn’t know what it would cost me.”

I listened. I wanted what he said to filter through what had set inside me, like the way water drips through rock and changes it. I wondered if it would take as long.

“The catch,” I said. “The downside.”

“Novo came for you,” Henry said. “He would have given up his life. Same as I have. But you saved him, Jude. You saved him. You freed him. And yourself too. I have never been prouder of anything or anyone in my endless life. And one day, yes, I promise, because of that, you are going to be fine.”

TWENTY-SIX

Henry Lake was right. Of course he was. I survived the equation of love plus loss. I am fine. I’m still here. Still bleeding. It starts off in a parallel place, recovery. Like when you’re lying in bed and everything is bone-heavy and the sky has no business being blue and you don’t see the point of any of it but you picture yourself, a part of yourself, getting up and eating breakfast and getting on with your day like you ought to, and then one day you do it. One day you actually do.

He offered me a way out before I wanted one.

“I’m a rich man,” he told me, a few months after Novo, when everything still felt like a bruise and it was all I could do to get out of bed in the afternoon and put one foot in front of the other. “I’m a rich man with nowhere to go. All I have are these pins on a map. When you’re ready, if you are ever ready, come to me and I’ll help. We can plan your next adventure.”

There was a morning.

I walked out of town alone on the coast path and when it got narrow I put one foot in front of the other and I smiled to myself that I could do this, that I had come this far without Novo and that this was happening. Life was happening again. Just to me. On my own.