“What’s your plan?” Mum said, and she meant, like, that afternoon, but I told her anyway.

“I’m going away,” I said.

“Really? Where?”

“You know. Traveling. I want to see some World.”

She looked at me for a second. “Good idea.”

Passed the war memorial and the charity shop. Mum smiled at me. “Henry will be pleased,” she said.

“What did he tell you?”

“He’s been waiting,” she said. “He wants to help you.”

And that was it. It was that easy. When I started out, I was just walking. I had no idea what I was doing, honestly, only a need to shut the door behind me and go, because it was time, now I’d decided, to get on with the business of living. Mum and Henry waved me off at the door, still drinking the champagne that Mum had splurged on, her chanting, “Postcards, postcards, POSTCARDS!” at me, all the way up to the corner of the road, where I turned and waved, and blew kisses and stepped on my own out into the world and kept going.

I took a bus, sat at the back, watching the raindrops gather and collect in quick lines on the windows, the kid desperate beyond everything to get out of its stroller, the old man muttering to himself, and the girl in tears on her phone. At the station, I stood on the freezing platform and waited for whatever train would be coming from the left, trusting my instincts over my sense of direction. Trusting my gut. Even now, the way I feel isn’t swallowing me up if I keep moving. It’s the only cure I’ve found for what I’ve lost. Going somewhere. Anywhere. All the time. In my head I see stampedes of horses, torrents of water, jet planes, spacecrafts, all light speed and hurtling. I think about Superman, flying round the earth so fast that he slows it down on its axis, stops time and all that. It’s ridiculous, impossible, I know, but I can’t help it, because ridiculous and impossible have been given whole new definitions for me.

At the airport, I couldn’t sit still. Part of me wanted to run home and never leave, like Henry. The rest of me smiled at everyone, delighted with this brand-new self, this healing of wounds and shedding of skin. After takeoff, I relaxed, almost, breathing out into the cabin, making my donation to the noisy, communal air. The way I feel about Novo was in everyone’s overhead bin then, everyone’s seat pocket, everyone’s lungs. I thought, We are all in it now, the traveling toward a life, five hundred miles an hour, at thirty-five thousand feet.

It’s love, I told myself. It’s love, for god’s sake, and who doesn’t want to be a part of that?

TWENTY-SEVEN