Ben doesn’t say anything. He just holds out his arms and everything in me sags in relief, and then I’m in his lap and he’s kissing my head, his arms tight around me.

I let myself fall into him, for him. Every single one of us is in free fall all the time—me, Ben, Earth itself, the stars. We fall and fall, without end, together.

That’s just physics. The falling. The always falling. Nothing ever lands, not really.

I look up at him, and I fall a little faster, and harder. I touch the tip of my nose against his. I’m okay with having nowhere to land, as long as I get to keep falling with him.

I take one last leap on my own:

“I love you.”

Did you know that the sun isn’t actually 149.6 million kilometers from Earth? It’s smack-dab inside Benjamin Tamura.

“I know,” he says, grinning. This boy is too smart for his own good.

“I have to explain some things I realized, but it might sound very weird because I was having an existential psychotic break in Boston Common earlier today. Which, by the way, was Yuri Gagarin’s fault. I haven’t had time to fully process it because I wanted to make soup for you.”

He laughs. “I am in so much trouble.”

I wrap my arms around his neck. “Me, too.”

“You made me soup?”

“It’s on your desk. Hannah helped. Italian wedding.”

“My favorite.”

“I know.”

Ben rests his forehead against mine. “Tell me what Yuri Gagarin did this time.”

“I thought it was personal,” I say, straightening up. “That the universe somehow had it in for me. Taking away everyone I love. I was trying to outsmart it. I thought if I could stay two steps ahead, I would have more control over the outcomes. But trying to have control was just my version of being a hungry ghost. Hannah wanted pills, I wanted control, but it’s the same thing—we’ve both been trying to outsmart the universe. But you can’t! Mostly because the universe doesn’t have a hit list. It’s just doing its thing, and it’s not personal—or, it is because I’m a part of it. Creation, destruction. Over and over. Me, you, my parents, Nah. My dad was a human, and now he’s the ocean. BUT HE’S THE SAME THING HE WAS BEFORE. He was always the ocean, and the ocean was always him. JUST IN DIFFERENT FORMS. I can’t fight that process. I can’t be mad at the wave for being a wave, because I realized I am the wave. We share the same cosmic encoding.” I stare at him, one final thing clicking into place. “I WAS NEVER AN ORPHAN BECAUSE WE ARE ALL COSMICALLY RELATED.”

Ben blinks. “Yuri Gagarin told you all of that.”