The Elizabeth he knew served the story of his life. She existed in his head as a pretty thing who opened his heart and broke it, who created space by leaving; and Robert exists beside me, as I exist beside him, all sparks and noise and alignment; but I am the one who has to live with myself. The Elizabeth in my head is relentless. She’s made of memories, mismemories, thoughts sprouted from smarter people’s thoughts and from misinformed people’s thoughts, too, and of judgments by people who use me as props in their own sagas and judgments about people I use in mine, and of habits, instincts, and emotions, but mostly memories and the beliefs they build. Sometimes, the flashbacks are like flesh wounds, surface-breaking and raw. Sometimes they’re closer to keloid scars, luminous and hard as mother-of-pearl under my skin. They are lodged in my body and mind, cobbled together to fill the shape of the person I believe myself to be. The Elizabeth I know serves the story of my life.

I hadn’t even realized how clipped my story felt until the morning I found myself face-to-face with Kayla Scott, who had every reason to size me up as a resource but didn’t. Instead, she looked at me like we were already connected. Like helping her and helping myself were the exact same thing. Like I was the channel, not the source. The current, not the charge. Like our supply was infinite already.

I’d almost forgotten what that felt like—to be seen as a channel and a current, to see that way, too. To communicate in an electric language that doesn’t feel like betrayal, after all. It feels like relief: getting to practice seeing and being seen that way with Bess, a new friend with a fresh start. It’s been so long since I’ve had a friend to practice with. To see what happens. To see.

Approaching the ticket window, I reach into my bag for my wallet and touch my paperback instead: an anthology of poetry written by dead women whose names have become clichés, whose poems once summoned in me an ecstasy and wonder so raw, so devastating that I considered this volume to be my personal Bible—my holy book, I liked to say. On the day we met, Stuart spotted me reading it at the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam, and he’d approached me as a stranger, quoting verse, and I’d said to myself, Why not? And I’d said to him, “I’m Elizabeth.” The rest became our history.