As Ayanna was getting ready to go have brunch with Stephen, Jane, and Felix, she looked at her phone. There was a message from her mother: Hello. I have been trying to contact your father, but he has not responded to any of my messages. Tell him to call me.

Ayanna put her phone down. She rubbed her eyes, making circles with her palms, feeling her soft eyelids and long eyelashes, and taking one, two, three deep breaths. There was the impulse to immediately text back you didn’t invite me to my sister’s memorial service. Another to pick up the phone and force her to speak to her. Yet another to remind her mother they hadn’t spoken in years. The phone buzzed and buzzed. Her dad was in Europe. He had not returned to the US since deciding to go and walk the Camino de Santiago. They had not spoken on the phone since the start of school. He wrote her emails, long and ponderous, about the nature of life, of faith, about once being able to walk between worlds and now trying to stay fixed on the beauty of this one. You never walked between worlds, Ayanna thought, when she read these. I did, and now I’m alone and like this.

Sometimes he complained about the diet he had put himself on, mostly vegetables and fruit, porridges, and whatever he was served when visiting a monastery because he would not be rude. A few descriptions of landscapes or people or children playing sports with one another. She did not respond often to these or find them charming. His desire to find peace by walking a path dedicated to a god he did not believe in felt disturbing and out of character. It was also easy to consider that he had crossed an ocean to avoid her.

Ayanna picked the phone back up. Another series of texts from her mother: ??

Last night, your sister visited me. She told me where I put the necklace I’ve been looking for and asked for grandma’s cookie recipe.

Bullshit, Ayanna thought. She could call her therapist’s office and ask for an emergency session. Or could spend some time in bed journaling. The room felt too bright, her eyes were itchy, and Ayanna picked up the phone, put it gently in her trash can, fished it out, put it back in with more force and threw some note cards from her desk on top of it for good measure, heard it buzz against the metal, reached in again, then shoved it into her bag. What was the point of dealing with an unsolvable problem immediately? Her walls felt very white, as if someone had come in during the night and painted them a starker shade.