She crouched close to him. He smelled like her expensive moisturizer, the one he claimed never to use. “Felix.”

His eyes fluttered. “Are you okay?”

“Your back is going to feel terrible in the morning.”

“I write. My back always feels bad in the morning.” She had heard him say it so many times now that she wondered if he had progressed to being able to say it in his sleep.

“Stephen’s dad died.”

Felix opened his eyes. This was one of her favorite things in the world, to get to see those big, dark eyes still soft with sleep and watch as they grew even softer when they focused in on her face. Whenever Ayanna noticed him looking at her this way, she knew it was working between them. How many people get looked at with such pleasure? There had been an excruciating year where they had broken up—her mental health had been bad, he’d been away at graduate school—where she had dated other people. Sometimes it was fun, sometimes it was sexy, sometimes it was consuming, but there seemed to be no one else on the entire planet who wanted her to feel as loved or desired as Felix wanted to make her feel. Then, it was clear he had registered what she said. Shook his head, his eyes suddenly wet. Felix sat up and looked at his phone, she sat on the small couch next to him and leaned her head on his shoulder.

“Are you going to help him talk to his dad?” Felix asked.

Ayanna sighed. Kept her eyes shut.

“I would, of course. But, I also don’t want to. I kind of think it would change everything.”

Felix leaned into her, rubbed his head against her shoulder. “You can say no. You don’t have to do things that make you uncomfortable.”

Ayanna shrugged away from him, stood up, and stretched her arms and shoulders. She could hear in his tone he wasn’t just speaking about Stephen. The office was a mishmash of them. It worked because she was a civilized person who liked desks. He was a chaotic back destroyer who could only write with his butt on something soft and his back propped by huge pillows. In the bookshelves were all the black notebooks Ayanna had filled with her own automatic writing, with the things she remembered about the golden path, her write-ups of the memorable encounters she’d had with the dead, and the thank-you notes from people who claimed to feel some sort of peace from the encounter. A box filled with FOIA requests about government research on the doors, mostly blacked out, but every once in a while, a long glimpse into a different, more neutral view of her childhood. A printout she had done of an internet thread about a mysterious woman who appeared to people that sometimes Ayanna allowed herself to fantasize was Olivia. She turned around and faced him.