“It’s fine,” she said, and immediately wished her voice had sounded more neutral. “I leave tomorrow anyway for work, and then, I guess, I’ll fly straight from there.”

For a brief second, Felix made a face Ayanna could only describe as “I’m making the same mistake again.” Then, he nodded, smiled, and said they should go to bed.

24

On the plane, another dream about an earthquake, this time a city where every door was blue. If she opened the right one, Olivia would be on the other side. Ayanna had woken up with a start. She tried to watch a critically acclaimed television show about mean white people in the past keeping secrets from one another and being wittily cruel to one another. But she couldn’t focus on it, even though almost every person on the show was beautiful. The door, the door. Her therapist had said maybe she was overvaluing her dreams. Sometimes, truly, they’re just your brain processing the day. The more the dream recurred, the more Ayanna thought it was a vision. She did not want to tell her therapist that, though, because it sounded like the first step to being diagnosed with delusions of grandeur.

When watching TV did not take Ayanna away from her thoughts, she leaned her head against the plane’s side, close to the small window. All her friends seemed to have felt an uplift when they hit their thirties. Stephen was killing it at work, Felix had sold a book based on his dissertation about fringe Black faith groups, and Jane was having a baby. They had all been lost and uncertain in their twenties, still made gestures toward having those feelings whenever Ayanna broached the subject, but Ayanna perceived them all as being mostly content.

They seemed to know how to create new things to want, how to enjoy the up-and-down progress of being alive. Ayanna felt like they were all coasting on their bikes, arms spread wide, and she was still trying to get her shoelaces unstuck from the gears. She knew, had articulated it in therapy—how she loved the formality and rigor of calling it “articulated”—that sometimes she was resentful of how Felix could move on from his grief. Yes, he had lost a friend, not a sister. But he had been through something deeply traumatic and loved living.