“Fine,” I answered him from Harvey’s arms. “But I won’t be back.”

He knew.

A timid breeze swept past me when I opened my mouth next, and of the things left to say, I could not decide between them. Because he did know: I was not the woman he’d married and he would have kept me just the same. There was something else hiding in the shadow across Lyman’s face, and as the sun retreated further and he disappeared from view even though none of us moved, I spoke the last words to pass between us.

“If you love her, Lyman, or ever did, you won’t let it happen again.”

I should have said something more. Before descending the hill—instead of admiring Harvey’s pale eyes and letting him lead me back to the car—I should have told Lyman to let the other woman go as well. She might have heard me, skulking behind some window overhead, tucked behind the curtain so as not to see me again. If I’d spoken, perhaps it would have shamed her into leaving on her own. But I made a choice, for me. I knew my name once and for all, and if I was not a memory—not an Extract No. 1 or otherwise—then their lives were no concern of mine.

“Don’t take me home,” I told Harvey when we were in the car.

“Where should we go?” he asked, and something constricted in my chest.

“I don’t care. Just not back to the Vault. Not yet.”

The Rialto Theatre was exactly as Camille and I had left it. Its wide and extravagant face still commanded such attention that the torch-shaped sign bearing its name was dwarfed by the building it was meant to advertise.

Parked along the sidewalk in front of it, Harvey and I sat in the car as it idled, neither of us having spoken since we left the Shepherd house. A woman and her escort passed on the sidewalk beside me, their laughter drawing my attention before the unexpected feeling of Harvey’s hand brought me back to him.

“At least tell me what it was like,” he said before I’d had time enough to enjoy his skin against mine. “If you won’t tell me everything.”

And though there was plenty to tell him, there almost seemed too much. Not because I suspected him of being too academic, as I had before. But a sea of memory, feeling, and thought could not be reduced to a few words, not well. There seemed no way at first to make it clear—how seeing Dolores and saving her from fracturing completely had solidified my name.

“I can’t,” I said, and he dropped his eyes because he’d expected my refusal. “Harvey, don’t misunderstand. There’s no one I’d rather tell—but it’s too great a thing to translate.”