While I reintroduced myself to him, Harvey’s face had flushed and, though they managed to hold the tears back, his eyes focused on me like they expected to see nothing after.

“You’re afraid because you’re not sure how long I’ll last,” I said while he pressed my hair behind my ear. “Neither am I. For all we know, I might never expire.”

It was true. I hadn’t thought it before as I waited on the Shepherds’ porch, but now the thought terrified me. The world outside us reappeared and the glow became too bright.

His reply was perfect, the way he looked like he could easily laugh or cry and he found new ways to admire my face with his hands. But there seemed little consolation in his accepting my true identity and in taking me at my word if it didn’t mean we were the same. And now I knew for sure that we would never be. Even the nearness in our age would soon change. I was nineteen, as I always would be. He was aging by the day, by the second. No matter how I imagined it, in how many ways—from whatever angle it was studied—there was no future for Harvey Parrish and me.

I didn’t recall taking back my hand but found them both upon my chest, rising and falling in a deceptively steady rhythm. I was trapped in a web I’d thought could free me. Reviewing the conclusions I’d stumbled into, my mind reversed only to be cornered again. Because if anyone could think his way out of this, Harvey would have done so by now.

“I don’t know why I came here,” he was saying then, as though to the steering wheel. His nose crinkled when he strained to look up through the windshield at the torch of the Rialto. “I guess because I’ve never been. I never had anyone to bring.”

My thoughts were halfway back to the Vault by then, somewhere between despising and envying the Mems who roamed its halls and had never wanted something they could not have. There was only one chance of being more like them.

“I thought perhaps before I took you home, we might take in a show.”

I kept imagining that Dolores might still be escorted into the clinic and I into the lab with her. I could share this evening with Harvey, this final occasion of being Elsie, before a new memory was laid over me, shattering the resilience of an epiphany that had given me nineteen years and then—in one day—taking everything away.

“You must have been here a dozen times,” he was saying. “Your social life has always been so much livelier than mine.”