“I will buy a desk today,” I told them, when Ettie, Camille, and the Professor came back from touring the rest of the flat. Camille’s round cheeks were rosy with enthusiasm and excitement; she couldn’t see the way the Professor’s forehead wrinkled while he towered beside her, but I could. He wouldn’t know everything—not even Ettie would—but he would know what I’d lost. And he would not begrudge me a secret or two.

All the way back to the clinic, I held the letter inside my beaded purse, one glove removed so that I could at least feel the envelope he’d held that morning.

“May I wait in the car?” I asked the Professor when he’d helped Camille from her seat and Ettie had returned to the Vault.

“We’ll only be in my office a moment,” he answered, offering me his hand. “And then you’ll never have to visit again.”

I consoled myself that I’d never seen Harvey Parrish in the Professor’s office. Nothing in the room would destroy me, the way the courtyard might, the way the halls and the Vault and the sitting room might unravel the fabric of me. And after today, I would keep my distance, for both our sakes.

It was a plan I felt confident would suffice until he walked through the office door.

“Hello, Elsie,” he said, his pale eyes shimmering.

“Hello. Harvey.” I stepped toward him and then stopped. He looked exactly as he had the night we’d kissed, when I couldn’t match his happiness. “Harvey?”

The Professor put his hand on my shoulder. “Extract No. 1.”

My lips parted as though I might speak to the man approaching me, but I didn’t. When he arrived, I only drew in my breath further, and he didn’t hesitate to gently slide his hand behind my neck, his fingers in my hair.

I stepped back.

“Harvey,” I whispered to the man who wasn’t there.

His fingertips found me, and then his eyes. Not Harvey’s; not the man I’d kissed outside Dolores’s blue-gray Queen Anne. The man who’d commissioned stained glass in a Vault dormitory before I arrived, whose touch softened when I told him I could feel.

The man whose father warned him against ever becoming a Source. And now he had.

“Elsie,” the man in front of me said, and my trembling stopped. Despite that he was not that Harvey. Despite that, because he knew me, that Harvey might somewhere be more like Dolores than any of the insufferable, gossiping Sources.

He might be. I couldn’t know.