She took the letter back and put it away. “He talks about your . . . your accident. He calls it something else, but, anyways, he mentions the posters, and he says that he closely observed them against the very first ones, and he had often noticed you walking around at strange hours, and he’s certain it was you. And that you told him it was you.”

“And this is how you found out?” I asked her. “Like, you weren’t trying to find out? You just wanted to write a book about this painter that no one has ever heard of?”

“I mean . . . yes.”

“And because that old lady gave you these secret letters, you now know that I made the poster?”

“Well, I told you, I’m almost one hundred percent certain that it was you. I’ve read your books, especially the one that you said you wrote in high school, and the main character talks a lot about going to the edge and there’s some imagery that feels very similar to what’s in the poster. I just . . . I mean, I honestly think it’s one of the most amazing things. I just . . . It’s you. You told me it was you. On the phone. It’s you.”

The edge, the edge, the edge, the edge . . . the edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us. I said it to myself, exactly in my own voice, and then I looked at Mazzy.

“I made it,” I finally said. “Yes, one hundred percent. I wrote it.”

“You have proof?” she said.

I’d brought the proof. I needed it to be as close to me as possible when I met with this woman who was trying to open up my life and unsteady me and possibly change everything that I’d done to make life possible. I reached into my backpack and I got out the polyester film folder, a museum-grade, top-quality archival sleeve. And I showed it to her, and she made this little sound, like someone had stepped on her chest. “This is the original,” I told her. “The first one. Everything came from this one.”

“This is the one?”

“And that’s my blood,” I said, pointing to the stars.

“Your blood?” she said, her eyes widening. I nodded.

She looked at the poster, the first time that anyone except me had looked at this poster in twenty years. I thought it might melt other people’s faces off, blind them, turn them into statues. But the archival polyester must have been protecting other humans from disaster, I imagined.

Mazzy leaned back against the hard curve of the bench, looked up at the ceiling. And then she smiled. She smiled, all her beautiful teeth, nothing like mine, nothing like Zeke’s, and she touched my hand. “This is amazing,” she finally said.

“I’m scared,” I said. “It’s . . . it’s just very complicated.”