Graham stepped out of his trousers, leaving himself clad in nothing but his boxer shorts, and turned, looking slightly nonplussed to find me still fully clothed. “Stasia? Is everything all right?”

No. Nothing was all right. It was possible nothing was going to be all right ever again: that we had passed the last moment of normalcy sometime in the past few weeks, and now it was gone forever. Biting my lip, I shook my head.

Graham frowned. He walked over and sat beside me, reaching for my hand. His frown deepened when it remained clamped over the bend of my elbow, unyielding. “Hey. What is it? Can I help? I’m sorry it’s not safe to go back to the hotel. But we’ll be able to change our clothes before the flight.”

The idea that this might be about something as pedestrian as clean underwear was almost enough to make me start laughing. The only reason I was able to resist was that I knew if I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I’d laugh and laugh as the world fell down around us, and I wouldn’t be able to save anyone. Not even Graham.

Not even myself.

“I need to show you something,” I said, voice carefully level, “and I need you to promise me you won’t freak out about it. Can you do that?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Can you do that?” My voice was ice eating away at a sapling’s roots, harsh and cold and unforgiving. Graham froze, leaning back to look at me with wide, startled eyes.

His beard was coming in the patchy way it always did, making his cheeks look like they’d been half-plucked by some rogue beautician. He was a little flushed, making the scars on his chest stand out white against the red, and he had never been so handsome, and I had never loved him more. This could be the moment when I lost him. Because I had always believed him when he told me he was a man, and we had always pretended his belief in me was the same thing, but it wasn’t, was it? It wasn’t the same thing at all. Gender was a social construct and a part of the soul, and humans had always been capable of getting it wrong. I, though …

I was something alien and new, and while we had built a relationship on believing each other, our secrets weren’t the same at all.

“Okay,” he said, in a hushed voice. “I won’t freak out.”

It was an impossible promise. It still made me feel better, enough that I could whisper, “Close your eyes.”

He closed his eyes. I peeled off my sweater, dropping it on the floor before allowing myself to look down at the bend of my elbow, at the place that had started itching in an impossible forest.