“Brutal honesty is usually more brutal than it is honest,” he wrote in big block letters on half of the postcard, to the left of the vertical dividing line. He wrote Z’s name to the right side of the line and then remembered that she hadn’t gone to her sister’s as she’d first planned, that she’d changed course at the last minute and gone to a place he had no address for—friends outside Austin, a camper van in a yard—and the whole point of writing a postcard was to contact her unidirectionally, requiring no reply. He didn’t want to text, or email, or call. Anyway, it could wait. He crossed out Z’s name and instead translated his sentence, filling the right half of the card.

A person in coveralls with an orange vest, carrying a clipboard and a pencil, approached.

As he walked away from the tent on the heels of the orangevested person, Pablo deposited his bilingual postcard-sign into the crotch of two branches in the nearest tree.

MARINA TAKES A BREAK

She was not expecting to be sitting in a small wall tent—a miniature version of the original tent in which she had met Pablo—for three hours, behind a wooden desk, doing what could be described as the speed dating of mediation work. This tent was more furnished, less provisional feeling than the large one: in addition to the wooden table and the chair she sat in, there were three other wooden chairs; a red-and-beige braided wool rug on the floor, smelling slightly musty; a few lanterns (solar, she guessed, based on the wires that led, through a hole above one of the windows, to the outside) hanging from the metal tent frame; an old putty-colored metal file cabinet with a key lock; and a potted fern. “It’s the therapy room. Also Reiki, that kind of thing, in regular times,” the person in the orange vest had said while ushering Marina through the unwindowed flap door. It made Marina think of nothing more than a game her niece had shown her the last time they’d been able to have a visit—Animal Crossroads or Animal Tracking, she couldn’t remember exactly—in which tents like this, each decorated for a particular use, were inhabited by wise cartoon owls or industrious cartoon squirrels, ready to provide services to the player’s avatar, about which all she could remember was a rear view of a small cartoon figure wearing a wide-brimmed hat.