“Well, he was tall and handsome, but I’m biased. He worked with computers, although I never really understood what he did with them. Isn’t that awful? He loved reading mystery novels. Val McDermid, Lee Child, Dean Koontz, that sort of thing. I saved a box of his books before my mom sold our house. I flipped through some of them the other day. He had a habit of underlining words, the ones he liked, or maybe didn’t know and wanted to lookup. He dog-eared the bottom of pages, not the tops. Sometimes he scribbled his thoughts in the margins. There’s something about seeing his handwriting that destroys me whenever I come across it now. I cherish it, but it destroys me. Maybe because I know it’s finite. He’ll never write another word. Whatever I find, that’s it.” She pauses. With anyone else, she would have ordered herself to smile. But with Hawthorn, she knows she doesn’t have to pretend. “Where was I?” she says. “He liked ordering pizza on Fridays to celebrate the weekend. He loved the outdoors. Especially driving up to Gatineau Park and watching the hawks at Champlain Lookout. He was the funniest person I’ve ever known. We laughed a lot. I know things ended horribly, but we had good times in my family, too.”

“He sounds like a great guy.”

“He was,” she says. “I’ve come to realize that he’s probably the only person who ever really understood me or accepted me for what I am. I thought I understood him, too. But there’s so much I didn’t know. Sometimes I think I didn’t really know him at all, and now it’s too late.”

“You knew him,” Hawthorn tells her. “Don’t torture yourself like that.”

“Either way, our connection’s gone, and I keep searching for it, but all I find is this awful silence.” She looks up. “Sequoia was your twin. You two were close. It sounds like she was your person in the same way Sunil was mine. So, how do you manage it?”

“Manage what?”

“Living without your person?”

He releases a long exhale. “I don’t have all the answers, friend. I’m all holes too.”

For a while, they sit and listen to the sound of the thickening snow gently tap against the window. The warmth of the tea eases the strain in her throat and soon her tears recede like tideline.

“It feels good to sit and talk with you,” she says. “I felt the same way after the meeting. I was so nervous before, though, I almost didn’t go. But I’m glad I did.”

“Now that you’ve had some time to digest it all, how did you find your first meeting?”