The flight attendant asked if any doctors were aboard the plane. No one answered. There was a retired nurse and a man whose sister had epilepsy. They laid Tilly down in the aisle of the airplane, turned her on her side, and searched through the first aid box for anything remotely helpful. There was nothing.

I stood and watched, feeling useless.

When Tilly stopped seizing, I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. She was alive. Soon, I told myself, she would speak to me and remind me that Antonia could handle anything and that I had nothing to worry about.

I waited for her to speak again.

Her breaths were slower, ragged.

She slept, moaning slightly. When the flight attendant and a man sitting one row behind us tried to move her back into the seat, Tilly grimaced. Her hand went up to her neck, and I thought she’d injured it when she’d been slumped over, her head lolling. As the plane descended and tiny homes and ribbons of highway became visible, I called Tilly’s name. Whether she heard me, I do not know.

The captain ordered everyone, including me, to stay seated until Tilly could be lifted onto the stretcher on the tarmac. Two men in uniforms hoisted the gurney into the back of an ambulance.

“I will go with her,” I insisted. But they shook their heads. I panicked, pulled away from them, and chased after the twirling red lights, dwarfed by a cavalry of planes. Fingers pressed into my arms hard, then harder, when I shouted in protest.

Tilly and I had come so far. We had been through so much. She had made promises to me, and I clung to them even as I watched her disappear.

Chapter 27

The end of one day is the start of another.

“This is temporary,” they said to me, these people without names. They sat me in a stark room and entered only to deliver bad news. It was not the welcome Tilly had promised.

Blurred by exhaustion and a flight across time zones, I couldn’t tell if the man who entered now was the same one who had walked in earlier. There were no clocks on the wall or windows to the outside world. A man in a button-down shirt brought me bread, a dense circle of dough with a sprinkling of black seeds on top. The bread had been sliced in two and a creamy white spread oozed out from between the two halves. I pushed it away, my appetite spoiled every time I thought of Tilly, pale and breathless.

With my hands beneath the table, I felt for the ring stitched into my pocket. I prayed they would not search me. This ring and I, twin survivors, were the last vestiges of our respective empires.