He leaned toward me. His mouth—a shock how soft and lovely, I knew it so well, like I’d traveled back in time; I’d never expected to find my way back here. As long as we kissed, the world with him accordioned out from us, and I could see my mother waving amid her lights, Durham’s brick tobacco castles, the Eno, the quarry, and Isaac’s room—once he’d covered his windows with black paper and punched a hole in the center sheet, and the light forced its way through the hole and cast, on the opposite wall, the perfect image of the gardenia bush and the woods beyond, upside down and wavering. I imagined traveling with Isaac and my mother to places the Ash Family had renounced forever—flying and landing in the red desert. I imagined marrying Isaac, how I’d carry poppies, though their petals fell so quickly. I imagined growing old with him. And then I remembered Pear, who didn’t have a chance because of what I had done. I couldn’t leave. The family could testify against me; there were twenty-three witnesses. I remembered how the family haunted the people who left, and how the people who left often died. Dice could follow the white breaks. The woods keened. All my fears came swirling in like snow.

Isaac pushed up my shirt. He thought our encounter was going well. I felt heart-shattering pity for him. I could not feel him, I was absent now, and it had never been clearer to me that there was no definite self. When I thought of making a life with him, I only felt loss—loss, even, of the pain of work, and the fear, and Dice’s all-seeing juice-colored eyes. The family cared about me more than anyone ever had, and they proved it with the way they constrained me, trapped me. They could not bear to see me go.

I didn’t want Isaac, did I? I wanted the pure, essential world. If I could be with Dice, I could lose track of myself, I could understand the thrill of seeing a branch in the shadowed woods move and transform into the antlers of a buck, I could understand why the last garnet sun, gripping the treetops, seized me with such astonishment. Why did a walk through the woods always feel like a coincidence, like just exactly what I needed? Queen would have understood. Coincidence, the loveliest gift of perception, the rhyming of it all.