I lie down alongside Eddie. She smells of pancakes and sugar and salt and freedom, like a beautiful ripe fruit—an apricot—and a flower: jasmine, I think. She is the whole world.

I take her face between my hands, framing it with my fingers. She smiles, keeping her eyes open as I explore the warmth between her thighs until we nestle seamlessly inside each other. The boundary between us has dissolved.

My darling, I think. My darling, darling Eddie, how can I even breathe without you?

THAT FIRST SUMMER we often made love on the top of the world—my name for Eddie’s magic garden above the roof-tops of London. One night when the stars appeared to breathe more freely in spite of the light pollution, she told me why she had planted the meadow. She was lying in the crook of my arm on the raised bed as the bats wheeled overhead and a blue moon—the second full moon of the month—rode high in the dark sky.

“When I was a little girl, I always longed for the grass behind our house to grow tall enough for a unicorn to be able to hide in it. At dawn it would emerge from the half darkness, lift its nose toward my room, sniff the air, and then wait for me to come to the window. For a brief instant we would look at each other and it would send me a thought like I know I’m safe with you before lying down in the grass and slowly lowering its head to rest at last. It would be safe from the world, safe from being caught and killed and tortured. Because humans always destroy what is miraculous, and the unique makes people uncomfortable.”

I stroked her head, whose form was so familiar, so perfectly matched to the curve of my arm. The texture of her skin was already part of me. My hands, fingers, lips, chest, and thighs all knew the feel of her.

“My father would cut the grass on our lawn with a scythe and later with a battery-powered lawn mower. One day when I was five I tried to stop him by standing in front of the mower.”

I was touched by this image of a small girl standing in the path of revolving blades to save a unicorn.

“And when he asked me why, I told him about the unicorn. My father never mowed that lawn again, and when my mother brought in a gardener to cut the grass with a scythe, he paid him to leave it be. My mother didn’t speak to us for weeks, but the lawn stayed just the way it was. Because of me and the unicorn.”

She paused before going on quietly. “The unicorn never came. That’s when I stopped believing in inexplicable miracles and contented myself with wonders that could be explained. When my father died, the unicorn died with him.”