“I had a man once that I stuck around for,” the woman says. She pokes a toe through the tip of her worn shoes and I wait for her to tell me more, but instead she just contemplates her foot awhile and then shrugs.

“Some men have a strange idea of what love is.” She pushes a strand of greasy hair back behind her ear and I see bruises dotting her neck.

What she doesn’t understand about me and Elias is that I promised him I’d wait for him to come back, and leaving would mean he’s dead. I know there’s nothing else that could keep him from coming home to me. The evening he left he said he’d find me again, and I believe him.

But a dark thought seeps into my mind, one that’s been curling around the edges of my consciousness for months: Elias left my sister alone in the Forest of Hands and Teeth when we were kids. Why would I ever think that he wouldn’t leave me?

The woman stands and I whirl to face her, pulling the knife back between us, ready to end it. She doesn’t come closer or threaten me in any way. She just flips her pipe over and knocks it against one of the chimneys, spirals of embers twirling and fading around her legs and feet.

“Did you ever think about what you really wanted your life to be like? Like when you were a little girl?” She moves toward the edge of the roof. The darkness seems to stretch forever.

I think about the village where I was born. Where I had a sister and a father and a community of people who loved and took care of me.

That. That’s what I want my life to be like. Not this city. Not these scars. Not this loneliness. I remember the moment in the Forest when my sister fell and scratched her knee and how bright the blood looked. How desperately the dead clawed at the fences while Elias and I walked away from her.

But I tell this woman none of those things. Instead I shake my head. “No.”

Her face falls a little as if she was expecting a different answer. “Ever wonder what you’d do if you knew you were going to die?”

“We’re all going to die eventually,” I tell her.

She smiles, more like a wince. “I mean if you knew when,” she clarifies. “If you only had a few days.” She inhales, sharp, and adds, “A few moments.”

I shake my head. It’s a lie, but I don’t want this woman to know me any better than she already does. Being here for her death—that’s already more intimacy than I’ve shared with anyone in years. I don’t want to like this woman—I don’t want to care about her—because then this moment and the one that’s coming next will hurt too much.

I refuse to have feelings about someone when I know they’re going to leave me. I feel sorry that I can’t offer this woman something different, but I have to protect myself more than I have to protect her.