The Congress Avenue Bridge is straight ahead. I grab onto Bailey’s elbow and we head onto the bridge’s walkway. But the foot traffic is moving slowly, if at all, the entire walkway jammed up with people. It’s good in the sense that it is easier to blend in, but everyone seems to have stopped moving.

Mostly everyone on the bridge is at a standstill, many of them looking down at the lake below.

“Did these people forget how to move?” Bailey says.

A guy in a Hawaiian shirt, carrying a large camera—a tourist, if I were guessing—turns back and smiles at us. Apparently, he thinks Bailey’s question is directed at him.

“We’re waiting on the bats,” he says.

“The bats?” Bailey says.

“Yeah. The bats. They feed every night right around now.”

This is when we hear, “HERE THEY COME!”

And—in a bright flood—hundreds and hundreds of bats start to fly up from beneath the bridge out into the sky. The crowd cheers as the bats move in an almost ribbonlike formation—an enormous, orchestrated beautiful swarm of them.

If Charlie is still behind us, I can’t see him. He is gone. Or we are gone, two revelers observing the bats take flight on a pretty Austin night.

I look up at the sky, flooded with the bats, moving as if in a dance together. Everyone applauds as they disappear into the night.

The guy in the Hawaiian shirt angles his camera to the sky, shooting pictures as they depart.

I slide past him and motion for Bailey to keep up. “We have to move,” I say. “Before we get stuck here.”

Bailey picks up the pace. And we make it over the bridge, both of us breaking into a jog. We don’t stop until we turn down our hotel’s long driveway. We don’t stop until we are in front of the hotel, the doormen holding the door open.

“Just wait,” Bailey says. “We need to stop for a second.”

She puts her hands on her knees, catching her breath. I want to argue. We are so close to being on the safe side of the hotel’s doors, so close to the privacy of our small room.

“What if I told you I remembered him?” she says.

I look over at the doormen, who are chatting with each other. I try to meet their eyes, get them to focus, as if they will keep us safe.

“What if I said I know him, Charlie Smith?”

“Do you?”

“I remember being called by that name,” she says. “Kristin. Hearing him say it, all of a sudden I remembered. How do you forget something like that? How is that even possible?”

“We forget all sorts of things that no one helps us remember,” I say.

Bailey gets quiet. Silent, actually. Then she says it, the words both of us have avoided saying out loud.