“Totally.” He smiled. “Totally in love. But I wasn’t ready for her. She was more grown-up than me, and I had a lot of stuff left to work out. I made some mistakes. I thought some things were important that really weren’t.”

Plum stood up too. She was windburned and tired, and the fabric of the seat of her pants disengaged from the roof in such a way as to suggest that the tarpaper had probably wrecked them.

“I feel like you’re talking around something here.”

“Yeah. Probably it’s that I slept with somebody else.” Ah. Kind of sorry she asked there, but Quentin kept going. “Then she slept with somebody else. It was bad, I almost ruined everything. Then just when I was starting to really figure things out, that was when she died.”

“That sucks. I’m really sorry.”

“It took me a long time to get over it.”

Plum’s own romantic history so far had been pretty limited, with minimal drama. It was one area where she felt comfortable lagging behind her peers. But she prided herself on her powerful philosophical insights into other people’s relationships.

“So if you do end up somehow, you know, bringing her back, do you think you’ll be together? I mean are you still in love with her?”

“I don’t really know her anymore, Plum. It was a long time ago. I’m a different person now, or at least I hope I am. We’d have to see.”

“So you’d start over.”

“If she wanted to. Though I feel like we were only just about to get started. We wouldn’t start over, we’d just start.”

Deep orange rays of sunlight meandered past, slowed by the viscous urban air they were passing through, full of floating particulates and toxic emissions. Bubbles popped in Plum’s knees.

“Here’s what I don’t get. If you were so unready, if you had all that stuff left to work out, why do you think she loved you?”

Quentin went back to mixing the smelly reagent he’d been working on before.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never did know.”

“That would be a good one to figure out. Maybe before you bring her back?”

—

The next morning was the dress rehearsal. They broke the enchantment down into its component spells, running through each of them individually, then in small groups, being careful all the while not to let them combine into anything that was actually live and volatile. In cases where the spell involved some exceptionally expensive component, or it was physically dangerous, they just mimed their way through it.

Though once Plum forgot and spoke something she was supposed to skip, and just like that there was bright light and heat in the room. For an instant it was unbearable, like when there’s bad feedback in an auditorium.

“Shit!” Quentin bolted, and she heard water running in the bathroom. When he came back his fingernails were still steaming slightly.

“Sorry!” Plum said. “I’m sorry.”