“I really fucked up.”

“She’ll be okay.”

“Will she?” Myron answered, glancing over his shoulder.

Zadie hesitated, remembering the last fight her mom and she ever had. Had she turned out okay? Not exactly. But her mom had left. Myron was still here. “You’re a good dad,” she said. “You’re sticking it out. Not everyone would.”

“Thanks.” He sounded unconvinced.

The truck was still running, Zadie realized. She killed the engine and listened to the gentle clicks it made as it cooled.

After a moment, Myron said, “Amy called it tree talk.”

Zadie turned around to face him and tried to sound surprised. “Your wife could talk to trees?”

“My wife could do anything, including talk to trees,” he said with a wistful smile that said better to have loved and lost. He picked up a loose fly from the bed of the truck and twirled it between his fingers. “Sometimes I wish Amy were here instead of me. She was better at this kind of stuff. If the kids walked up to her and said, ‘Dad’s in a tree,’ she wouldn’t hesitate. She’d do something crazy like grab an old sheet and a projector and play movies outside so we could all watch them together.” Myron chuckled sadly, imagining the scene. “Me? I can’t even say hi.”

Zadie paused, then answered, “That sounds like a good place to start.”

Finn stared out the window of the little barn apartment, unable to recall her own name. In every echo she’d ever had, her name had always been her North Star. She knew who she was and who she wasn’t. She knew which memories were hers and which belonged to someone else. That distinction is what kept her sane.

But as she looked down at what she knew intellectually to be her own hand, she had the unsettling thought that the hand, the arm, and everything it attached to did not belong to her, that this body was just a vessel, one she was currently using to reach out the window, pull the bird feeder from its hook, and upend a bag of seeds.

Her name? Her name was irrelevant now, it seemed.

She turned to see a woman standing at the top of the stairs to the apartment, watching her.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

It was Zadie, her sister. That would make her Finn.

Finn. Finn. Finn. She would need to think of some way to remember it. Write it in permanent marker on her arm perhaps, or somewhere more discreet so Zadie didn’t suspect she was losing herself. If losing myself is what it takes to find Mom, then that’s what I’ll do, she thought, although the prospect made her uneasy.

She screwed the top of the feeder back on and returned it to its hook outside the window. “How was fishing?”

Zadie lingered in the doorway. “It wasn’t that bad, actually.”