Despite everything, Ash felt himself grin. “Not so bad right now, actually.”

“Then let’s do it. Grab a bag, we can leave tonight.”

A minute passed, and then another. Neither of them moved. Chandra let her head fall onto his shoulder. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

Ash rubbed his eyelids with two fingers. “You don’t have any sage wisdom for me?”

Chandra scoffed. “Sage wisdom?”

“You know, advice. How to face your death like a man and all that.”

“You need Willis for that. Want me to get him?”

Ash shook his head. “What about movie advice, then? If this were a movie, what would the hero do now? Would he go, knowing he was about to die?”

“Well.” Chandra was quiet for a moment, considering. “In a love story, there’s always a moment near the end of the movie when the protagonist has to make a choice. Either she does the easy thing and life continues as usual, or she does the hard thing and everything changes. She faces her fears and winds up with everything she ever wanted.”

“This isn’t a love story, Chandra.”

Chandra looked up at him. “Isn’t it? Could’ve fooled me.”

She kissed him on the cheek, and then stood and crossed the room, walking in a quick, jerky way that told Ash she was trying to make it to the hallway before she started to cry.

She paused at the door and said, without turning to look at him again, “Maybe I do have some sage wisdom after all. Have you ever heard the parable of the blind men and the elephant?” Her voice was thick and choked, but she continued anyway. “So the story goes that these three blind men stumbled upon an elephant, right? Only they’d never met an elephant before, so they didn’t know what it was, so they groped around, trying to figure it out. And one blind man touched its trunk and said, hey this thing sort of feels like a big snake. And the other touched its leg and said, hey it’s kind of like a big column, right? And the third one touched its ear and thought it was, like, this big fan. But none of them really knew what it was because they were only seeing one part.”

Ash thought about this story for a moment, and then he said, “I don’t get it.”

“That prememory you keep having is, what? Five minutes long?” Chandra lifted a hand and moved it across her cheek, still facing the door. “How do you know you’re seeing the whole thing?”

Ash felt his eyebrows draw together. “You think there’s more to it?”

A shrug. “There always is.”

55

Dorothy

Dorothy sat in Roman’s room, darkness gathering around her like an old friend. She didn’t know what time it was, only that the sky outside was black and starless. A candle and matches sat on Roman’s bedside table, but she couldn’t bring herself to light them. She didn’t think she could bear to look at Roman’s things; just sitting here was painful enough. If she closed her eyes she could even pretend that Roman was beside her. The sheets on his bed still smelled like him, and the walls still seemed to hold the echo of his voice.