“I guess you have the gift,” Lydia said as they dashed back to their room, giggling and holding on to each other to keep from slipping in their waterlogged shoes. They put on a Sly and the Family Stone record and danced around the room while the rain pelted the window, eating the cake with their hands and drinking from a cheap bottle of champagne that Lydia had bought when they first arrived in Paris.

Later, when the cake and champagne were finished, they lay next to each other on the bed they shared, their hands still sticky with icing as they held their palms side by side above their heads, comparing the lines. The room was dark, the lines barely visible, but as Kate looked from her palm to Lydia’s, she suddenly realized what the fortune teller in Brighton had seen. “The future doesn’t matter, anyway,” she said, her heart pounding as she shifted onto her side to face Lydia.

Lydia rolled over, too. “You’re right. The only thing that matters is now,” she said, pressing her palm against Kate’s. They fell asleep with their fingers intertwined, and when they woke the next morning, eyes fluttering open in the dusty haze of the breaking dawn filtering in through the window, their hands were fused together, bonded by icing and the heat of their own skin.

“You are so beautiful,” Lydia whispered.

No one had ever said those words to Kate before, in that voice. Their faces were so close that she could see the fine spray of freckles across the tops of Lydia’s cheeks, the delicate creases between her eyebrows above the bridge of her nose. Before she could stop herself, she leaned in and kissed Lydia. And Lydia, in all her infinite, indescribable radiance, kissed her back.

Kate felt so free in Paris. But maybe freedom is all relative. Right now, she feels free because she is driving, she is in a foreign country, and she has an inkling that no one knows where she and London are. She tries her memory exercises again. There are pieces that come to her. She was hurt somehow. Was London with her when she got hurt? No, that can’t be right. She remembers a young man in a uniform, but she doesn’t know what kind. She remembers falling, but that is nothing new. She dreams of falling every night, waking herself with a start, panting in her bed next to Walter as the breeze blows through the bedroom window. No, whether she fell or not will remain a mystery.