“What on earth?” she says. She pulls out what appears to be the remnants of a sandwich, which has been stuffed into the main compartment of her purse without any sort of wrapper or container, save for some bits of soggy napkin clinging to one edge.

“Nana, that’s your sandwich,” London says.

“What sandwich?” Kate asks, wiping some sort of purplish goo off her hands and onto the steering wheel. She realizes as soon as she says it that it is the wrong thing to say, that she has given too much away. London just stares at her. Then she takes Kate’s purse and peers inside, where the sandwich has deconstructed itself all over her belongings.

“How did it get in here, all unwrapped like that?” she asks. “What were you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” Kate says. She truly doesn’t. She doesn’t remember lunch, or a sandwich, or why on earth she would order something covered in all that purple goo. The road behind her has disappeared, and all she has left now is the road ahead, and she’s racing to get to where she is going before the disappearing catches up to her and the road vanishes under her feet.

—

Becoming Lydia’s lover was a path that, a year earlier, Kate could never have possibly imagined taking. But with Lydia it seemed as natural and pure as the wind ruffling the leaves in the trees. Ever since she crawled out of a frozen Lake Superior, Kate had felt off-kilter, as though the pieces of the world didn’t quite fit together properly. The moment she kissed Lydia, it was as if the world shifted slightly and those pieces all clicked into place. Being with her made life brighter, more vibrant, more defined. Suddenly, Kate’s past didn’t matter anymore, and she stopped worrying about the future. Nothing existed but the present: the smell of bread baking from the café across the street, the sound of a violin floating under the door, Lydia’s hair rippling like cool, dark water across the pillow. Kate’s heart, so restless in the past, was somehow stilled by Lydia.

As spring passed into summer they took up daily residency on the Left Bank, and although there were many other artists working there, Lydia always drew a crowd. Kate bought a beautiful purple blanket and matching purple pillows that she laid out on the ground, inviting people from Lydia’s crowd to sit while she read their palms – for a small fee, of course. They lived on wine and bread, spent days on end speaking to each other only in their pathetic grade-school French, walked barefoot through rivers when it got too hot, and bought rusty second-hand bikes on which they raced each other around the city at night, the headlights from the cars reflecting off the gleaming chrome of their fenders.