Then he left to get my chair while I made my way to the foyer. I actually beat him and was leaning against the wall by the old elevator, waiting for him when he wheeled in my chair. I sank gratefully into its cushion and let him push me into the elevator.

“Oh god,” Geordie said, as the doors closed. “Was I sounding just like Christy out there?”

“Yes, you were very take-chargy.”

“I mean with all that lecturing I was doing about fairies and spirits.”

“You handled it perfectly,” I assured him.

“Because I know where Con and Andy are coming from.”

I smiled. “I remember. I was there, Geordie, me lad.”

He returned my smile.

“Yeah,” he said. “You always were, weren’t you?”

Later, when we were up in our room, I had to ask him.

“So you and Mother Crone broke up?”

I’d washed up and changed into another top in the bathroom, an awkward procedure since it was pretty much the size of a small closet. But now I was sitting in my wheelchair, watching as Geordie rosined his bow and checked to make sure his fiddle was in tune. I liked the way the light came in the window and made his hair glow. It looked as though he was giving off the luminescence and I wished I could capture it in a sketch, but I had neither the necessary materials nor the motor skills to do it justice. Not anymore. Instead, I had to hold it in my memory, the way other people who aren’t artists do. But did they see light the same way?

Geordie looked over at me and shrugged in response to my question.

“I don’t know if we were ever really a couple,” he said. “We were together, sure, but not like you and Daniel are.”

“Um, we’re not so much a couple anymore, either.”

He gave me a surprised look.

“Oh, that sucks. Are you okay?”

“Actually, I was the one who broke up with him.”

“But—”

“I know. He was perfect. But maybe that was the problem, or—not so much him being perfect, as everything between us deferred to what he thought I wanted out of the relationship, which for some people would be perfect.”

Saying it aloud made me wince a little. It sounded so petty and ungrateful.

Geordie shook his head. “When did you buy into the whole ‘bad boy’ routine?”

“I didn’t. I haven’t. I know what it sounds like, but I wasn’t looking for a bad boy. I just wanted him to bring something of himself to the relationship.”

“Okay, that I get,” Geordie said. “It’s sort of where things were with Mother Crone and me.”

“Really?”