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Darling, he’d said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself

Now it is ht cutting through the curtains, and Toby shifts again, rising up through the surface of sleep And the girl who is—was—Jess holds her breath again as she tries to iine a version of this day where he wakes, and sees her, and remembers

Where he s”

But it won’t happen like that, and she doesn’t want to see the familiar vacant expression, doesn’t want to watch as the boy tries to fill in the gaps where ether his coirl has seen that perforh, knows the motions by heart, so instead she slides fro room

She catches her reflection in the hall mirror and notices what everyone notices: the seven freckles, scattered like a band of stars across her nose and cheeks

Her own private constellation

She leans forward and fogs the glass with her breath Draws her fingertip through the cloud as she tries to write her name A—d—

But she only gets as far as that before the letters dissolve It’s not the medium—no matter how she tries to say her name, no matter how she tries to tell her story And she has tried, in pencil, in ink, in paint, in blood

Adeline

Addie

LaRue

It is no use

The letters crumble, or fade The sounds die in her throat

Her fingers fall away fro room

Toby is a ns of his art are everywhere

In the instruainst the walls In the scribbled lines and notes scattered on tables—bars of half-rerocery lists and weekly to-do’s But here and there, another hand—the flowers he’s started keeping on the kitchen sill, though he can’t remember when the habit started The book on Rilke he doesn’t res that last, even when memories don’t

Toby is a slow riser, so Addie makes herself tea—he doesn’t drink it, but it’s already there, in his cupboard, a tin of loose Ceylon, and a box of silk pouches A relic of a late-night trip to the grocery store, a boy and a girl wandering the aisles, hand in hand, because they couldn’t sleep Because she hadn’t been willing to let the night end Wasn’t ready to let go

She lifts the , inhales the scent as memories waft up to meet it

A park in London A patio in Prague A teah

The past drawn like a silk sheet over the present

It’s a cold ed with frost, so she pulls a blanket frouitar case takes up one end of the sofa, and Toby’s cat takes up the other, so she perches on the piano bench instead

The cat, also na weird…” he explained) looks at her as she blows on her tea

She wonders if the cat remembers

Her hands are war on top of the piano and slides the cover up off the keys, stretches her fingers, and starts to play as softly as possible In the bedroo, and every inch of her, frohtens in dread

This is the hardest part

Addie could have left—should have left—slipped out when he was still asleep, when their ht, a moment trapped in amber But it is too late now, so she closes her eyes and continues to play, keeps her head down as she hears his footsteps underneath the notes, keeps her fingerswhen she feels hi in the scene, trying to piece together the tione astray, when he could have irl and then taken her home, if he could have had too much drink, why he doesn’t remember any of it

But she knows that Toby won’t interrupt her as long as she’s playing, so she savors theherself to trail off, look up, pretend she doesn’t notice the confusion on his face

“Morning,” she says, her voice cheerful, and her accent, once country French, now so faint that she hardly hears it