“I thought I could fix it. I didn’t want to worry you. I tried, but I . . .” Her aunt’s eyes fill. “I never should have signed that prenup. It was monumentally naive of me. But I thought—I thought that this time . . .”
When Liyana was a child she’d felt fragile as cracked glass, ready to shatter at a touch. The stoical solidity of her aunt, who’d taken her under her wing, hadn’t allowed it. Now Liyana’s the adult and her aunt the child. She wants to reach out and wipe Nya’s tears, but she also wants to slap her. And then she realizes something else.
“But—but I’m starting at the Slade . . .” Liyana feels as if she’s slipping under water. “Term starts soon—less than three weeks. I—I . . .”
Studying at the Slade, arguably the best art school in England, has been all Liyana’s wanted since she was fourteen, since that torn ligament ripped away her Olympic dream.
Nyasha gives a barely perceptible nod. “I know, vinye, I know. It’s okay, we’ll postpone . . . I’ll write to them, I’ll explain. I’m sure they’ll let you take a gap year, while we get the funding. You can start next October.”
Liyana stares at her aunt, incredulous. “I don’t want to wait another year. I’m ready, I’ve got so much to—I need to go now.”
“I know, I know,” her aunt says, stricken. “But the fees, we can’t possibly—”
“And what if it’s not okay?” Liyana starts to shiver, the water suddenly icy. “What if they won’t defer my place? What then?”
“No, they will. Of course they will,” Nya says. “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right, Ana. I’ve got an idea, I just—”
“What?” Liyana snaps. “You’re going to get a job?”
“Well . . .” Her aunt nibbles the edge of her thumbnail. “Yes, I’m certainly looking into that, but also I was thinking . . .”
“What?”
“Well . . . marriage.”
Liyana lets out a blurt of laughter, casting ripples across the water, warmer now. “You’re going to get married again?”
“Nye me nya o,” her aunt mumbles. “Ao . . .”
“English,” Liyana says. “You know—”
“Well, no. Not exactly . . .” Nya loses the word in the folds of her dressing gown. “I was, um, thinking perhaps it could be you.”
Liyana stares at her aunt. “What?”
“Well . . .”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“Wait, let me—”
“I’ve got to get out.” Liyana stands, sending waves over the bath’s rim, splashing her aunt’s feet. “The water’s freezing.”
Pulling her towel from the radiator, Liyana strides towards the door. In her wake, silence swells in the room like a sudden flood.
6:32 p.m.—Bea
“Do you believe in free will?”
Bea looks up from Logic and Knowledge to see a student sitting across the table gazing at her. He is rotund, bearded, and has hope in his eyes.
“No talking,” she mouths, then returns to her book.
The student coughs. Bea ignores him and focuses on Russell. He coughs again.
“What?” Bea hisses.
“Do you—?”
“No, I don’t believe in free will,” Bea snaps, eliciting pointed looks from several other students sitting along the same long table. “Or, yes, I do. Which one do you want to hear?”
“The first,” he says, giving a quick tug of his beard. “I thought perhaps . . . if you believed in predeterminism you might . . .”
“Might what?”
He drops his voice to a whisper. “Might go for a coffee with me after you’ve finished your date with Russell?”
Bea frowns at him, thrown. The frown shifts to a scowl once she realizes what he means. “That is, without a doubt, the most pretentiously ridiculous pick-up line I’ve ever been subjected to,” she says. “And no, I don’t believe in fate. So no.”
He looks crestfallen, then smiles. “Well, I do. So I hope our paths will cross again.”
Bea returns the smile, the one in her lexicon reserved for lecherous creeps. “Hold your breath on that hope,” she hisses. “And we’ll see what fate has in store for you then.”
Over a decade ago
Everwhere
You step out of a glade, where stones give way to a thick carpet of moss that sinks pleasantly under your feet. You go on and the moss springs back. You stop walking to stand and glance up at the trees flanking this hidden space, so closely pressed together that their boughs entwine. You see a canopy of branches and leaves so dense that the sky is no longer visible. And yet, as you squint into the darkness, all at once it becomes brighter: the shadows retreat,