If I’d had the chance, I would have roared at these women that they had overlooked someone beautiful and warm and gentle. But it was your life to live, and we all make choices, and, anyway, those bars have changed, so much, since you left.

I spent years constructing watertight staircases over my own dark spaces. But today, I am afraid to open the front door of my heart and step onto the landing. My mortar is pulverized, and my mouth is full of screams ready to unleash.

Alongside the sandwich, I offer grapes, diced pear, slices of cucumber. He eats, or he does not. He gulps his milk greedily, demands more.

This solution seems too easy. I flog myself with nine tales of other dinners I might have cooked for him: couscous with garbanzos, lentil salad…I had so many ideas. I pour a glass of wine for myself. This day, it is enough.

I’ve been reading too much, she said over breakfast. I think I need a break from the news.

It’ll be here when you get back, he said, peering over the folded-down corner of the local paper.

Outside, she rubbed lemon juice into her flesh, and reclined in a deck chair, waiting for the sun to bleach away the words that haunted her.

She always thought she would give up at the end, let go when the government and her community and family were gone.

But she still had some drinking water and a compass, and she knew, somewhere north, America still rose above the waves. She clasped one fist overtop her paddle, and began to row.

Do you think we don’t see your father’s ear bend toward your mouth? Do you think we miss what he says next? You may be beautiful, but you are still as transparent as your crystalline life.

This isn’t easy, she said, and he nodded, following her path from road’s lower vantage point. But the view is much better.

They had left for their walk without phones, without anything to track their location. No one knew where they were.

I had forgotten what it felt like to know only one person was listening, she said.

He nodded, already worried she’d discover he was passing information through shadowy channels, telling them all her revolutionary thoughts.