“You,” he says, before the door closes all the way. “I often dream of you.”

“If Sean's voice is layers of wood, and Mina Ma's is the voice a copper pot, then Mathew Mercer's is the voice of a wild animal. I suddenly think of a movie Ammara and I loved when we were little, and I think of Scar, the lion who murdered his brother to become king. That kind of voice.”

“Just last year, I had to read the old Indian epic, the Mahabharata. Inspired by it, I wished I had been named Draupadi. After all, she, too, had been born differently, even abnormally. She had stepped out of fire, a gift from the old gods to her father the king. There had been no Hindu gods involved in my birth, but the loose parallels gave me a delightful sense of grandeur.”

“I’d rather spend the rest of my life without ever seeing you again,” he says, “than watch them destroy you because of me.”

“He can see what move I'm planning to make in chess and counters before I can do it. He always knows who the killer is in a detective story. I think he could make a career out of detecting, but he wants to write plays for theater. Maybe he could be a Shakespeare instead of a Sherlock. He could be anything. Anything he wants to be.”

“Come on," I say, "let's go be star-crossed lovers and court disaster.”

“But maybe that's what the dead do. They stay. They linger. Benign and sweet and painful. They don't need us. They echo all by themselves.”

“You,” he says, before the door closes all the way. “I often dream of you.”

“If you expect the worse, you're only denying someone a chance to be better”

“You have to be a two people”