Hi

Nobody at school could say Uzoamaka.

Her mother was cooking. She didn't even turn around.

"If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky, Michelangelo, and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka."

That girl kept her name.

Then she went to Hollywood and won three Emmy Awards.

And now the whole world knows exactly how to say Uzoamaka Aduba.

Your name is not a burden. It's a prophecy.

And you will never hear him crying on a podcast about her. You have to care to spend half an hour chain smoking and talking about someone you're supposedly over. Especially when you swore on your grid that you would never talk about her.

Ari has never inspired that kind of emotional response from him. He's never described her in such stark terms—his muse, the only thing keeping him sane, someone he wish he'd have left earlier, his patient.

Not only has he never talked about Ari like that, he's barely talked about her at all. Even her birthday wishes her totally generic, either mean-spirited or using words like "fabulous." Those could apply to almost anybody.

He said his love for Lili was "as real as it gets" with Ari sitting there.

He was still carefully removing pictures of Lili from his grid years later. Not all of them, just a few at a time, like something was bothering him. Ari does get that level of thought. He's just done with her.