#helicobacter

“What is so appealing to you about sneaking out? Is it the thrill of the forbidden? Should I worry that you’ll lose interest when both your mother and the overall prohibition are gone?”

“My honest answer about whether you should worry is, ‘how should I know?’ My hopeful answer is, ‘of course not.’ As for the sneaking out, it’s mostly for my mom’s benefit at this point. She doesn’t want to have to show how pleased she is to have the place—a place—to herself. Once in a while.”

Puzzling. “I thought your father took many fishing trips.”

“It’s only when Mom’s gone, really. He doesn’t say much about it, but he’s happiest when they’re together.” She finished with her boots, stood up, and began to tidy the bed. She looked over her shoulder at Helena. “Maybe you’ll want to go fishing only when I’m out of town.”

“I don’t know how to fish,” Helena said. She added a silent And now I don’t want to learn. But why keep silent? Why was her first instinct to censor such words? So she said, “And now I don’t want to learn.”

Myka turned back to the bed. She said a warm “Good.”

“Your father did invite me, however.”

A chuckle. “You should go, and Skype and Facetime and text and DM me every chance you get, on lots of different devices. Send me emails too. He’ll lose his mind.”

“What if I tell him about the aquatic abilities of raccoons?”

Myka spun around again, her mouth open in comic protestation. “I’ll never forgive you! I want to annoy him, not give him a heart attack. Besides, you should bear in mind that he’s the one who bought a very significant textbook lot.”

“My gratitude is stipulated.”

“Plus, and I realize this matters to me more than to us, he got me Georgeliot.”

“Under duress,” Helena noted.

Myka nodded. “Sometimes it takes a little duress for people to do the exactly-right thing.”

“So if I happen to come home some evening and am greeted not by you but by a large gaze of raccoons, I should assume there’s some right course of action I’ve failed to take?”

Myka pulled her into a half-embrace and bestowed a swift kiss, recalling the tactility of the rehearsal dinner. “I really like that you just said ‘come home.’”

Helena resolved to say “come home” far more often. “And not even under duress,” she said.

Another swift kiss. “I also really like that you know the collective noun for raccoons.”

“I like that you like that I know it.”

“I like that too.” Myka’s expression changed from affectionate to sly. “Want to sneak out of the hospital?”

“No.”

Myka pouted. “You are no fun at all.”

Rolling her eyes at the pout—which managed to be annoying and attractive at the same time—Helena said, “To test me, over and over again. And I’d like to add that that’s a ‘no’ in perpetuity, because—”

“No fun.”

“Will you let me finish? In perpetuity, because I don’t want to be in any hospital so as to have occasion to sneak out of it.”

The pout dissolved. “Oh. That’s reasonable.”

“Now call your mother back in here,” Helena said, “so we can get on with leaving, so we can get on with working—”

“And back to no fun,” Myka interrupted, herself back to the pout.

“And back to, will you let me finish? So we can get on with working, so the day can get on with ending, so you can then get on with sneaking out.”

Now the pout became a familiarly brilliant smile. “Oh. That’s even better than reasonable.”

The half-embrace became full.

****

When Helena opened her door to Myka after the promised, and much-anticipated, sneaking out, it was the hospital room again: no one lunged. Instead they looked.

One beat, two. Unhurried because there was at last no hurry? Or were they waiting for something?

Then Myka said, “This is different than before. Both times. Me standing here.”

“This is different than before,” Helena agreed. She glanced down at the ring on her finger, as if it might itself be the explanation.... it glittered back, wise and clear. A symbol, but not the cause, of everything that stood differently around them, how they stood differently before each other.

Myka spoke again. “Belief is a good look on you.” She took a slow breath. “Then again, I think just about everything’s a good look on you.”

On that, Helena’s memory barked a shin. “Wait. How do you know what I look like in a hardhat?”

“I have a vivid imagination,” Myka said. She stepped inside and kicked the door closed.

The kick was strong and deliberate, but not overpowering; Helena was able to respond, somewhat calmly, “While I know that’s true, I don’t believe it represents a truthful answer to my question.”

Myka’s mouth shaped into a languid smile. It was even more deliberate than the kick. “You really want to know? Fine. One morning Abigail was giving me grief about how she was going to be meeting you at the neighborhood site. This was right after the committee was formed, and I thought that maybe Steve would come with you, and that that would mean the whole committee was there, and I could pinpoint, and you’d be there too, so... you see how I thought the plan was going to come together. But as it turned out, no Steve.”

“So no pinpoint.”

“No pinpoint, and so I felt really silly, lurking around a corner like I was part of some pathetic, busted sting operation, ready with my camera and telephoto lens, but then there wasn’t a drug deal after all. Then again, I did get to hyperventilate about how irresistible you were in that hardhat.”

“But not irresistible.”

“No, seriously.”

“Perhaps seriously, but not literally. You resisted, did you not? Remained out of sight, around the corner?”

Myka paused. “Fine. You win.” She paused again. “But only in the short term.”

“I win only in the short term?”

“I resisted only in the short term. I mean, look at me.”

Helena obliged, and Myka wrapped her arm around Helena in her now-familiar loop, this time as a clear prelude to what would come next. “You do not appear to be the picture of resistance,” Helena acknowledged.

“Good. But obviously resistance was never really on the table. Case in point: that disaster with Ben, the guy in Accounting, happened right after my attempted ring bust.”

“The PTA-meeting fellow. The dressing-down.”

“Which was supposed to put the fear of god, or just shame and unemployment, squarely into all of us.”

“Instead you called me,” Helena said.

“See? I couldn’t resist. I remember you practically ripped my head off.”

“Abigail had made very clear to me that the situation was no longer abstract or humorous. given how you would react to such a public mortification... will you be all right with the consequences of the ‘truth’ about us becoming known now? Whatever those consequences may be?” Helena asked, out of genuine curiosity.

To her surprise, Myka laughed at that. “Given that a lot of the people I work with have both seen you and heard you, I might just get high fives rather than any metaphorical pies to the face.” She turned serious. “But regardless, even if I have to cringe my way through some of it, I’m going to remember that the real consequence is that our situation, yours and mine, doesn’t have to be abstract anymore.”

“Humorous, surely,” Helena said, pressing herself close into that bodily loop.

Myka smiled. “I hope so. But Abigail did try to make the gravity clear to me too. She shoved the ring at me, told me to take it and return it. I almost agreed to.”

“But?”

“But I realized that if it was in my possession again, I was going to track you down. Partially because you were so on fire to keep me out of trouble, and that was... well, irresistible.” She placed her lips softly against Helena’s temple: a gesture of proof. “I have to believe there’s a way out of any box, if you’re willing to work hard enough to find it. Even though that box, then, seemed to be collapsing on us.”

“Like a poorly constructed architectural model,” Helena said, but she thought of that sturdy little community center, flanked by those valiant trees. “You are persistent.”

“Maybe it was because I’d heard the word ‘cancer,’ but I knew what I wanted. Who I wanted. Really, at long last. It was such a relief.”

And Helena considered that Myka wasn’t wrong, not at all. She herself had received no such mortality shock, yet it was still a relief to know with such seeming clarity: this. It was also a relief, now, to be able to act on that knowledge unencumbered. “And at last we can—”

“Wait,” Myka said. “Grapefruit.”

“All right. Turnabout. I see. Interestingly, or not, it also involves a grief-giving from Abigail. It was when she and Steve koaned me. I don’t believe they were yet a committee...” The half-embrace was turning full again; Myka’s ‘wait’ was clearly not intended as any sort of prohibition, but Helena continued, “Abigail was having fun, asked what I liked for breakfast, rubbing in the fact that you and I did not, and would not, share it. ‘There is no grapefruit’ was said, to make me feel terrible.”

Helena realized she’d drawn her expression into severity only when Myka began kissing it gentle. “My poor baby,” she murmured.

The addition of “my.” Entirely right, yet entirely a surprise in its rightness. How could anything so apparently destined be composed of so many pieces that Helena did not expect? “I was wearing a hardhat at the time,” she told Myka. Then she pushed. “Can you imagine? Perhaps you can...”

“Now you’re just showboating,” Myka said, but her hands moved in a way that suggested “just showboating” meant “issuing clear instructions.”

Whatever instructions Helena had inadvertently given, they were exactly the right ones. “Mm,” she said. “Trying to hold your interest.”

Myka said, her words another decisive door-kick, “Irresistible. In the long term.”

****

Early in the morning, a bit baffled by the morning (“It’s only Tuesday? We can do this again tonight and it will then be only Wednesday?”), they went to Myka’s apartment for breakfast.

“I thought your mother liked having the place—a place—to herself,” Helena objected.

“This morning I think she’ll like making maternal noises,” Myka said. She insisted they stop and buy grapefruit and Pop-Tarts, “because symbolism is important.” Helena considered objecting but then reckoned that this stood as one of many lessons, and that her life going forward would be easier if she absorbed those lessons as they presented themselves.

“Three,” Jeannie greeted them.

Helena winced: “Please don’t keep count.” Still so small, that number. What would change as the tally increased?

“I read up on that third Emperor Napoleon,” Jeannie informed her, with a Myka-esque innocent blink. “He instituted several much-needed reforms. So on a scale...”

“Oh. Then please carry on.”

“Actually I’d find that a little weird,” Myka said, with a wince of her own.

“That. That’s what you’d find weird. In addition to my family, of course.”

“A little.”

“You could name my first grandchild Napoleon,” Jeannie suggested.

“Really?” Helena said. Not the worst of names. But also: children. Charles and Jane had been talking of having a child, and Helena had thought that when they succeeded in doing so, that would be that, childwise, for the Wells family. And yet... Napoleon?

“Not really,” Myka said. She frowned at her mother.

A thought struck Helena. “Donovan.”

“What?” Now Myka swung her frown toward Helena.

“First there is a mountain.”

Jeannie said, “I remember that song.”

Myka’s face softened. “I don’t hate it.”

“The song, or the name?” Helena asked.

“I’ve never heard the song. I think. But the name is nice.”

“I can’t wait to tell your father,” Jeannie said. “He’s been terrified you’d name your first after the dog.”

“The author, you mean,” Myka said, and the frown was back.

“No, the dog. The one-word version.”

“Why wouldn’t he like that?”

“For a little girl’s dog, it was charming. An actual human?”

“We’ll name her Emilywilson,” Myka declared. “How about that?”

“Sweetheart, your father’s the one you have to reassure about the name. I just want a grandchild. Name it Child One if you want to.”

Helena, hoping to inject a bit of levity, asked, “But then how will little Two feel?”

Myka raised her eyebrows. “More than one? Really?”

Helena had meant it in jest, but... more than one? “We’ll need to talk about it,” she said.

“We will. The things we get to talk about now!” Myka seemed to glow at the very idea.

Helena had a strange and wonderful presentiment of their doing exactly that: talking about things. Coming to real agreement when an issue was essential, reaching détente when it was not. All while the tally grew: Four. Five. Six. Seven.  In some universe, surely there were uncountably many Emperors Napoleon, each bettering the previous.

Aloud, Helena instructed herself. Take this lesson from Myka: speak it all aloud. “Uncountably many Emperors Napoleon,” she said.

“Forget Maine,” Myka countered. “We’ll move to Florida and buy a grapefruit orchard.”

“Most likely more profitable than refusing to fish for lobsters,” Helena said. “One and Two will need college funds.”

“Three?” Jeannie suggested.

“I don’t know how much money there really is in citrus, particularly if this cheapskate raids the grove every morning for breakfast. Three might have to be one of those pretty never-children,” Myka told her. Then she turned to Helena. “But we’ll need to talk about it.”

“We will,” Helena agreed. The things we get to talk about now... Helena was reasonably certain she was glowing too.

****

Once Myka’s mother and the overall prohibition were gone, Myka did not seem to lose interest. And she and Helena did talk about things. Helena was becoming accustomed to the idea that she would never become accustomed to what Myka would say... happiness pushed up against surprise, always, to make a double bed.

“Here’s a funny thing,” Myka said one morning, standing in Helena’s kitchen, holding a cup of coffee, just as Helena had hoped she might but despaired that she would never.

“Oh god,” Helena responded, because while she was of course thankful for the circumstance under which Myka was speaking, she was still not quite fully thankful for never knowing what she would speak about.

Myka laughed, as she always did. “No, no. It’s just a question; what’s funny is that I never thought to ask you. Why’d you come to the U.S.?”

It was true, though not very surprising, that the topic had not yet come up. Many practical, reality-related issues hadn’t yet come up, perhaps in part due to temperament but mainly due to time. Helena could still easily count their nights... then again she might always keep that count, reflexively. Joyfully? Myka was looking at her, so Helena said, “Sorry. Preoccupied by a number—”

“Thirty-six?”

“That’s the one.”

“We should give each other cards for significant ones. Maybe the primes?”

“Tomorrow, then. I’ll bring you flowers as well... no, I’ll have them sent to you at City Hall.”

At work, Myka had in fact been high-fived more than she had received pies to the face. Apparently most people’s hearts weren’t made of stone, and it was true that Myka was porous when it came to the extent of her happiness. Not to mention, her illness had banked her some goodwill... but it was most likely Myka herself, being herself, that led to the indulgent responses.

“You’re trying to distract me,” Myka accused, but not seriously. “You, to the U.S., why?”

“It isn’t a very interesting story,” Helena said. “Not nearly as interesting as your gratifyingly enthusiastic response to receiving flowers. But since you ask: my mother was fascinated with America, and Americans, when she was young. She instilled it in me, I suppose, and so when I was deciding where to study...”

“I thought that kind of fascination usually went the other way—Americans love the British. The accent, the royal family. Scones. I know my mom did, and I guess she instilled that in me, if we take you as evidence. But so why did your mother—”

“She had an American penfriend.”

“A pen pal?”

“Yes, that. I heard about her my entire childhood, not least because I was nearly named after her.”

“I can’t imagine you not being ‘Helena.’ What was it you were nearly named? And why weren’t you?”

“Jeannette,” Helena said promptly. “Or, as my mother always called her, ‘American Jeannette,’ and in fact that might have been my name, but my father prevailed, because my mother had been the one to name Charles. Although now that I think about it, I don’t know why she wanted his name to be Charles. It isn’t a family name, not that I’m aware, and his ears were of perfectly average size, thus no connection to the prince, so I—”

“I’m going to take a wild stab here,” Myka said. She had set her cup down and crossed her arms, and she was regarding Helena with what was, even for her, an enigmatic expression.

“Are you? At what?”

“Your mom’s name is Sarah.”

Nonplussed, Helena said, “That stab wasn’t wild at all. It was in fact... wait.” No.

“Okay,” Myka said.

“No. Oh no. No.”

“Always with the same bad argument.” Myka’s smile. As if she had always known... but she couldn’t have. So: her smile, as if she had always been—would always be—willing to believe.

“I don’t understand,” Helena said. She didn’t. At no turn had she understood.

Myka said, “Well, me neither.” But she moved across the wide space of the kitchen; she put her arms around Helena, and that was something Helena did understand. 

A kiss, a long one, and she understood that too. “Words about destiny,” she said, when she could.

Myka said, familiarly, against Helena’s neck, “Does it really even matter why?”

“I don’t enjoy being set up.”

“You were set up with me.” Still familiar, still against her neck.

“That improves the situation,” Helena conceded. “Marginally.”

“I’m going to make you regret that addition.”

“Are you?” Now it was Helena’s turn to put lips where they would be familiar. And persuasive.

Myka chuckled. “Depends on how you thought you’d be spending the next several decades.”

Helena determined to take this literally. She leaned back and moved her left hand in front of Myka’s face. “I have a ring, my acceptance of which indicates that ‘married to you’ is my thinking in the matter. More-detailed projections are your job.” This was true: speculating about the gamut of possibilities, from fantastical citrus groves to children, real or never-, delighted Myka.

“Speaking of projections,” Myka said, “I don’t think it’s too crazy to predict, based on this new information, that the wedding—which was already going to be fantastic!—just got that much better. My mom always wondered what happened to her pen pal from England.”

“Is there any prediction that you would consider ‘too crazy’? But my mother wondered too.”

“Both busy raising daughters destined for each other.” This Myka emphasized with a kiss, but...

...so chancy, all of it. “What if it hadn’t happened?” Helena demanded, as if Myka would be able to say. “What if something in this Rube-Goldberg destiny had gone wrong?”

“What if it had? Well, what if it already did? For all you know, this is destiny’s backup plan. She tried a ton of other ways, but then finally threw her hands in the air and said ‘Go forth and matchmake, Helicobacter pylori!’”

Speaking of throwing one’s hands in the air: Helena didn’t perform the action, but, “I give up,” she said. “You win: it’s H. pylori’s fault.”

“Bank on it,” Myka said, her words accompanied by a bright-eyed smile that spoke equally to their past, their present, their future. She followed that with a kiss that was soft and sure, a word about the short term, a promise of the long. “But better yet, bank on me.”

Rick answered the latter question: “Because life isn’t a series of random collisions of atoms.” So helpful.

“It might be,” Varsha told him.

“But we couldn’t perceive it that way, even if it were,” Steve told her in turn.

“I’m having trouble perceiving it in any way,” Helena lamented.

Myka, who hadn’t released Helena’s hand, pulled on it, drawing her attention back. “Let me help you perceive it my way. It’s pretty simple: I bought a ring for you ages ago, mostly as a sort of... gesture of hope. To say ‘there’s a future in which this will be possible.’ But then I showed it to Abigail, and she said it was too risky for me to have it in my possession, because I’d run into you at some point and feel like it was burning a hole in my pocket and just drop to the one knee, regardless of where and when.” She raised “didn’t you” eyebrows at Abigail, who nodded. Myka went on, “I said that was ridiculous, but then one day I saw you down a hallway at City Hall, and I realized I was in fact about to sprint in your direction and do exactly what she’d predicted, so I literally reversed course and went right to her and handed it over. And promised I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t have it. Because even I need the occasional guardrail.”

Abigail snorted. “Occasional. Right.” To Helena, she said, “We should apply for a federal grant to fund the guardrails-against-Helena project. Anyway, I said I couldn’t hold it all the time, because then she’d know exactly where it was, which was almost as bad, given that I didn’t want to be rudely awakened in the middle of the night some night by some lovelorn lunatic who decided she just had to set phasers to nuptial. So I made her promise also not to ask you if she couldn’t pinpoint its location, and we set up a committee—at first just me and Steve, but after she read Rick in, we decided to draft him, too—to rotate possession. Myka doesn’t know the rotation or the schedule, which makes it hard for her to fight through the bureaucracy to get to it.”

“That’s a clever disincentive,” Jane remarked, causing Helena to note that she had not, in fact, exited the inside-joke snowglobe just yet.

Abigail said, “I modeled it on the demonstration-permit regs. They’re so well thought out.”

“I wrote those,” Jane told her, and when Abigail offered her a disingenuous “you don’t say,” Jane bowed her head. She might have been glowering, laughing, or praying... she offered no clarity with her next words: “My staff: the Machiavelli Players.”

Myka, seeming to resent that the spotlight kept shifting away from her, said, “Anyway, I almost did the asking on Saturday night, because it had to be in that room, too, given the committee. But I figured we were so close to getting the work thing fixed—and you’d probably be more inclined to say yes once we did—that I should wait.”

“I’m the one who’s got it now,” Rick said. “Sort of ironic. And I was supposed to hand it off to Steve today.”

Helena looked to Steve. “Behind my back,” she said, “this entire time?” and Steve had the grace to look at least a bit chagrined.

Myka said, “Not entire. It wasn’t until after I told my mom the truth that I really made up my mind.”

“But then you did?” Helena asked.

“But then I did. I’m serious. You’re looking at me like you don’t believe me, but I’m serious.”

“I’m looking at you like...” Helena tried to find words to say about what she was feeling, words that might possibly be correct. She fought through what she recognized as a Myka-esque pause, search... then surrender. “You’re right, like I don’t believe you. We’ve spent only two nights together!”

“Info that I for one didn’t need,” Rick said. “Or want.”

“This I can vote on,” Varsha agreed.

Steve said, hurriedly, “Passed by acclamation.”

Myka gave that attention-tug to Helena’s hand. “If we were fundamentalists, we’d’ve spent zero nights together.”

“We aren’t fundamentalists,” Helena said. Of that, she was reasonably certain, but what it had to do with anything...

Now Myka blinked at Helena: a slow, soft, indulgent blink. “My point is, depending on the circumstance, two is a lot.”

“World wars, for example,” Abigail offered.

“Isn’t that an argument against their spending more nights together?” Liam asked her.

“Emperors Napoleon?” Abigail tried.

“Nope, there were three of those,” Steve said, “but maybe also part of an argument against? The French probably thought the first one was one too many.”

“Waterloo,” Helena muttered, because she still had no purchase on the situation, but defeat seemed a relevant concept.

“That is a very good song,” Myka told her. “I refer you to the lyrics.”

“Mamma Mia movies!” Liam exclaimed.

“That just makes that ‘argument against’ point stronger,” Steve said, and as Liam protested that he liked them, that there should be lots more, Steve gave him a look that Helena decoded—perhaps based on the personal experience of having sent very similar aspects in Myka’s direction—as “your questionable judgment makes me question my own judgment in finding you so appealing.”

Jeannie said, “Here, I’ll try something in a different genre: one of Myka’s great-great-grandmothers was a mail-order bride. She hadn’t even met her intended before the wedding.”

“I didn’t know that. But they lived happily ever after?” Myka asked, with evident hope.

Jeannie shook her head. “Probably not. It was Colorado in the 1800s.”

Varsha clapped her hands lightly, her face a study in joy. “One or both highly likely to have died of cholera!” Her enthusiasm for that outcome was... unsurprising.

“That pile of ‘against’ points keeps getting bigger, guys,” Myka said, “so maybe leave this to me?”

“No, no, the epidemiological point is that you most likely won’t die of cholera,” Varsha said.

Myka smiled, then squinted. “That’s great, but... how is that an argument in favor of our spending more nights together? And/or living happily ever after?”

Varsha squinted back, saying, “It isn’t. It’s a necessary condition for either or both of those outcomes to occur. You’ll have to make your own argument.”

“I’m trying,” Myka said. “Give me the ring, Rick.”

Rick shook his head. “Can’t.”

“Of course you can. It’s mine. And it’s about to be hers, I hope.”

Abigail said, “We have to vote. The committee. It has to be unanimous. You read the bylaws.”

Myka closed her eyes. She breathed in slowly, then said, “You cannot be serious.”

“Isn’t that usually my line?” Helena asked—joking, but not entirely.

Myka’s grip on her hand tightened again. “I swear to god if you people don’t let me put a ring on it, I will water-gun fake blood on each and every one of you, and that will happen at a time you’ll find extremely inconvenient.”

“I move we hand it over,” Steve said.

“Seconded.” That was from Rick.

“I move we vote immediately on the motion,” Steve continued.

Rick again: “Seconded.”

“Aye,” Steve said.

“Aye,” Rick said.

Abigail said nothing.

“What are you waiting for?” Myka demanded.

“Clean clothes,” Abigail told her. “See, I’ve already been water-gunned. I kind of want to make you sweat.”

“Ill-advised,” Jeannie said.

“Why is everyone stealing my lines?” Helena complained.

Myka darted a glance at Helena, a glance of a quality suggesting that Helena’s repeated noting of line-stealing might have been either immensely alluring or extravagantly irritating—or possibly both—and said to Abigail, “I swear. To god. A ring on this, or.”

Abigail sighed. “Fine. Aye.”

“Now,” Myka told Rick.

Rick reached into his pocket, but in trying to extricate what was presumably the ring, he turned the fabric inside out. A loud clink resounded, as did an “oh jesus” from him and a giggle from Abigail, and then he had dropped to his knees and was scrabbling at the floor, and Helena genuinely expected that in a moment, all of them would be examining the linoleum in great detail, for Myka now wore the expression of someone likely to issue a strongly worded decree about what had better be found right now... but Rick quickly bounced up. “Here,” he said to Myka before he looked directly at her face. “Sorry,” he said, after he did.

She held the ring between the thumb and forefinger of her free hand and shook it at him. “You had a diamond ring loose in your trouser pocket? This diamond ring? You are a ding-dong.” Rick looked for a moment as if he might take the fool’s path and protest... but he kept his mouth closed. Myka said, “Good choice,” and she gave the ring, a simple band upon which sat a smallish yet dazzlingly clear stone, to Helena, placing it in the hand she was not holding. “There. Now do you believe me?” She paused. “And now will you say you’ll marry me?”

Helena looked down at what she held. Could a diamond be content to be affixed to a ring? Happy, even, to be there? Because this one’s shimmering clarity seemed not to bespeak mysterious depths, but rather to nestle it securely into its setting. The diamond knew its mind better than Helena knew her own... she cleared her throat. “I’ve never been proposed to before,” she said.

That made Myka not tighten her hold on Helena’s held hand, but gentle it. “That’s because it was always meant to be me.”

That had to be true. It had felt so right to be engaged to marry Myka, even as fiction... Helena said that aloud.

“Told you,” Myka said, but she was not smug. “See, you knew it even before I did.”

“I didn’t buy a ring and set up a committee.”

“That’s because I’m the planner.”

“What does that make me?” Helena asked, and she did not know what Myka’s answer would be. She didn’t know what she wanted Myka’s answer to be... other than right. But what was right? What was she in this improbable relationship?

“You mean,” Jeannie said, “what does it relegate you to.”

Myka smiled at her mother. Then she smiled at Helena. “Dreamer-in-chief,” she said with certainty. “You know, you should put that on your business card. Steve, don’t you think she’d get more work that way?”

“She’d get different work that way,” Steve said. “But isn’t the goal of all this to make sure she gets... similar work?”

With a small eyeroll, Myka said, “Fine. We’ll relegate it to the vows: ‘Do you promise to faithfully execute the office of dreamer-in-chief? To keep dreaming up the never-fountains?’”

Dreamer-in-chief. Perhaps anything Myka had said would have been the right answer, because perhaps it all was nothing more—or less?—than an inside-joke snowglobe. But why not stay in it? The fountain might not exist, but this could. Surely, after all they had been through, this could. Then there is... Helena cleared her throat again. “As noted,” she said, “I didn’t buy a ring.”

“Cheapskate-in-chief,” Myka said, and that was even more right.

“But will you marry me, too?” Helena asked. It was not what she ever would have planned to say today, but now she had said it. And she did not mean it as any push of problems into the future... no, it was a pull of problems. An invitation to them, in the present and in the future.

“Try and stop me, beautiful cheapskate. Just try.” Myka leaned back against her inadequate pillow, looking for all the world like a spoiled princeling, sure that the world—or at least Helena—was hers for the taking. She was of course right, and Helena leaned in and kissed her, savoring it, savoring all of it, even the obvious absurdity, even the likelihood of additional, or at least eventual, catastrophe... “I haven’t changed,” she still wanted to warn, but she still also remembered Myka’s “maybe you shouldn’t have to.” This is how it feels, Charles might as well have been whispering in her ear, as the right wrecking ball knocks you over.

When the kiss ended, Myka didn’t, to Helena’s surprise, return to smiling. Instead she blinked overwet eyes. The planes of her face were ruddy. “You really do believe it,” she said. Perhaps not so spoiled after all, the princeling...

“I do,” Helena assured her.

Varsha said, “That’s funny too! Even more so, because I don’t think you said it intentionally.”

“I have to confess I find it a little hard to follow what you think is funny,” Rick told her.

Helena echoed, “Hard to follow. I have to confess that I find the turn—turns?—my life has taken a bit hard to follow.”

Myka sighed. “If we’re owning up, then I have to confess that I find myself contemplating more often than is probably healthy how adorable this cheapskate looks in a hardhat.”

“What?” Helena said, startled. “How do you know that?”

“That’s the part that’s a little hard to follow, and I’ll tell you later, but I note that you aren’t disputing your adorableness.”

“I—”

“That better end with ‘love you.’”

“It does,” Helena said. “And you knew that before I did.” She had been holding the ring in the palm of her own free hand, where Myka had placed it. Now, to substantiate her words, she loosed her right hand from Myka’s and used it to place that unassuming band onto the appropriate finger, where it fit as if, yes, it had always been intended to live there. She held her hand up, facing its back, and thus the confident stone, toward Myka. “Well? What do you say to that?”

“Everything,” Myka said, and Helena laughed and kissed her again, because of course she did say everything, anything and everything, all of it exactly what Helena needed—and a reasonable majority of the time wanted—to hear.

When this kiss ended, Helena heard a small sniffle, and she looked up to see Jeannie dabbing at her eyes. “I’m not surprised this got to me,” Jeannie said, “because witnessing my daughter so overcome is, to use an inadequate word, rare... but I didn’t know it would get to anybody else.” She looked at Jane. “I’m glad to know she works for someone with such a heart.”

Helena observed, with astonishment, that Jane was touching her own eyes with her sleeve. Jane said, “I did mention it isn’t made of stone. And with that, I’m leaving, before anyone mistakes me for a sentimental fool.”

“Too late,” Abigail informed her, with a laugh that seemed dangerously near a cackle.

Jane confirmed the danger with a raised eyebrow. “Spread that around, Ms. Machiavel, and I will show you how fast a heart can harden.” She then made an exit of a sort that should have been accompanied by a retinue.

Rick sighed. “I guess that means Myka’s cured, and we better get back to work.”

“Unless someone in this room would like to develop some sort of interesting infection,” Varsha suggested.

“I’d rather my day be boring, thanks,” Rick told her.

Varsha gave his cheek a pat that, if bestowed by anyone else, would have seemed overly aggressive. “Of course you would, wallpaper. See how soothing he is!”

Once Rick and Varsha had gone, Liam said, “I guess they’re right. There’s only so many billable hours I can give up in order to ‘visit a sick friend.’ Or visit a ‘sick’ friend. Or whatever it is we’ve been doing.”

“It’s strange but nice to have seen you in the middle of the day,” Steve said.

“Heart-melter. Maybe I won’t badger you to watch Here We Go Again tonight.”

“Waterloo... knowing my fate is to be with you,” Steve sang softly, and Helena added “Steve singing” to the list of seemingly impossible things that had happened today. He turned to her with a slightly apologetic, self-conscious smile. “If I can’t concentrate this afternoon because that’s running through my head, it’s your fault.”

“Accepted,” Helena said. “I think we can safely assume some similar words will be interfering with my thoughts.”

“Obviously, mine too,” said Myka.

“And mine,” Liam agreed. “Thanks a lot, honey. I’m supposed to be writing a closing argument. What if I accidentally put in ‘I feel like I win when I lose’?”

Steve shrugged. “Depends. How many ABBA fans are on your jury?”

“That isn’t something we commonly get around to in voir dire.”

“Then I think we’ve all learned a lesson or two today, haven’t we? About good questions to ask,” Steve said. He directed a significant look at Helena and Myka, then threw an even more significant one toward Liam. “In particular circumstances.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Liam said as they departed. “I will badger you to watch Here We Go Again. Every night for the next week. Or maybe the next year. Or decades....”

Abigail remarked, “They’re almost as cloying as the two of you, but with less drama. Is that good or bad? Anyway, I’m going to bring this back around to ‘clean clothes,’ and the fact that I’d like some, so I should—”

“They have lovely scrubs here,” Helena told her. “The color of an emergent bruise.”

Myka said, “I’ll admit I got a little overenthusiastic with the ‘blood.’ It’s a lot more fun water-gunning it than actually producing it myself. Although I did end up engaged to the most beautiful cheapskate in the world, both times...”

“It seems entirely unfair to Abigail that you were the only one in possession of a weapon,” Helena said.

Abigail nodded at Helena with enthusiasm. “So true. Unfair to you, too, that first time, even if the weapon was her gut. We’ll have to get back at her somehow—I know, a group paintball tournament! Maybe make it an annual thing. For your anniversary.”

“That is the best idea ever,” Myka said to her. Then she turned to Helena and said, as if referring to the sweetest of intimacies, “Isn’t it.”

“Paintball,” Helena said, and did the tone she took with Myka inevitably sound that same tenderness? “Do you know what Charles says to his wife, Jane, on a regular basis?”

“Unfortunately, he didn’t tell me. Do you want me to guess?”

“Actually... I’d love to hear your guess.”

“He says ‘Jane, isn’t my sister so very lucky to have found Myka, and vice versa.’”

That made Helena laugh. “Although you’ve produced a tolerable version of his voice, I don’t believe he does say that. Not regularly.”

“Well, give it time. What does he really say?”

“He says, ‘What a disaster our first meeting was.’”

“Did she really run into his car? Or was he shining me on?”

“And then he thought to return the favor,” Helena affirmed, “to make sure he had her romantic attention. He didn’t tell you that part?”

“God, no. You Wellses are weird.”

“I talked him out of it!” Helena protested.

Myka, doing princeling-against-the-pillow again, drawled, “That’s your evidence to the contrary.”

Helena said to Jeannie, “Do you know, occasionally your daughter sounds exactly like her father. Who has that irrational fear of raccoons, as I’ve so recently come to understand, so if family weirdness is genuinely on the table—”

“I do know they sound alike,” Jeannie interrupted, “but it’s nice to be reminded of it. Do you sound like your father?”

Helena smiled. “No, but I do sound very like my brother—as Myka has remarked, and which is pertinent, because Charles always follows his initial disaster comment with, ‘What a disaster I would be in the absence of that disaster.’”

“That’s sweet,” said the princeling, “but still weird.”

“My point is that I suspect I’ll be following his lead in these ritual utterances as well.”

“I don’t need clean clothes,” Abigail announced. “I need insulin. Is there a special British kind? Because you never sound like you’re made of sugar, but you are, and that makes it worse. That’s it for me.” She paused at the door, turned around, and pointed at Myka. “Pop-Tarts are one thing, but grapefruit’s another.” Then she pointed at Helena. “And raccoons are one thing, but eleven of you, nobody could take.” She swept out, and Helena suspected she would have wanted her departure accompanied by dramatic exit music.

“Grapefruit,” said Myka. “She’s said that to me before, in relation to you.”

“It has vaguely to do with koans. I’ll tell you the story some other time,” Helena said.

“Why is there always a story?” Myka said, a gentle mock.

“I’m told it has to do with atoms.”

Jeannie said, “Colliding, but not randomly. She was so excited when I finally found that book of yours.”

“I suspect she was primarily pleased to have been right. In her identification.”

“Well, she’s Myka,” Jeannie allowed. “But also... she was overcome. Like today. By you. I’m really not giving away any secret when I tell you this matters to her in an unprecedented way—but even if it were a secret, I’d tell you, because of that unprecedented mattering.”

“I’m in the room, Mom.”

Jeannie ignored Myka. She leveled a not-quite-benign gaze at Helena and said, “Treat her well. You seem like you will—I want to believe that you will—but please.”

Not precisely a talk of shovels, but near enough. “I will work hard at it,” Helena told her. “I’m very good at working hard.”

Myka leaned against Helena again. She said, “Mm. In a selfish, Emperors-Napoleon sense, I’m glad you aren’t overly good at being good.”

Not in front of your mother, Helena thought at Myka. She tried to show, by means of a severe brow-furrow directed at the very contented woman at her side, that she was thinking this instruction, but that made Myka laugh, and that in turn made Helena want to forget about who they were in front of.

“I clearly need to give you two a minute,” Jeannie said, and that was, from Helena’s perspective, an embarrassingly accurate reading of the room’s temperature. “But as I understand it, everybody’s supposed to get back to work. And you might want to remember that the idea behind this whole thing was for everybody to keep having work to get back to...” The door closed behind her.

Guilt: Helena had been so, so uncharitable in her initial assessment of Myka’s Rick-promoting mother, yet Jeannie had, now, provided them with their first instance of clean, unencumbered intimacy. She does want Myka to be happy, Helena now thought. With someone. And she genuinely seems to believe that I am that someone...

That they didn’t lunge for each other seemed, paradoxically, a good sign. A marker of this new reality.

“One minute,” Helena said. “Our first real minute.”

“Speaking of what’s real, tell me, do you really want this?” Myka asked. Helena moved her jaw in disbelief, but Myka went on, “I can take it if you don’t, but only if you tell me right now.”

Helena held her hand up again. “Here is what I’ll tell you right now: I will remove this ring for no reason other than a medical emergency?”

“That could just mean you like rings,” Myka said.

“Have you seen me wear a ring before today?”

“That could just mean you like this ring,” Myka said, but she touched the ring, began playing with Helena’s fingers.

“I have no right answer anymore.”

Myka looked up. “You do if you kiss me.”

So Helena did.

“See?” Myka said, some length of time later. “Now I’m persuaded. Want to persuade me some more? Maybe really, really fast? I think from my side of things, I can promise—”

“No,” Helena interrupted, because if Myka kept talking, the answer was going to be yes, because Helena certainly did want to persuade her some more.

A little pout, a pretty blink. “No?”

“Well, not no,” Helena conceded.

“Not no? Maybe I’m wrong, but that seems like a double negative, which I’m mostly sure works out in the math to be a positive, so—”

Helena had to interrupt again. “I mean, no, but not in perpetuity. No for the present moment.”

“You pick the worst times to be good at being good, but fine. Failing that, I don’t suppose you’d want to just go for the whole cheese plate? Fly to Vegas and get married tonight? Bellagio... fountains.... something like, there is no fountain, then there are lots of fountains, and they dance or light up or do some other—”

Helena kissed her again, and this one was sharp and quick, for it was meant both to stop her and to stop the idea, which was, for all its absurdity, ridiculously compelling: fly away and change everything yet again. She remarked, trying to lighten the idea away, “We’ve both said ‘I do,’ as Varsha found so amusing. Perhaps we’re married already.”

“In some version of the world, I bet we are.”

“I would in some version of the world marry you this minute. But I think we’d both enjoy getting to know each other just a bit better first... more importantly, however, if Charles isn’t invited to the event, he’ll riot.”

“All by himself?”

“That would be very Charles. Also, however, my parents.”

“They’ll riot?”

“Doubtful. Well, my mother might. But I would... want them here. For such an occasion. The right one.”

“If that committee hadn’t let me give you this ring, I would’ve rioted.”

“Once I became accustomed to the idea, so would I.”

Myka said, “I sprang it on you. I’m sorry.” She kissed the ring where it lived on Helena’s finger.

As severely as she could, given the kiss, Helena said, “You are in no way sorry.”

“See, you know me pretty well already. I love that I sprang it on you. I also love that you sprang it on me, reciprocally.”

“It did take me a moment.”

“Scariest moment of my life.”

“You don’t mean that,” Helena said.

“Maybe you don’t know me so well after all. What if you’d said no?”

“You never genuinely entertained that as a possibility.”

“I did though. The look on your face right at first? I don’t ever want to see that look again.” She pulled Helena to her. This kiss said Don’t frighten me.

Helena didn’t want to do that, but she did want to tell the truth. She said, “I’ll be honest: I’m not sure this will work as perfectly as I want it to. As some of our interactions have suggested it might.”

“That you want it to work perfectly is a pretty good start... plus that you think that some of our interactions have suggested it might, that doesn’t hurt. I do too, by the way. Want that. And think that.”

Trying to maintain her honesty, Helena asked, “Is it setting us up for failure? Nothing is perfect.”

“It’s all about goals. What’s failure? Aim for perfect, hit pretty damn wonderful.” And then she clearly decided to tell some truth of her own. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. But nothing will if we don’t start, so let’s.”

“I’m fairly certain we have. Look at what’s on my hand.”

“I had moments when I thought about having bought this thing—this thing that was too dangerous for me to have in my possession—and I wondered who in the world I was, who I thought I was, to even consider something like that. Something like that, with someone like you.”

These insecurities... they were Helena’s fault. “Who were you?” she asked, not at all rhetorically, for she intended to give a convincing, sure answer. “Someone with the fearlessness to consider, to push for, a better future. Meanwhile all I did was feel sorry for us. That was all someone like me could do: sit and wait for someone fearless like you to change the circumstance.”

“Fearless, foolish... but no matter how foolish it was, you’re right, it’s on your hand. I like it there.” She stopped, seemed to consider whether she wanted to go on. “Hm. Did you wear a ring before?”

“No, I’ve never worn one. I did the proposing. Gave the ring.” Did Myka want the reciprocal question? Helena went ahead and asked, “Did you? Wear one?”

This occasioned a sigh. “Weirdly, no. The wedding ring was going to be his grandma’s, and we were vaguely planning to retrofit something to go with it. I didn’t press the issue—didn’t care enough to. That should’ve helped clue me in, shouldn’t it?” That was said with a wry twist of lip, not a smile.

Of course both their pasts contained unheeded clues... “I think it’s fair to say that we’ve both made some errors.”

“I think it’s fair to say that we both failed upward.”

What an exquisite thing to say in this context, about what had gone wrong in the past—so exquisite that Helena could barely stand it. She felt a rush of willingness to take Myka up on the idea of being fast, right here... but that rush was an impulse, not an imperative. Instead, Helena got up from the bed. Stepped away. Regarded the woman still in it. Her face, its lines so deft, its beauty barely contained in a too-precise space, would always raise that impulse—no, imperative—to protect.

Pale, sick Myka, in a bed such as this one. Would Helena ever cease to see that day superimposed on Myka’s face and body? And would Helena ever cease to hear, inside Myka’s voice, an echo of that day’s weakest, most distressed entreaty: Will you be here when I wake up?

Of course I will, Helena had told her, and was that when she herself had made up her mind? When you wake up, I’ll be the first thing you see. Helena hadn’t known it then, but she had already begun speaking the vows. Keeping them. “In sickness...” she now said.

“Don’t worry,” Myka told her. “I’ll inflict plenty of health on you, too. Not to mention their friends: richer, poorer, and better.”

“What about ‘worse’?”

That made Myka smile with mischief. “Now who’s the one tempting fate?”

“Destiny,” Helena corrected.

Myka kept smiling, but she also narrowed her eyes. “Hm. Now that sounds like a koan.”

“What does?”

“I asked, ‘Who’s the one tempting fate?’, and ‘Destiny,’ you said. That’s the one tempting fate.”

“But I meant—”

“So the koan is, what happens when destiny tempts fate?”

Helena said, immediately, because it was true, “Charles would say, a car wreck.”

“What would you say?”

Helena would have smiled, largely and with intent, but she was already doing that, and Myka was doing that too, and Helena suspected they both would keep on doing that. She shook her head and exhaled, a little ripple-chuckle of jubilation. “What happens when destiny tempts fate?” she echoed, and Myka nodded. “What would I say?” Myka nodded again, her smile, impossibly, even larger. Now Helena shrugged. There was only one answer, so she gave it: “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“It was you all along,” Myka said, and her voice was sweet, not weak. “It really was you.”

Helena had been working on a dramatic statement in the “yes, it was I!” genre in response to whatever she encountered, here in this little hospital-room playhouse. But “I’m sorry” she said instead. An inadequate apology for everything from the original sin of the textbook through to Myka’s having to lie here in a hospital bed again.

Myka said, “I’m not.” She smiled. “But we really need to stop meeting like this.”

Enough of Helena’s wits returned for her to observe, “Abigail seems to have got the worst of it this time.”

“Impressive, right?” Abigail said. “When she gets sick, she gets sick. Overachiever.”

Now Helena did try to “act”: “You told her,” she said to Rick, who nodded. “So you know everything?” Helena asked Myka.

“I hope so,” said Myka. “I want to.”

“I want you not to be sick again,” Helena said, and that was no act.

“I can see that. Come here. If I am going to be sick again, it’s where you belong.” Myka looked up at Rick. “Now I’m the one who’s sorry. I did think it was you. Before. That it was supposed to be.” Rick said a soft “me too,” and Helena saw that Myka’s words, and his, were indeed about before: before Helena. Months ago, she would have found such an acknowledgement exclusionary and enraging. Now it raised further gratitude in her. She found she could not quite remember how it felt to hate Rick.

She did remember, however, how it felt to go to Myka’s bedside and take her hand. “I didn’t think I’d be allowed to do this,” she said.

“Technically,” Myka said, now with a glance at Jane Lattimer, “you’re not. But isn’t there an initiative about to be rolled out? That might make it okay?”

Everyone else was now conspicuously silent. Helena was not at all sorry to have missed whatever histrionics had preceded her entrance, but poor Liam was likely to regret finding so little to work with, improvisationally.

“Initiative?” Jane asked, with an edge, and Helena began to worry.

“Sunshine?” Myka asked back.

Jane frowned, and Helena, her worry intensifying, said, “I don’t want to cause trouble. But at the same time, I’d be happier if I didn’t have to skulk in someone else’s emails. Even if he was kind about it. Thank you, Rick.” She meant it.

“You’re welcome,” Rick said, and he seemed to mean it as well. “Happier’s a good goal. For you and for Myka. I think we all agree on that.”

“We certainly do,” Jeannie said.

Her words made Helena remember that, given the situation, she wouldn’t know who this was. “Have we met?” she asked.

In lieu of a real answer, Jeannie ruminated, “Myka told me about you, the first time this happened. Of course she told me after the fact. About all of it. ‘Hi, Mom, hope bridge club was fun, and by the way, cancer.’ And even then she seemed more concerned about having decorated you with so much of her AB-positive... that was a little confusing, in terms of priorities, but the most confusing part is why nobody insisted on calling her next of kin!”

“Mom,” Myka said. “First, I wasn’t dying. And second, storyline, okay?”

“Fine,” Jeannie said. “Am I allowed to sigh and say words about destiny?”

“Like I could stop you,” Myka said.

Helena tried to walk a middle way with, “I wish the circumstances were better, but I’m pleased to meet you.”

“We’ll see if it’s likewise,” said Jeannie, with a bit of her familiar twinkle.

“I’ll try to make it so. If Myka will let me, now that she knows that my feelings belong to me, not Rick. And now that she knows that her feelings are for me, not Rick. That is, if she still has those feelings, given the revelation that they may be for me, not Rick.” Well, that had been a terrible improvisation. Helena wished some language-use fail-safe mechanism could have cut her off after the first “me, not Rick.”

“I have them,” Myka said, with admirable simplicity. To Jane, she said, “So could we?”

“Could you what?” Jane asked. She still wore a frown, but was that was from “when will my day resume” annoyance, or because Myka was on an extremely wrong track?

“Hold hands, now that we know who feels what for whom. Could we just do this, and not worry about our jobs? Given the sunshine, I really think we—”

“But Myka,” Jane said, her expression changing from severe to gently serious, “that isn’t how it’s intended to work. It’s intended, once we announce, to flush people out: ultimately, to be an even greater deterrent. To show that we can find problems and dispatch them. One of you would still have to go—the only thing the initiative does is provide for some negotiating and grace period. A softer landing, with associated publicity. For example, Helena’s firm could finish the library, but she’d be barred from city work after that. Or you could wrap up your projects, and then you’d exit with some sort of severance package.”

Myka’s small smile had vanished, and her hold on Helena’s hand had become progressively tighter through Jane’s explanation. “What? No... no, no, no! Blameless adorable girls!”

“What?” Jane said.

Myka turned to Helena and said, in a voice as tense as her grip, “I didn’t know.”

Helena said a quiet, “That’s your just deserts for reading things you shouldn’t. Draft memos... marked-up city planning textbooks...”

“I thought it was going to be perfect,” Myka said. Her eyes dampened, and she blinked fast.

“It is perfect, as far as the initiative goes,” Jane told her, “but it doesn’t get you the outcome you seem to want.”

Myka hates how red... they really could not move to Maine and refuse to fish for lobsters, so Helena was going to have to come up with something else, and she was going to have to do it quickly. “But not the outcome you want, either,” she said to Jane, buying time.

“How do you mean?” Jane asked.

“Do you want me to be barred from city work?”

“Of course not. I wish I could say there were plenty of firms in the sea that can bring work in on time and on budget, but.”

Helena continued, slowly, “And you can’t possibly want to send Myka off into the sunset with a severance package, because she’s exceptional at her job.” An even more salient through struck her: “And because you most likely won’t be allowed to replace her, will you? Given budgetary concerns.”

“That’s most likely correct,” Jane said.

And now Helena had to throw that last reasonable save-us-all possibility out the window as well. Not on impulse, but as an imperative: because it was no longer a reasonable possibility. She said, “I would swear to fall out of love with her, but I don’t believe I can do that. And you would have your suspicions, wouldn’t you? Regardless of what either of us swore.”

“‘Suspicions’ is far too mild a word for what I would have, if you tried to sell me that story,” Jane said. “That story.”

It was a clear request: sell me the right story. What was the right story? The current circumstance was once a different circumstance, Helena reminded herself, and then she began to remind Jane of it: “Let’s consider a hypothetical situation. What would have happened if she and I had been together before I bid on the neighborhood?”

Jane said, promptly, “You would never have been allowed within ten miles of that bid.”

“But remember, the process began before the current mayor took office. And Myka wasn’t involved, not initially. Under the previous administration, that was the functional equivalent of being ten miles apart, wouldn’t you say? Under the previous administration, our integrity would have been the stuff of legend. Perhaps even epic poetry, composed in Greek.” She glanced at Myka, who was not at all ready to smile. I will never, ever let this face be red again. Maine, lobsters, red. Everything connected. Fix it.

Jane said, “I have my doubts about the poetry, but in a general sense, yes.”

“And neither Myka nor I could have known that after my unfortunate incident with her now-former coworker, you would assign her to the project. Could we? She certainly didn’t volunteer for it.”

“No...” Now Jane Lattimer had a tilt to her head and a glint to her eye that suggested she was beginning to see Helena’s point: blameless adorable girls...

Myka was still blinking, and she was breathing hard through her nose: she wasn’t there yet.

“The timeline,” Helena said. “The timeline. You assign Myka to the project, having no idea that she and I are together in some way; we don’t say anything about it, because why would we have done, under the previous regime? A short time later, the new mayor takes office; new rules go into effect. Myka and I are now stuck: what can we do? If we reveal ourselves, either she loses her job, or my firm is dropped from consideration. We don’t want either of those outcomes, so for a brief while, we bide our time. Perhaps we’re trying to figure out a plan.” She looked at Myka again, and now Myka blinked again, but slow, an I trust you blink, an I still don’t quite see but I trust you movement of lids and lashes.

Helena, encouraged, continued, “We fail to figure out a plan before Myka falls ill, and we have our day in hospital. She conveys to you the basic facts of what happened—that she did fall ill, that I was there with her—because she could hardly conceal those facts. And you, following the guidelines, remove her from the project and install Abigail instead. We breathe something of a sigh of relief, but we also find ourselves consigned to secrecy. We’re trapped. We remain trapped, all this time... but, notably, I don’t attempt to influence any of Myka’s work, and she exerts no influence to benefit me. That is objectively the case.”

“The mayor wouldn’t bother to follow that story,” Jane said. “She’s busy; it’s lengthy. And I’m not persuaded it’s true.”

“It could have been true. Just as this story of emails and a relapse could have been true,” Helena told her—but having done so, she realized that she had fully confessed to the fictional nature of the current situation. Monumental error?

Apparently not; Jane’s posture relaxed, and she said, “So Myka’s all right?”

Myka squeezed Helena’s hand. “I’m all right,” she said, and Helena was so relieved to hear her sound like herself again that she sat down next to her on the bed, heedless, now, of all appearances, even of making it clear that she had indeed been with Myka, lately, in a better bed than this one. She noted that she was on the correct side of this bed. They had been in better beds, but at least she was in this one correctly.

“All right then,” Jane said. “Several things could have been true. What actually is true?”

The words “First there was a fountain” made their way out of Myka’s mouth before Helena managed to interrupt, “I don’t believe anyone’s life will be improved if we try to explain. Speaking of stories no one would bother to follow.” Myka’s theory regarding public shaming was all very well, but now they needed to offer something that made sense.

“All right then, “ Jane said. “We’ll save the truth for a less instrumental time. But what would you like me to sell to the mayor?”

Helena said, “Sell her this: a city employee and a contractor have a personal relationship that predates the current administration, but that relationship has never been allowed to influence their work. I think that says a great deal about how this mayor has managed to bring integrity back to governance, don’t you?” Jane began to nod, if still with bit of skepticism, so Helena went on, “If the mayor is indeed concerned about having nothing to disclose, then here is something that may be disclosed. If everything looks too perfect, here is a story in which everyone’s behavior, while not perfect, is undamaging to the work at hand. In fact the work at hand is being done rather well, and our conduct has been, all things considered, very nearly exemplary.”

No one else in the room had said anything for quite some time—poor Liam, Helena thought again. Everyone’s eyes were on Jane, who said, “It’s a shame you weren’t secretly married. I’d have a better case for having this new initiative somehow grandfather you in, given your ‘exemplary’ conduct.” Helena heard the quote marks.

“Hm,” Rick said. “How about if they were engaged?”

Jane tilted her head one way, then the other. “It couldn’t hurt.”

Rick turned to Myka and Helena and shrugged as if to say “well then.”

“There are several people who work at this hospital who would attest to that as fact,” Helena said.

Myka smiled up at Helena. “Plus it would help explain why you dropped everything to be here today—I mean, here, today, when I’m having this relapse—regardless of appearances.”

Jane said, “And I suppose it would explain why, here today, you were both unable to hide the ‘real’ situation from me. Given what a terrible actor Helena is.” She said this last with a “go ahead, challenge me” air.

“Terrible,” Helena agreed, not rising to the bait, if indeed it was bait. “Jane, I believe you’re the hero in this scenario, are you not? You offer the mayor an easy way to show a tinge of relatively harmless imperfection, and you keep all your personnel in place. No other department head could possibly have the opportunity—and ability!—to thread such a needle.”

“Don’t push,” Jane warned.

“I can’t help but push,” Helena said, because it was true. “Look at her.” She herself looked at Myka... and was struck by the fact of her. No more impulses; only imperatives.

“It’s fortunate you’ve given up asking me to believe that this romance is purely epistolary,” Jane said. “We do still have one problem, however, speaking of looking: going forward, there’s that pesky appearance of a conflict of interest. I’m not sure how I can talk the mayor down from that.”

Varsha said, “I have an idea. You see, I’m using this wallpaper”—she gestured at Rick—“to help my career.”

“Who are you again?” Jane asked.

“I am Doctor Varsha Parekh, but that is unfortunately neither here nor there in the present circumstance. The point is that the wallpaper is fine with it. He would most likely not be fine with it, however, if I hadn’t told him. If for example I told someone else and that news made its way back to him.”

“Full disclosure!” Liam said, with a florid melodrama that the current circumstance certainly didn’t warrant... then again, Helena did see that it was likely to be one of his only lines, so of course he would want to make the most of it.

His making the most of it startled Jane. “Who are you?” she asked.

“I thought,” Liam began, just as extravagantly—then Steve elbowed him and he calmed down—“well, I thought I might get to play a doctor too, but instead I’m ‘Assistant’s Boyfriend.’ Which is fine.” He elbowed Steve.

Jeannie sighed. “I’m still just ‘Mom.’”

Myka burst out with, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

“I know you did,” Jeannie told her, “and it’s fine, just as Liam said, but—”

“No, Mom,” Myka said, “I’m talking about disclosure. If I warn them, no one can say I didn’t warn them.”

Abigail mused, “It is a conflict of interest. Say it loud and proud, over and over, and eventually nobody’ll think twice about it; they’ll bake it into every single good word you might say about her. And every single bad word you might say about anybody else.”

“You will have to say it over and over,” Jane told Myka, “or everyone will think you’re joking.”

“I will be so happy to say it over and over,” Myka said. Her hand, still gripping Helena’s, was warm.

Jane said, “You’ve always been above reproach... are you ready to take that reputational hit?”

At that, Myka did lose a bit of her shine. Helena looked at Abigail, who shrugged and said, “She’s the one who keeps saying she’s tougher than she looks.”

“Think of it as a metaphorical pie in the face,” Helena suggested to Myka.

“I guess you did pre-apologize,” Myka said. “First thing when you walked in here.”

“And I felt I really did have to throw it. Well, to set you up for it to be thrown, I suppose. Unfortunately I don’t think anyone will bother hiding it in a bouquet.”

“Helena, I had no idea you were this strange,” Jane remarked.

“I’m not the one who—never mind. Yes, I am this strange. Now. I occasion the throwing of metaphorical pies. I personify the lessons of a koan that inexplicably involves a lobster. And everywhere I go, I find myself there under false false pretenses.”

“Not everywhere,” Myka said. “But speaking of false false pretenses, and why she goes places, I should make clear that regardless of when anything did or didn’t happen, I did all the pursuing, I swear. If she’s been trying to get me to wield influence on her behalf, she’s doing a terrible job. Gave me no incentive at all.” Myka accompanied this with an irresistible nestle against Helena’s side... a reminder that Myka herself had provided near-constant incentive for Helena to give up and give in. As she was now once again doing.

“Maybe she’s spectacular at reverse psychology,” Abigail said.

“Whose side are you on?” Myka demanded.

With a glance at Jane, Abigail said, “Good governance. I’m on the side of good governance.” She glanced down at the “gore” that decorated her. “I’m also on the side of clean clothes.”

Steve said, “She is not spectacular at reverse psychology. She’s not even very good at straightforward psychology.”

Helena sat there and took it, because really, what were her options? Her martyrdom was mitigated by the fact that she was still sitting next to Myka, holding her hand. With a modicum of hope.

Jane said, “Honestly, psychology aside, I wish you’d just come to me in the first place. My heart isn’t made of stone.” She shook her head in an exasperated chide.

In response to which, Helena had no choice but to muse, “How ironic it would be if someone had, prior to all this, suggested doing precisely that.”

Myka un-nestled herself and poked Helena in the side. “How even more ironic it would be if, after all this, someone else were to decide she’d changed her mind about wanting to be with someone.”

“I am having a sign made that says ‘point taken.’”

“Good investment.” Myka then re-nestled herself, as if it were a relief to have that settled.

And with that, Helena capitulated. Entirely: no part of her soul was divided. She would sell the firm to Steve if she had to; she would move to Maine; she would confront lobsters or any other monster from her childhood, from her subconscious, or from reality. She would maintain.

Jane said, “I need to make one more very important point, one that each and every one of you needs to take to heart: You’re all terrible actors—“

“Now, wait,” Jeannie said, and Liam added, “You should have seen me as Biff Loman three seasons ago at the Civic Theater.”

Jane rolled her eyes. “But since you’re willing to put on this ridiculous show to ‘help’ them, can I count on you to maintain the equally ridiculous position that they’ve been involved for as long as they have to have been, for this story to be plausible? A year? More?”

Helena, suddenly giddy at the idea of victory within their grasp, said, “We have known each other for more than a year and have been madly in love for twice that long. Wait, was that backwards?”

“Liar,” Myka accused. “Three times that long.”

Rick offered, “I am pretty sure Myka cheated on me with her.”

Myka raised a threatening hand to him. “Hey. Actually too soon on that.”

“Sorry,” he said.

Helena remembered how it felt to resent him. She glared.

“Very sorry,” he amended.

“Some secret engagement that you were trying to tell me some fake story about,” Steve said, contemplatively.

Helena recognized the phrasing. “You did say that. At the time.”

“I was all set to believe it then... so now I do.” His breathing was steady. Helena reflected that if she did have to sell the firm to him, everyone there would most likely breathe far more steadily, far more of the time.

“Wonderful,” said Jane. “And when I say ‘wonderful,’ I mean that if I hear one whisper of trouble about this, everyone in this room over whom I have any authority whatsoever is fired, removed, or otherwise penalized. Do I make myself clear?” She received decisive nods from everyone, even those over whom she technically had no power at all. “All right. Here is the ‘real’ story: you’ve been engaged since before the current administration came into office. I had no knowledge of this engagement. As far as I knew, you met on the day of Myka’s hospital stay—during which, I’m gathering, Helena represented herself as Myka’s fiancée.”

“I did,” Helena said.

“That representation of the situation was, if anyone asks from this point forward, true,” Jane told her.

Helena said, “It felt true.”

“It did,” Myka agreed.

“True enough,” Rick harrumphed.

Helena remembered yet more resentment.

Jane went on, “And I removed Myka from the project with absolutely no knowledge of this previously existing relationship. And the two of you spent a great deal of time fearing for your lives and livelihoods.”

“Also true,” Helena affirmed.

“Very,” Myka intensified.

“Because you didn’t know how magnanimous I would be in attempting to work out this grandfathering situation,” Jane concluded.

“I bet I suspected,” Myka said, with a bit of a wily smile, and she knew Jane better than Helena did, so she would know if that was all right, but Helena still had to resist a strong urge to shush her and tell her not to tempt fate.

Fortunately, Jane seemed not to take it amiss. “I haven’t survived as many administrations as I have by being unwilling or unable to do what’s necessary to get to my preferred outcome. You’re not wrong about the politics of the situation, Helena. I think this will let the mayor send a particular signal... I think it could, strangely, work. And work well.”

“So many of Myka’s ideas seem to,” Helena said. “Work strangely, I mean. And well. Although rarely as she intends.”

Jeannie said, “You probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that that’s been true since she was five and decided that she wanted a pet. Her father wouldn’t get her a dog, so she used Pop-Tarts to train a raccoon to sit at the backyard picnic table with her.”

“And against its better judgment, it agreed to continue to pose as her fiancée,” Helena said, and she felt Myka’s body move. Laughter, accompanied by a mumble of “should’ve tried Pop-Tarts with you.”

Abigail asked, with enthusiasm, “Did it bite her and give her rabies? Ooh, Rick, is that why you decided to become a doctor? Seeing your little best friend foaming at the mouth?”

“Seeing Myka foaming at the mouth would’ve made me want to become an exorcist, not a doctor. Also, I thought Myka did have a dog.”

“Can you not tell dogs and raccoons apart?” Varsha asked, giving him a look. “That is so sad.”

“You are a fine one,” Helena told her.

“I know which one you are. If my grandma were standing here with a bowl of her famous lapsi, she would without doubt refuse to serve it to you. She’d train a raccoon with it instead.” She really was very matter-of-fact about it. Helena believed her.

Jeannie continued her story: “That well-fed raccoon spread the news about the Pop-Tarts far and wide. Myka’s father took the trash out one day and met up with eleven of them, sitting in a line, waiting for Myka and snacks. Reasonably politely, but still. He screamed—he’s never liked raccoons—but they were unfazed.”

“And?” Helena asked. Myka was still laughing against her, harder now, saying “Eleven, eleven...”

“And the next day, he brought home a dog to deal with our raccoon problem.”

Now Myka picked up the tale. “She was a Corgi mix named George Eliot—although I was five, so I thought that was all one word, ‘Georgeliot’—and I adored her. So did the raccoons, and vice versa. My dad felt so betrayed.”

“I begin to see why he spends so much of his time sitting in a boat,” Helena said.

“Also he thinks raccoons can’t swim,” Myka told her.

“Can they?”

Myka, solemnly: “Like little furry crocodiles.”

Helena did think she had gone all in, mere moments ago. Now, however, a small, final bit of her heart or her soul or whatever might have intended to hold out some possibility of defiant resistance dusted its hands, picked up its lunch bucket, and walked off the job. She sighed. “I suppose they’ll feel right at home in the fountain, then.”

“They’ll keep it lobster-free for you,” Myka assured her.

“Considerate,” Helena said. She closed her eyes and, for one breath, paid no heed to those surrounding them; she let herself revel in the physicality of leaning against inadequate pillows, atop an industrial-grade bedsheet. With Myka. Not the day’s inevitable outcome by any means.

Then Jane said, “I am now exiting this inside-joke snowglobe and going back to City Hall, where I expect Myka and Abigail to join me shortly. And I’d appreciate it if Myka and Helena would both be so kind as to continue behaving in your exemplary nonpersonal fashion until I’ve had a chance to talk to the mayor.”

“Should I be there?” Myka asked. “I really think I could explain—”

Jane interrupted, beating Helena to it by a nanosecond, “You should not be there. You should be at least half a world away.”

At this, Myka gasped, dropped Helena’s hand, and sat up extremely straight. She said to the room, “Half a world away! If everybody here isn’t thinking exactly what I’m thinking, I’m going to be so disappointed.”

Helena said, “I, on the other hand, will be relieved. Because I fear for our collective sanity if we’ve all started thinking like you.”

“I’m with you, Helena,” Rick said, and Helena felt her umbrage subside again.

Varsha said, “I’m inclined to agree, but for reasons of family and history, I’ll vote ‘present’ instead.” She directed an appraising gaze at Myka and asked, “Unless you’re thinking about rabies? It’s caused by a lyssavirus, not very interestingly shaped, but extremely—”

“Not rabies,” said Myka. Varsha deflated, and Myka said, “I promise to think about rabies some other time.” Varsha didn’t smile, not exactly, but Helena for one was amused to find that there was a facial expression easily legible as “pleased to have at this moment begun mentally assembling a PowerPoint presentation on the topic of lyssaviruses.”

“Clean clothes?” Abigail tried, to which Myka shook her head. Abigail glanced at Jane again. “But I still care about good governance.”

Liam declared, “I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you!”

Both Steve and Myka said, “What?”

“It’s from Salesman. I was thinking about that season at the Civic.”

Steve said, “I was thinking about what kinds of design projects we could bid on that might involve greenhouses.”

Jane said, “Hm.” Then she said, “Well.” Then she pointed at him and said, “You didn’t hear it from me, but there’s a public/private partnership being set up to fund a senior-housing complex. I heard the word ‘greenhouse’ mentioned as something to consider, in terms of providing resident activities. Then again I also heard ‘horseshoe pit’ and ‘pickleball court,’ so they may go sporty instead.”

“When we bid,” Helena began, but at Jane’s ahem hurriedly corrected to, “rather, if we bid, Steve will wax lyrical on the virtues of gardening and persuade them otherwise. Won’t you?”

“The virtues of gardening, but the virtues of gardeners in particular,” he responded.

Liam put an arm around his shoulders. “Aw. You’re not a dime a dozen.”

“Neither are you,” Steve said, with an answering embrace. Helena found them charming.

Myka, charmed or not, was undeterred. “What is wrong with you people? Half a world away!”

“Well,” Jeannie said, “my first thought was probably too stereotypical a ‘Mom’ line, given that it was ‘honeymoon,’ so—”

“Ding ding ding!” Myka shouted. “We have a winner!”

“Your thought was ‘honeymoon’?” Helena asked, and Myka nodded in dramatic fashion. “I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but I don’t believe we can go on a honeymoon.”

“Why not?”

She had to be joking. The guileless eyes had to be an act. Helena didn’t know what the purpose of this act in particular was, but she played along and said, “Those generally follow weddings.”

Still guileless: “And?”

“And—Jane, don’t listen to this part—as far as I know, we are not in fact even engaged to be married.” Something had turned slightly strange in the room; Helena looked to Steve, but he gave her very little in response, not a smile or a shrug, just a gaze. Abigail did the same. Helena began to worry again. “These things do tend to proceed in a customary sequence,” she said, as a last aren’t-we-on-the-same-page stab.

“Okay, then, let’s get our raccoons in a row.” Myka turned her still-upright torso toward Helena and took her hand again. “First step: will you marry me?”

“I have no idea. However, it might be better for me to have allies, simply as a check on my worst impulses where a certain someone is concerned. I find myself agreeing to things... so perhaps you can pull me back from that ledge.”

“The fact that we’re talking about plans for Saturday night that involve a certain someone suggests to me that you’ve already agreed to something,” he said, but he was smiling rather than observably attempting to control his breathing.

“That, I regret to admit, is true.”

“Have you jumped off a ledge?”

“Not literally.”

“But only because she hasn’t asked you to.” Still smiling.

“I regret to admit as well that that is the only reason. It might solve some problems if she did ask and I did do it. In the literal sense.”

He said, with a beleaguered air, “I guess we’d better come, if only to tie a rope around your middle.”

“You are the best assistant the world will ever know.”

“I try. Then again, so do you.”

“Not enough.” She looked at the model-piece. “We need to build more libraries.”

“That sounds like a ledge, or stepping off of one.”

“What does Liam like most?” she countered.

“Other than me? You’ll laugh.” In response to this, Helena again heard herself make the question-noise, which now would always remind her of Myka having recognized it. How that woman wormed her way into everything... Steve answered the now-Myka-reminiscent noise by saying, “Gardening.”

And Helena did laugh, as predicted. She’d expected the answer to be professional, such as “the law,” or perhaps something fitting Liam’s extraordinarily handsome looks, such as “Armani suits.” Then again, Myka was every bit as beautiful as Liam was handsome, and Myka loved books... Helena said, “Wouldn’t you build many, many greenhouses if you could? Because you could?”

“They’re pretty objectively good, right? Like libraries. Maybe we do need to build more of them.”

“I am not opposed. Find a project, or projects, and we’ll bid.”

“Really?”

“Of course,” she told him, with feeling.

“You’re not just saying that because I’m bringing rope on Saturday?”

“Everything is connected, my darling Steve.”

He chuckled. “With rope?”

“If necessary.”

“What is this really about?” he asked.

“I’ll let Myka tell you—it will please her enormously to go into detail.” Saying “Myka” aloud pleased Helena herself enormously. So rare a pleasure, lately. “Also I don’t understand any of the duplicitous particulars well enough to explain them to you. Sadly, I don’t have Greek, so I can’t read the epic poem in the original... plus, I haven’t slept.”

“I can tell... please don’t tell me why not.”

“Would that it were that.” She sighed. “My darling Steve. Am I ever going to feel in control again?”

“Have you ever? Really?”

“Comparatively.” She had certainly at some point not experienced this career-off-a-cliff need to agree with every objectively ridiculous proposal of an irresistible, book-loving city planner...

“Do you want to? Feel that way again, I mean?”

“Yes?” Because she ought to want to.

“So cancel the Saturday plans.”

“I can’t.”

“Then no. You won’t ever.”

“Hence the need for the rope,” Helena agreed.

“I think I’m going to have to learn how to actually do roping. Maybe not the tricks with the spinning, but enough to throw the loop around you.”

“I suspect your doing that would be met with great enthusiasm from a particular spectator.” So easy to picture the enthusiasm—the delight—on Myka’s face if she witnessed such a performance, but Helena tried to return to pessimism. “Not that I expect any of this to work out.”

“You know the real reason Liam and I’ll both be into this Saturday thing?” Helena shook her head, and Steve went on, “What always happens is that we’re at his place or my place, and we don’t have the energy to come up with any ideas about what to do, so we stay in. And then he complains that we never go anywhere.”

“So it’s because this comes prepackaged as an idea of what to do?”

“For him, that’s my bet. But for me, it’s because after he complains, he smiles at me. And I give thanks that I get to witness it. Myka’s got a pretty decent smile... I think you should have the opportunity to give that kind of thanks.”

From anyone else, such words might have cloyed. From Steve, they calmed. “The best person the world will ever know,” Helena said, with certainty.

To which Steve replied an impish, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

“I will concede that you may have peers. Six-fifteen.”

“I have six hundred and fifteen peers?”

“Myka wants you there at six-fifteen.” Her name, out loud, again...

“Do you really think this is going to be a disaster?”

“That question is, at this point, moot. I tried, but I have met my match.”

“In more ways than one, I guess,” Steve said, but he continued to smile.

That gave Helena leave to answer, “You guess correctly.”

****

At six in the evening on Saturday, Helena stood in her customary spot outside Myka’s door, her customary flowers in hand, second-guessing her decision to bring one extra-large bouquet rather than two this time. But then her thinking and deciding didn’t matter at all, for Myka opened the door and was there, a physical presence not in a City Hall elevator.

Myka didn’t let Helena hand her the flowers, didn’t even get them out of the way; she pulled Helena close and kissed her as if they were alone. A fussy part of Helena wanted to protect the poor bouquet, but that part was outvoted by every other part, bodily and otherwise, all of which were celebrating standing once again in this space, enveloped once again in these arms, being kissed—she kissed soft, Myka did. Belying the body-crush, her mouth was careful, solicitous.

Helena eventually regarded the no-longer-impressive bouquet with a bit of disappointment. “Much as I enjoyed that, you might have let me set these down first.”

“You’re going to have so many more chances to give me flowers, and I’ll give them to you all the time too, and floriculture will flourish around the world thanks to us.”

“‘Floriculture will flourish’? Are you drunk?”

“Not yet, you beautiful... hm. I was going to call you a cheapskate again, but those flowers look like they might have been expensive before somebody made a mess of them.” She raised her voice. “Mom! Helena brought you some pricey smashed flowers!”

Helena said to Jeannie, who wore an extremely smug (and, Helena had to admit, extremely justified) smirk as she approached, “In the interest of accuracy, Helena brought you and your daughter some flowers, which your daughter caused to be smashed. Cost notwithstanding.”

“I saw you participating,” Jeannie said. Helena supposed she could hardly have missed it.

Then came another familiar voice—from the hallway, for Myka had neglected to close the door, Helena heard Abigail say, “That is an interesting euphemism for what they were doing.”

Myka shook a fist at her. “You weren’t supposed to get here before six-fifteen!”

Abigail, unmoved, said, “Like I didn’t know the reason for that.”

Apparently everyone had known the reason for that, and they had all wanted to see the six o’clock show: Rick and Varsha appeared behind Abigail, and Steve and Liam did too, making for a traffic jam not only of bodies but of introductions. Abigail enthused to Steve, of Liam, “He doesn’t disappoint!”

Liam said, “I’m... pleased?”

“I thought he was overselling your looks,” Abigail told Liam. “What with being in swoony love,” she added, and Steve blushed.

Myka said, into Helena’s ear, “Speaking of swoony love, it isn’t possible to oversell you. There aren’t enough words,” and when Helena tried to shush her, Myka kissed the ear she’d just whispered into.

Varsha, upon being introduced to Abigail, said, “Overjoyed to meet you. I was honestly beginning to think none of them knew any actual people.”

Abigail nodded. “It’s just me. Let’s do lunch or something. But only if you aren’t planning to, one, bid on a city contract, and two, fall in love with me, because there’s only so much of this kind of drama I feel like I can handle.”

“I can promise the first one,” Varsha said. “The second, that’s up to fate.”

Rick said, “Wait, what? Are you joking?”

“No,” Varsha said, in such a way as to make Helena wonder whether she ever joked.

To Rick, Abigail said, “You might need to class up your personal plating, Myka’s ex. I’m pretty charming.”

“Also not wallpaper,” Varsha added.

Myka said, “Confirm. She is not wallpaper. Can additionally confirm the charming point.”

“Should I be the one who’s concerned?” Helena asked. “You two are together most all day every day.”

Myka kissed her.

“Thank you for the reassurance,” Helena said.

“I didn’t do it to reassure you,” said Myka, and after smiling at Helena’s raised “then why” eyebrow, she said, “because I can,” and that was even better than reassurance.

Rick said to Myka, “You and I never got this far.”

“This far,” Myka repeated. “This far?”

“Rehearsal dinner.”

Myka squinted at him. “I really like that we can joke about this,” she said.

“Still too soon?”

Now Myka swatted him, her palm against his head. “In perpetuity, you ding-dong.”

Ding-dong? Helena began laughing at how ridiculous such an utterance sounded, certainly from Myka’s mouth, and when Myka looked at her quizzically, she could offer only, “I’ve never heard anyone say that.”

Rick said, “You should’ve hung out with us in—what was it, fourth grade? Some entire school year, it was everybody calling everybody a ding-dong.”

This made Varsha bark a laugh as well. She said, “Oh my god, it’s worse yet also better when you say it.”

To Helena, Myka said, ‘I want to hear you laugh like that in perpetuity. And you are not a ding-dong”—which set Helena off again, and Myka said, “Well, maybe you are,” but she softened it with a sweet nuzzle into Helena’s hair.

In fact throughout the entire evening, Helena found Myka to be physically demonstrative to an extent that was... new. Every time Myka neared Helena, her right arm extended toward Helena’s waist, her hips, eventually settling onto the concavity just where fixed ribs gave way to floating, there on the right side—there, or resting, higher but just as happy, in the middle of Helena’s back. These placements of her hand: Helena found them correct. Feeling the fit, the lock into place. Like sides of the bed.

All this prompted Helena to ask Myka, at a later point when, for a moment, they did not seem to be the center of anyone’s attention, “How much had you been holding back?”

“What do you mean?”

“Before. In contrast with all this contact now, tonight,” Helena said.

“I told you I was going to kiss you and kiss you and kiss you.” And Myka proceeded to do that.

“I did think that was hyperbole. I’m not complaining, but you didn’t do this before.”

“Well, before. I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable. You were doing me a favor with the engagement. Several favors.”

“I thought I was.”

“Am I making you uncomfortable now? I can stop.”

“Can you?” But Helena was teasing. “I haven’t seen you stop yourself from doing much of anything you want to do. Certainly not anything related to this evening.”

Myka shrugged. “I’m really committed to working toward certain goals.”

Helena regarded the relaxation of Myka’s posture, the playful smile on her lips, the glow of her gaze... and she was struck by, but couldn’t bear, the possibility of Myka being deprived of all this, of having to once again become the pale picture of irritated overwork she had been before. And this was no pretense of happiness, as Myka had said she’d been putting on as part of her project; rather, this was the real thing: Myka happy, not holding back. Yet had they spent enough time together for Helena to be sure that that was so? “Is this how you are, with me?” Helena asked. “Is this how we are?”

“I wouldn’t be bothering otherwise.”

Helena didn’t doubt it. “I’m sorry I haven’t worked as hard as you have. Toward those goals.”

“You can make it up to me later. Long game, you beautiful cheapskate.”

“The bill will come due?” Helena asked, pretend-rueful.

“I certainly hope so.”

“I do too. But can you promise me that we will never have to engage in a performance this ridiculous again?”

Myka put on a show of considering, then said a simple “No.”

****

Scenes from a Rehearsal Dinner

*

Helena pulls Abigail aside to say, because she has not had a chance to say it, “I thought we weren’t doing this. I thought we were actively keeping her safe. No possibility of public shaming. I did try very hard to—”

“Except for the glasses incident.”

“That was a mistake, one that I, if no one else, made a sincere attempt not to compound. Why are you helping her in this? Why are you not physically preventing me from helping her?”

“Didn’t she tell you her theory?” Abigail asks.

“Oh god, what now.”

“They’d never public-shame her over this, if they find out what she’s really been doing—and if she somehow gets in trouble for any part of it, they will definitely find out, because she’s planning to tell them the entire story, her idea being that it’s too insane.”

“That’s...” Helena begins, but she realizes she has nowhere sensical to go. “Well, that’s....”

Abigail nods. “Right? Because who’s going to call the org chart into a room and say ‘Here’s what you can’t ever do: put on a play about having your cancer recur so as to persuade your boss that you’ve fallen back in love with your ex-fiancé who it turns out is really a contractor who, if you can’t have her, you’ll waste away and die, but you would still like to keep your job, please and thank you.’”

“When you put it that way, I have no idea how anyone could follow it.”

“Exactly. In Myka’s own extremely special way, she’s brilliant... and as far as I can tell, the cancer—and you—really made her drill down on that.”

“Rick does say this isn’t how she behaved in the past,” Helena concedes. “But I’m beginning to think her newly revealed talents are being wasted in her chosen field.”

“Someday she’ll rule the world. And then, I don’t mean to alarm you, but I bet we’ll all be buckling our seat belts and hanging on for dear life. And enjoying it. I mean, look at you: you’re enjoying it right now.”

“‘Enjoying’ may be a shade too positive. In any case, you seem to have a part in the play too.”

“Point taken.” Abigail snickers. “I told her to buy grapefruit, and she asked me why. Never got around to breakfast after that glasses incident?”

“I did not punch her in the face.”

“You’ve said.”

“But I may yet punch you.”

Abigail waves off this concern. “I’m helping. Also, I’m not wearing glasses. So punching me wouldn’t get you going at all.”

*

Several pizzas arrive. Myka asks Helena, “Did you know there’s such a thing as lobster pizza?”

Before Helena can answer, Rick says, “Why wouldn’t there be? Can’t you slap anything on a pizza crust?”

Abigail says, thoughtfully, “Then again, Myka’s ex, you may be my kind of chef.”

Varsha warns, “Mind yourself, not-wallpaper. I don’t want to have to cancel lunch.” She eyes the pizza boxes. “I also don’t want to have to engage in any avoidance behaviors.”

“No allergens,” Myka tells her. To Helena, she says, “Which means your dreams are safe, too.” Myka then busies herself handing out what she calls “the scenario”—several stapled-together pages of which Helena is as terrified as she ever has been of creatures that are large and have claws. She reads the first line: “First, there was a fountain.” She wishes she weren’t driving; she needs several stiff drinks.

Myka says, “Okay, nobody’s got lines as such because I didn’t have time to learn all the medical terminology, and also I’m not sold on anybody’s ability to get it down by Monday.”

“I love improv,” Liam says as he receives his pages.

“So do I!” Jeannie tells him, and they make exclamatory faces at each other.

Liam continues, “Ooh, can I be one of the doctors?”

Jeannie, for her part, sighs. “I suppose I’m relegated to being the mother.”

“Relegated?” Myka demands. “Mom!”

Helena mutters, “How could this go wrong.”

“You’re such a pessimist,” Myka says.

“Why does that make you smile?”

Jeannie, for the moment embracing her relegation to the role of mother, says to Helena an indulgent, “Everything about you makes her smile.”

*

\Myka beckons to Helena. “Come with me,” she says, leading her down the hallway, in the direction of the bedroom... raising Helena’s hopes for a brief, scandalized moment... but their destination is instead a different room, this one an office (with air a bit chilly at the moment but not stale; Myka must in fact spend time here) featuring a computer with a large monitor. “Dad’s actually really going to call in this time,” Myka says, “and if I’m trying to hold my phone screen steady he gets seasick. So this works better.”

And indeed, after not much time, there appears a slightly choppy video image of a some-days-bewhiskered older man sitting in the stern of a rowboat. He wears a fishing hat of an incongruous bright red. Whatever technology is enabling the call seems to be his only companion in the boat, yet he regards it as if it has appropriated the entire armrest between them on an airplane.

Myka begins, “Hi, Dad. Any luck?”

“Fishing is not a matter of luck,” her father says; this must be a customary exchange. “It’s skill.”

“Any skill?”

He answers a solemn, “Only on the part of the fish.”

Myka pulls Helena into view of the computer’s camera. She keeps her arm around Helena’s waist as she says, “Dad, this is Helena. Helena, this is my dad, Warren Bering.”

“Helena.” He nods. “Myka’s explained.”

“Has she?” Helena asks. “Fully?”

“How should I know?” he asks in turn, and Helena has to concede that this is a reasonable question.

“I’ll go grab Mom,” Myka announces.

“Wait—” Helena calls, but she is gone. And there Helena still is, expected to speak cogently to Myka’s father. Having recently thought about the time she spent in his daughter’s bedroom. She coughs and says, “I’m pleased to... semi-meet you.”

Myka’s father, who does not seem, based on this first semi-meeting, to be someone given to sentiment, nevertheless offers Helena a kind, if gruff, lifeline. “Semi-same. You want to go fishing?” he asks.

“Do you mean right now?”

He shrugs. “Get on a plane.”

“You have no idea how appealing that sounds.”

“Oh, I have some idea,” he says.

“And yet your wife and daughter would, I suspect, exact revenge on me if I failed to participate.”

“Get used to the feeling. Or leave the family.”

“These are my choices?”

“From where I sit.”

“You’re in a boat,” Helena observes.

“Well, or spend a lot of time fishing.”

“I don’t know how to fish.”

“Guess you’d better participate, then.”

“Or leave the family?”

“Myka hates how red her face gets when she cries,” he says. Factually. As he might state Myka’s age, or her eye color.

“You’re saying that the ‘leave the family’ option is off the table,” Helena tries.

“I’m saying that Myka hates how red her face gets when she cries.”

“You are a member of an overall very strange family.”

He leans against the back of the boat; the change in posture makes him far less forbidding. “I heard your brother married some lady because she wrecked his car,” he says, with a little conjurer’s wave of his right hand.

“Touché,” Helena says.

*

Helena finds herself standing next to Rick. They are both watching and listening to Myka, who with great animation is detailing for Steve and Liam—and Abigail, but Helena knows that she already knows—the motivations of the characters in “the scenario”: “This is preposterous,” Helena says. “Does anyone honestly expect me to believe that this inclination—this readiness—to deceive is a new development in Myka’s character? It seems far too well-honed.”

Rick says, “She was always really really smart—especially in a get-things-done way—but I swear to you, if I’d known she was likely to turn into somebody like this, I probably wouldn’t have gone out with her in the first place.” He pauses to scratch his blond head. “Or maybe I wouldn’t ever have let her get away? I’m really not sure.”

“Well. Too late,” she tells him, and he bows that blond head in recognition.

He then says, “I need more food,” and wanders off, presumably to find some, mumbling words that sound like “lobster” and “pizza” and “I wish.”

*

Steve is telling Abigail, “I like your idea about not rerunning what happened before too exactly.” Myka has given her credit, in the written scenario, for this innovation. “I bet Helena likes it too—no blood on her this time.”

Abigail says, “We’re getting fake stuff that doesn’t stain. But also, history doesn’t literally repeat. Or it shouldn’t.”

“It can’t,” Myka says. “Same river twice.”

Abigail comes back with, “Or, better, first time as tragedy, second time as farce.”

“Whatever you say, Marx,” Myka tells her.

Helena mutters, “More like the Marx Brothers in this case.”

“In this case,” Abigail says, “which time is tragedy and which is farce? Genuine question for Myka. I mean the blood situation seems to support Marx’s version, but...”

“No times as tragedy,” Myka says firmly. “First time as TV hospital drama, second time as romantic comedy.”

“Not farce? Really?” Helena asks.

“Not unless the pies start flying,” Myka assures her.

Liam says, “I think that’s technically slapstick.”

Steve laughs and gives Liam a peck on the cheek. “I love you.”

“None of it oversold,” pronounces Abigail.

“You know, you’re right,” Helena says, for Myka chooses that moment to catch her eye and smile. And Helena gives thanks.

*

“I’m so happy,” Myka says to Helena, as if she’s been trying not to say it but can’t hold it in. Helena welcomes the words both as themselves, and as confirmation that her impression about pretense—or rather, its lack—had been correct.

“Are you?” She doesn’t need to ask the question, but Myka seems to be multiplying her joy by speaking it aloud.

“I am. About all of it. This”—a kiss—“and also that everybody knows everything now.”

Helena feels compelled to state, “Not everybody. Not yet.”

“I just said I’m happy. Quit raining on my parade.”

“It is quite a parade. And yet Rick seems to be sleeping through it.” She points at Rick, who is on the sofa, head back, eyes closed, mouth open.

“Hey, mister!” Myka says at him, and his eyes snap open. “Nap on your own time.”

“This is my own time,” Rick objects. But he says to Abigail, who happens to be beside him at that moment. “I think I did fall asleep during part of the briefing. Are they engaged in this version?”

“Not yet. The email proxy, remember?”

“Right. Sorry. I’m just tired. Long shifts. I’ll read the cheat sheet later.” He pulls a decorative pillow to him, clasps his arms around it, and closes his eyes again. Embroidered on the pillow is a fine-featured monkey, attired to assist an organ-grinder. If Rick were wearing a fez, their kinship would be unmistakable. As it is, Helena is left to wonder why Myka has a decorative pillow that depicts a fez-wearing monkey, why she herself has never noticed that fact before, and how Myka manages not only to say things Helena does not expect but also to decorate in that way too.

*

Helena feels a tap on her shoulder; she turns to see Jeannie. “Mm?” Helena asks. (She imagines both Charles and Myka laughing at her for it.)

Jeannie sighs, with great ostentation. Then she points at Helena and says, “Words about destiny.”

“Mm,” Helena now says. “Myka told you. That much of it?” Everybody knows a far greater portion of everything than I was aware, she thinks.

“My daughter is a lovely person.”

“I... know?”

“But she is a talker.”

“Also known,” Helena says.

“And yet not with everyone. In fact with very few. It’s a sign.”

“Suspected, yet not entirely known. Very much appreciated, however.”

“Destiny,” Jeannie maintains.

“I don’t disagree. Also very much appreciated.”

Myka, carrying two full wine glasses, clearly in transit, bends her head to kiss Helena’s cheek. She says, “Told you it sounded more upbeat than fate,” kisses her once more, then moves on.

“Thank you,” Helena says to Jeannie.

“For?”

The entirety of this gift. “The unanticipated.”

*

Rick and Varsha are the last to leave, save Helena herself. She suspects Abigail and Steve and Liam, who departed together, are staging some sort of private afterparty of their own.

Jeannie hugs Rick. “Didn’t I tell you that you’d find a nice young lady?” she says.

“I don’t prefer to be thought of as nice,” Varsha informs her. She evades a hug, as if to prove her point.

“You’ve been perfectly nice to me,” Jeannie says, though with a tinge of thwarted-hug disappointment. “I asked if you’d mind if I ate the last piece of the pizza that had the artichoke hearts, and you said ‘not at all,’ even though we both liked that one best.”

“I did say that,” Varsha allows, but with a hostile witness’s displeasure that this overzealous prosecutor is using her past statements against her.

“So you’re nice under certain circumstances,” the prosecutor continues, and Myka nudges Helena and murmurs what’s a circumstance. “Are you nice to Rick?”

Rick hurries to say, “It’s all good, Mrs. B.”

Jeannie crosses her arms. “I didn’t ask you, mister.”

Helena doesn’t bother to hold back a laugh. “And just like that, you turn into Myka.”

“I’m her mother.”

Myka, for her part, doesn’t bother to hold back a snort: “Don’t even try acting like you’re proud of that, Mom. Somebody named you was complaining about being relegated.”

“In the play.”

“Also, you’re the one who got upset about not being called in to get all relegated the first time.”

“That was real.”

“Would you be happier if this were too? I could always knock back a shot or two of H. pylori.”

Helena says, “Do. Not. Tempt. Fate.” Myka gives her a comical stare, and Helena sighs and amends, “Destiny.” To Jeannie, she notes, “But I am not saying words about it.”

Varsha says, “Fate or no, I would be very interested in the case if she did knock back those shots.”

“I’m not sure what reading that gets on the ‘nice’ meter,” Jeannie says.

“Throws its calibration off completely,” Rick says. “It never works again.”

“I do like you,” Varsha tells him.

*

Jeannie says she will busy herself “collecting pizza boxes,” a euphemism for “ignoring the two infatuated women saying goodnight in the magic foyer.”

Myka’s conspiratorial whisper to Helena: “I’d ask you to stay, but my mother’s here.”

“Sneak out,” Helena whispers back.

“Who sneaks out of their own apartment?” Myka says this as part of a smile against Helena’s neck.

“You make me so strangely happy.”

A chuckle. “I’ll leave her a note. Still think it should say ‘be right back’? How fast are you feeling?”

“Happy,” Helena reaffirms. “But strangely so,” she adds, as well as, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t find a part for Charles in the play? Otherwise he’d be at my house, and what would we do then?”

“It’s like you never heard of this amazing invention called a hotel room. They’re incredibly romantic, plus you get clean towels every day if you don’t care about the environment.”

“You make it sound like a very judgmental place.”

“Or you can hang up the ‘do not disturb’ sign and save the environment.”

“I don’t think that’s technically what that sign is for.”

“You’re not very into mixed-use design, are you? Which is weird for an urban architect. But I’m not worried; I’ll meet Charles eventually. And in the meantime, he’s not here.”

“He is not.” And in any case Helena would throw him out into the street if it meant she could be alone with Myka...

“Don’t tell him I said this—because I want him to like me—but: good.”

****

When Helena opened her door to Myka this time, she did not need to ask “why are you here,” and she did not need to wish that Myka would push her way in: after only a breath of standing and looking, Helena pulled her, because she wanted to get Myka to the bedroom as fast as she could, not because either of them needed to be fast, but to make sure that she was there, where Helena had feared she would never be, before anything happened to prevent it.

“If this doesn’t work,” Helena said, as Myka smiled at her haste, “and I don’t see how it could, so I should say when this doesn’t work...”

“Then it’s your turn to dream something up. I know you can.” Myka stopped moving, which drew Helena to a halt too. “You will, won’t you?”

Myka’s voice held not doubt, not exactly, but somewhere within that light won’t you Helena felt a vibration, a reed disturbed by a breath of unease. “We’ll move to Maine and refuse to fish for lobsters,” she said, because she would dream something up. Something, anything—because nothing was more important than this. How could she have thought otherwise?

“From a fountain that doesn’t exist. Don’t forget that part.”

She would dream something up. She took Myka’s hand, kissed it, and began to lead her once again. “I will never, ever forget that part.”