Three days. That was how long Gemma Reyes had been circling the fortress of Marco Aurelio Reyes, and the walls showed no sign of cracking.
She sat in the passenger seat of her old Civic, engine idling, the heater rattling through its usual death rattle. Outside the floor-to-ceiling window of Vance Associates, a glossy Chelsea address she had passed a dozen times without ever entering, the receptionist moved with the unhurried grace of someone who had never been told no in her life. The November light slanted gold across the sidewalk, and somewhere a delivery truck ground its gears on Tenth Avenue.
Gemma tightened her grip on her phone. The contact card still read Renata Vance, Publicist to M.A. Reyes, and beneath it, in small italic letters, By Appointment Only. She had left four messages. She had sent two emails. She had, on the second day, driven to the building with a folder of family photographs and a speech she had rehearsed in the mirror until her throat ached.
None of it mattered. Renata Vance had replied to none of it.
"Call again," Gemma said aloud, and the sound of her own voice, steady and a little hoarse, surprised her. She hit dial. The line rang twice and then, with a small, precise click, connected.
"Vance and Associates." The voice was crisp, mid-Atlantic, and cold enough to frost the earpiece. "Renata speaking."
"Ms. Vance, this is Gemma Reyes. I called yesterday, and the day before, and I left messages about my father, Marco Aurelio Reyes. I am his daughter. I need to speak with him. I am not asking for an interview or a quote. I am asking for five minutes of his time."
A pause. The soft sound of fingers on a keyboard, each keystroke deliberate.
"Ms. Reyes." Renata Vance gave the name a faint, almost imperceptible stress, as though she were tasting it for poison. "I have your messages in front of me. I have your two emails. I have, in fact, read them all. I appreciate the persistence. It is, in some circles, considered a virtue."
"Will you pass along my number?"
"Mr. Reyes is not, at present, accepting personal communications from family members."
The word landed like a slap. Gemma pressed her palm flat against her thigh to keep it from shaking.
"Family members," she repeated.
"Yes."
"He is my father."
"I understand that, Ms. Reyes. I have the relevant paperwork on file. I am aware of the relationship."
"Then you understand why I need to see him."
"I understand that you believe you need to see him. The two are not the same." Another pause. More typing. "Mr. Reyes is, as I'm sure you can imagine, in the final stages of a promotional tour for his new feature. His schedule does not permit unscheduled visits. Nor, frankly, do his wishes."
"You spoke to him about me?"
A beat. The faintest hesitation, quickly buried.
"I speak to Mr. Reyes about many things, Ms. Reyes. It is, after all, my job."
Gemma closed her eyes. The heater rattled. Outside, a woman walked past the car with a stroller and a small white dog, and the dog turned its head and stared at Gemma through the glass, its black eyes bright with what she chose to interpret as solidarity.
"At least tell me where he is staying," she said. "I will wait in the lobby. I will not make a scene. I will sit quietly and read a book until he has a free minute."
"That is, perhaps, the most ambitious thing anyone has said to me this week." Renata's voice did not warm by a single degree. "I will, of course, convey your request. Though I should warn you, my current success rate with similar requests is not encouraging."
"When can I expect a call back?"
"You can expect one when, and if, Mr. Reyes indicates a desire to speak with you. Until then, I would encourage you to enjoy the rest of your autumn. The leaves in the Park are quite beautiful this year."
The line went dead.
Gemma lowered the phone. For a long moment she did nothing, just sat in the idling car, listening to the heater, watching the receptionist glide past the window with a paper cup of something that steamed. Then she put the car in drive and pulled out into the late-morning traffic, her jaw set, her mind already sorting through the next move.
She had not come to New York to be managed. She had not come to be handled. She had not come to be told, in the polished, pitying tones of a woman who had never missed a meal in her life, that her own father did not wish to see her.
She had come because her mother had called her, three weeks ago, in the small hours of a Tuesday morning, and said, "Mija, I think your father is dying. I think he is dying and I do not think he wants anyone to know."
Gemma had flown out the next day.
The problem was that Marco Aurelio Reyes, once a modest carpenter in Washington Heights, now styled in the press as the reclusive visionary M.A. Reyes, had built his new life on the bones of the old one, and the old one had been quietly sealed away. He had a publicist. He had a gallery. He had a feature in Vanity Fair that described him as a man who had emerged, phoenix-like, from the ashes of an obscure personal history.
No one mentioned the wife. No one mentioned the three children. No one mentioned the small apartment on 181st Street, or the truck that never started in winter, or the way he used to hum boleros while he planed a length of cedar, his big hands impossibly gentle on the wood.
Gemma parked on a side street and called her sister.
"He says he does not wish to see me," she said, when Daniela picked up. "Actually, no, he did not say that. She said it for him. I have never even met this woman, and she is telling me my own father does not want to see me."
"Maybe he told her to say that."
"Maybe he did. That is not the point."
"What is the point, then?"
Gemma pressed her forehead against the steering wheel. The horn gave a small, sad honk, and a man on the sidewalk glanced over with mild alarm.
"The point is that Mama called me, and Mama does not call at three in the morning unless something is very wrong. The point is that I have not seen my father in eleven years, and I have not had a real conversation with him in longer. The point is that if he is sick, and he is alone, and he is being managed by some woman who treats me like a stranger, then I am going to walk into that building and I am going to sit in the lobby until someone calls security, and then I am going to explain to security who I am, and then I am going to sit in the lobby some more."
There was a long silence on the other end.
"Gemma," Daniela said carefully, "you cannot just storm into a stranger's office and demand to see a man who has spent a decade pretending we do not exist."
"I can," Gemma said. "I absolutely can."
"You will get arrested."
"Then I will get arrested."
"In what world does that help Mama?"
Gemma closed her eyes. Her sister's voice was small and tired, and beneath the tiredness was the same old fear, the same old loyalty, the same old willingness to fold herself up so that the rest of the family could keep standing. Daniela was twenty-three and already tired. Gemma sometimes wanted to shake her.
"In what world does it help Mama to do nothing?" she asked.
There was another silence. Then Daniela sighed.
"I will ask around. I still know people at the gallery, the ones who were there before the big show. One of them might know how to get a message to him that does not go through Renata."
"Ask today."
"Gemma."
"Today, Dani. Please."
A pause. "I will call you this afternoon."
Gemma hung up and sat in the car, listening to the city breathe around her. The leaves on the small tree beside her were mostly gone, a few determined yellow ones clinging to the highest branches. She thought about her father, the version she remembered, not the one in the magazine, the one with the silver hair and the expensive coat and the carefully distant expression. She thought about the smell of sawdust and the way he used to carry her on his shoulders through the Halloween parade on Dyckman, his big laugh rumbling down through his chest into her small bones. She thought about the morning he had left, which she remembered only in pieces: the sound of the front door closing too softly, the smell of coffee that no one drank, her mother's face turned toward the window.
She had been seventeen. She had not cried. She had stood in the hallway and held her sisters' hands and promised them, in a voice that did not shake, that everything would be fine.
She had kept that promise. She had co-managed the family business. She had helped her mother through the bankruptcy. She had put Daniela and Lucia through school. She had not, not once, allowed herself to think about what she wanted. The wants were small, and selfish, and irrelevant. The needs were enormous, and constant, and hers to carry.
And now her father was sick. And the woman with the cold voice would not let her in.
Gemma started the car. The Civic coughed, caught, and pulled away from the curb. She had three days of failure behind her, and a fourth day ahead, and she had no intention of making it a fifth.
She found him on a Tuesday, because the corporate directory at Stellan Vance Holdings listed a subsidiary called Aurelia Wellness Group, and the Aurelia Wellness Group listed a Tribeca address above a wine bar on Franklin Street, and the address turned out to be a meditation studio with no sign on the door.
Gemma circled the block twice before she found a parking spot on Hudson, six blocks south, and walked back up through the November wind. The neighborhood had the look of expensive quiet: cast-iron facades scrubbed clean, designer dogs in cashmere sweaters, a florist selling peonies in January for forty dollars a stem. She kept her head down and her coat pulled tight and tried to look like someone who belonged. The look was not convincing. Her best blazer had a snag on the left cuff that she had been meaning to fix since Daniela borrowed it in October, and her boots were the same boots she had worn to her mother's funeral, resoled twice, the leather gone soft at the ankles.
The studio door was painted the same gray as the wall around it. Beside it, in small bronze letters, a single word: AURELIA. Below that, in even smaller letters: silence is a practice. Gemma stood outside for a long moment, her hand raised to knock, and then did not knock, because the door was already ajar, and through the gap she could hear the low, steady tone of a singing bowl.
She pushed the door open.
The interior was warm, dim, and smelled of cedar and something faintly sweet, maybe sandalwood. A narrow hallway led to a reception area that was little more than a wooden desk, a clay bowl of river stones, and a single orchid in a glazed pot. A woman in her sixties sat behind the desk with silver hair pulled into a low knot and reading glasses perched on her nose. She looked up when Gemma entered, and her expression did not change, but something shifted in her eyes, a recognition that had nothing to do with Gemma and everything to do with the fact that Gemma clearly did not belong.
"We're closed between sessions," the woman said. Her voice was pleasant, firm, and final.
Gemma's mouth went dry. She had not planned what to say. She had planned everything else: the route, the timing, the parking, the outfit. But she had not planned the words, because the words required a category she did not have. She was not a customer. She was not a journalist. She was not a corporate spy, though she was beginning to feel like one. She was the eldest daughter of a man who had disappeared from her life when she was seventeen and reappeared in a magazine, and she had come to find out if the man in the article was the same man who used to carry her on his shoulders, or if that man was gone forever.
"I'm looking for Marco Aurelio," she said.
The woman behind the desk did not blink. "The studio is closed between sessions."
"He's teaching here." Gemma's voice came out steadier than she felt. "I saw the schedule. Seven a.m. silent sit."
The woman studied her for a long moment. Then she removed her glasses, folded them, and set them on the desk. "Are you family?"
The question landed in Gemma's chest like a small stone dropped into still water. She felt the ripples move outward through her, through the careful architecture of her composure.
"Yes," she said. "I'm his daughter."
The woman did not react to the word. She simply nodded, as if this were a thing she had been expecting, or at least preparing for. "He asked not to be disturbed during practice."
"I know."
"He's been here since five."
Gemma blinked. Five in the morning. Her father, who in her memory had never voluntarily risen before seven, who had considered sunrise a personal insult, was at a meditation studio in Tribeca at five in the morning, sitting in silence with strangers. The information refused to fit inside any container she had built for him.
"I don't want to disturb him," she said. "I just want to watch."
The woman considered this. Then she rose, came around the desk, and led Gemma down a side corridor lined with framed photographs of mountains, lakes, and the interiors of temples in places Gemma could not identify. At the end of the corridor, a heavy wooden door stood slightly open. The singing bowl tone was louder here, resonating in Gemma's sternum.
The woman gestured for her to enter, then retreated, her soft-soled shoes making no sound on the hardwood.
Gemma slipped off her boots and stepped inside.
The room was long and low-ceilinged, with walls painted the color of unbleached linen. Cushions were arranged in neat rows on a raised wooden platform, about thirty of them, most occupied. The students sat cross-legged or kneeling, spines straight, hands resting on their thighs. The lighting was indirect, coming from paper lanterns suspended at varying heights, and the air smelled of cedar and the faint mineral tang of stone.
And at the front of the room, sitting on a cushion slightly elevated above the others, was her father.
He was thinner than the magazine photograph had suggested. The suit and the silver hair had given him a kind of editorial bulk, a presence shaped by tailoring and posture. Here, in a loose gray shirt and dark cotton pants, he looked diminished and somehow more real. His eyes were closed. His hands rested on his knees, palms up, fingers relaxed. His face was turned slightly toward the ceiling, and in the soft light the lines around his mouth and across his forehead were deeper than she remembered, and also, somehow, softer. He looked like a man who had stopped performing.
Gemma stood in the doorway, barefoot, her coat still on, and felt the floor tilt beneath her.
A woman near the back shifted her cushion slightly and glanced up at Gemma with a look of mild inquiry. Gemma shook her head quickly, mouthed sorry, and slipped inside, lowering herself onto the floor against the side wall, beneath a paper lantern that gave her a view of the entire room without placing her in anyone's direct line of sight. She pulled her coat tighter around herself and tried to make her breathing quiet.
The singing bowl tone faded. A long silence followed, the kind of silence that has texture, that presses against the ears. Gemma could hear the building: a faint hum from the HVAC, the creak of old wood settling, the muffled sound of a car horn from the street six stories below. She could hear her own heartbeat, which seemed louder than it should have been.
Her father opened his eyes. He did not look at the students. He looked, for a moment, at his own hands, as if checking to see that they were still there, and then he began to move around the room.
Gemma watched him stop beside a young man in the second row who was hunched forward, his shoulders drawn up toward his ears, his jaw tight. Her father knelt beside him. He did not speak. He raised one hand, palm flat, and held it a few inches from the student's shoulder. He waited. The student did not react. Her father lowered his hand, gently, to the space between the student's shoulder blades, and pressed, lightly, until the student exhaled and his shoulders dropped an inch.
Her father moved on. He paused beside an older woman whose hands were clasped too tightly in her lap. He did not touch her. He simply stood near her, his presence a quiet suggestion, until she unclenched her fingers on her own. He moved to a man near the window whose head was tilted at an angle that suggested either pain or distraction, and knelt again, and waited, and eventually the man straightened, and her father nodded once, a small movement, almost invisible, and continued on.
He did this for the next twenty minutes. He moved through the room like someone tending a garden. He did not speak. He did not correct. He adjusted, when adjustment was needed, with a touch so light it barely qualified as contact. He waited, when waiting was required, with a patience that Gemma had never seen in him. The man she remembered had been impatient, volatile, prone to eruptions of temper that left the house ringing. The man in this room was none of those things. The man in this room was someone she did not recognize, and yet, watching him, she felt a pull in her chest that she could not name, a recognition that had nothing to do with his face and everything to do with the way he moved through the world, the way he attended to it, as if it were something that required his full and constant care.
She realized, with a start, that she was crying. She pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes and willed herself to stop. She had not cried at the funeral. She had not cried when the creditors came. She had not cried when her mother had told her, the night before she died, that Gemma was the only one she had ever truly relied on, and that she was sorry, and that she was proud, and that she should not have to carry so much, and that she was glad, in the end, that it was Gemma. She had not cried then. She cried now, silently, in a meditation studio in Tribeca, watching a man she had spent fifteen years trying not to need adjust a stranger's posture with the gentleness of someone handling something irreplaceable.
The class ended the way it had begun, with the singing bowl, the tone rising and falling, and the students opening their eyes, and her father returning to his cushion, and the room exhaling collectively. The students began to gather their things, moving quietly, some of them nodding to her father, some of them pressing their palms together in the small bow she had seen in the photographs in the hallway. Her father remained seated. He did not look at Gemma. She was not sure he knew she was there. She was not sure she wanted him to know.
She stood, wiped her face with the back of her hand, and made her way toward the door. She needed to leave. She needed to be outside, in the cold, alone, before she did something irreversible, like calling his name, or running to him, or falling to her knees in front of thirty strangers and demanding to know why he had left, and where he had been, and whether any of it was real, and whether she was allowed to be angry, and whether she was allowed to forgive him, and whether forgiveness was something she was capable of, and whether the man in the gray shirt was the same man as the man in the magazine, and whether the man in the magazine was the same man as the man who had carried her on his shoulders through the Halloween parade on Dyckman, and whether that man still existed, or had ever existed, or had only ever been a story she told herself to make the absence bearable.
She had almost reached the door when his voice, behind her, said, "Gemma."
She stopped. The room was nearly empty. The last students were pulling on coats in the hallway. The paper lanterns swayed almost imperceptibly in the draft from the corridor. She did not turn around.
"I knew you were there," he said. "From the moment you came in."
She turned. He was still on his cushion, his hands on his knees, his face turned toward her. He looked tired. He looked old. He looked, for the first time in her memory, like someone who was not sure he had the right to speak.
"How," she said.
"Your breathing," he said. "It's the same as your mother's. When she was afraid."
The observation landed somewhere deep in her, in a place she had not known was still reachable. She pressed her hand against the doorframe to steady herself. The wood was cool and slightly rough under her palm.
"I'm not afraid," she said.
He nodded, slowly. "I know," he said. "I was."
The silence that followed was not the silence of the meditation room. It was the silence of two people who had not seen each other in fifteen years, standing on opposite sides of a door that neither of them had closed. The paper lanterns swayed. The building settled. Somewhere in the hallway, a student laughed softly, and the sound was so ordinary, so completely unremarkable, that Gemma felt her throat close around it.
"Why didn't you tell me you were sick," she said. It was not the question she had meant to ask. It was not even close. But it was the one that came out, and once it was out, she could not take it back, and she did not want to.
Her father was quiet for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was low, and rough, and very tired.
"Because I knew," he said, "that if I told you, you would come. And I knew that if you came, I would not be able to let you leave. And I knew that if I let you stay, I would ruin you the way I ruined your mother. And I could not," he said, "I could not, do that to you again."
Gemma felt the floor tilt again. She felt the room narrow, and the lanterns brighten, and the sound of her own breathing become the only sound in the world. She wanted to say something. She wanted to say: you already ruined me. You ruined me when you left. You ruined me when you made me the one who stayed. You ruined me when you taught me that love is something you earn by being indispensable, and that leaving is something you survive by becoming the person who never needs anyone.
She wanted to say: I have not slept through the night in fifteen years.
She wanted to say: I am so tired.
She said none of these things. She stood in the doorway, with her hand on the frame, and she looked at her father, and he looked back at her, and neither of them moved.
"I'm not asking for permission," she said, finally. "I'm telling you. I'm here. And I'm not leaving. And you don't get to decide what ruins me."
He closed his eyes. The lines around his mouth deepened, and then, slowly, softened. He nodded, once, the same small movement he had given the man by the window.
"Okay," he said. "Okay."
Gemma let go of the doorframe. She crossed the room, slowly, her bare feet silent on the wood, and sat down on the cushion beside him. She did not touch him. She did not speak. She sat with her hands on her knees, palms up, the way his students had, and she closed her eyes, and she breathed, and the room was quiet, and her father was beside her, and the singing bowl was still, and outside, in the November wind, the city went on without them, indifferent and enormous and full of strangers, and none of that mattered, for the moment, as much as the small, warm circle of light in which they sat, and the sound of their breathing, which was, after everything, the same.
The singing bowl began to hum again, a low tone that Gemma's father had not struck. It rose from the metal on its own, as it sometimes did in the old stories, when the air changed, or when someone was about to arrive, or when something that had been waiting a long time finally began to move. He opened his eyes. Gemma opened hers. They both looked at the door.
Devon Castell stood in the doorway, still in the gray suit, still holding the paper cup of tea he had bought at the corner shop and never drunk. He had not knocked. He had climbed the stairs, and he had stood in the hall for what he estimated, later, to be four minutes, listening to the silence on the other side of the wood, and he had understood, in the way that he sometimes understood things, that the silence was not a silence he was meant to break by knocking. He had waited until the bowl began to sing, and then he had opened the door, because the bowl was an invitation, and he had been raised, in his own way, to know the difference.
"I brought tea," he said. His voice was quiet. He lifted the cup slightly, as evidence. "It is probably cold by now."
Gemma's father looked at him for a long moment. He did not stand. He did not offer his hand. He looked at Devon the way a man looks at a thing he is not yet sure of, the way a man looks at weather on the horizon, the way a man looks at his own face in a mirror when the light is wrong and he cannot tell if what he is seeing is a flaw or a feature. Then he nodded, once, toward the cushion across the room.
"Sit," he said. "Drink your tea. Tell me why you are here."
Devon sat. He drank the tea. It was, as he had predicted, cold. He held the cup in both hands, the way Gemma had held her own a few hours before, and he looked at the carpet, and he looked at the singing bowl, and he looked, finally, at the old man across from him.
"I am here," he said, "because I made a mistake, and I have spent the last several years making it worse, and your daughter came to my building today and told me that the mistake I made at the beginning was not the mistake I thought it was, and the mistake I am making now is the one that matters, and I think she is right, and I think you are the only person who can tell me what to do about it."
Gemma made a small sound, something between a laugh and a sob, and her father reached over, without looking, and put his hand on her knee. He did not squeeze. He just rested it there, a weight, a presence, a reminder that he was still in the room and that he was not going anywhere. She put her hand over his. Her fingers were cold. His were warm. The bowl sang. The light moved.
"You are the man from the building," her father said to Devon. "The one with the company."
"I am."
"The one who put my family on the map and then took us off it again."
"I am."
"The one my daughter is supposed to marry, for the business."
"That is the idea, yes."
Her father was quiet for a moment. He looked at Devon, and he looked at the cup in Devon's hands, and he looked at the way Devon was sitting, with his back straight and his shoulders low and his eyes steady, and he thought about the long walk Renata Vance had taken him on, years ago, when the boy was still a boy, and he thought about the way the boy had stood in the rain outside the office, and the way the boy had looked at him in the back of the car, and the way the boy had said, quietly, that he would not do what his father did, and the way the old man had believed him, at the time, and the way the old man had stopped believing, later, and the way the old man was now, in this room, in this light, looking at the boy again, and trying to decide whether to believe him again.
"You were a good boy," he said, finally. "I remember that. I remember thinking you were a good boy. I remember being wrong, or being right, I am not sure which. I remember that you stood in the rain and you did not come in, and I thought that meant something, and maybe it did, and maybe it did not."
Devon did not look away. "I was not a good boy," he said. "I was a boy who was trying to be a good man in a bad system, and I failed, and the failure cost your family, and I have carried that for a long time. I am not here to ask you to forgive me. I am here to ask you what to do."
"What to do about what," her father said.
"About the business. About the wedding that is not a wedding. About the woman I am supposed to marry, who is sitting next to you, and who I have hurt, and who I do not want to hurt again, and who I think, if I am honest, I do not want to marry at all, and not because she is not enough, but because I am not enough, and because the thing I am being asked to do is the same thing my father did, and I swore I would not do it, and I am doing it anyway, and I need someone to tell me how to stop."
The room was very quiet. The singing bowl had stopped. The light in the window had shifted, and the small circle on the floor had moved, and it was now between Devon and the old man, a bridge, a no-man's-land, a place where neither of them stood and both of them could see. Gemma's father looked at the light. He looked at his daughter. He looked at Devon. He looked at the door, where no one stood, and at the window, where the city was still going on without them.
"Renata Vance came to see me," he said. "A long time ago. Before the wedding was planned. Before any of this. She came to see me, and she told me that her son was a good man in a bad system, and that she wanted to make sure he stayed that way, and she asked me to help her, and I said no, because I did not trust her, and because I did not trust him, and because I had learned, by then, that the people who say they want to help you are usually the people who want something from you, and I was tired, and I was sick, and I was not in the mood to be used."
He paused. He took a breath. He let it out.
"I was wrong about that, too," he said. "She was not using me. She was trying to save her son, the way I have been trying to save my daughter, and the way my daughter has been trying to save me, and the way all of us have been trying to save each other, and failing, and trying again, and failing, and trying again. She came to me with a truth I did not want to hear, and I sent her away, and I have regretted it for a long time, and I have not, until this moment, said so out loud."
He looked at Devon. "Your mother was right about you," he said. "She was right about you then, and she is right about you now, and I am sorry I did not listen, and I am sorrier still that I let my own fear keep me from helping you when you were the one who needed it, and not me."
Devon did not move. He held the cup. He looked at the old man. Something in his face changed, very slightly, the way a landscape changes when the cloud passes, and you see, for a moment, the color of the hill, and then the cloud is back, but you remember the color, and you know it was there.
"I do not know how to stop," he said, quietly. "I do not know how to be the man I said I would be. I do not know how to fix the thing I broke. I only know that I am tired of pretending I do not see it."
Her father nodded. He reached over to the singing bowl, and he picked up the wooden mallet, and he held it out, across the circle of light, toward Devon.
"Hit it," he said. "Not hard. Just enough. And then listen to what it does after."
Devon looked at the mallet. He looked at the old man. He reached out, slowly, and took the wooden handle, and he struck the bowl, once, the way Gemma's father had taught his students to strike it, with the wrist loose and the arm still, and the sound that came out was not the deep, cathedral tone of the beginning of the hour, but something higher, something thinner, something that rang for a long time in the small room, and then began to fade, and as it faded, it changed, and as it changed, it found, somewhere in the air, the other tone, the one that had been waiting, and the two tones met, and the meeting was not a harmony, exactly, but it was not a discord either, and it filled the room, and it filled the three of them, and it was, for a moment, enough.
Devon set the mallet down. He set the cup down. He put his hands on his knees, the way Gemma had, the way the students had, palms up, and he closed his eyes, and he breathed, and the sound went on, and the light moved, and the city went on outside, and the three of them sat in the small room, in the small circle, in the small, imperfect, ordinary grace of an afternoon in November, and none of them knew what would come next, and none of them were pretending that they did, and that, for now, was the beginning of the rest of it.