Page 11

The four days since Tressa Fay and Meryl’s experiment had been a blur of work and long conversations over text, which Tressa Fay moved into and out of, listening to the soft buzz of her phone when she was too busy with a client to read what Meryl had sent, anticipating the moment when she would be finished at the salon and could curl up at home, post-dinner, and write and read and flirt late into the night.

Though it wasn’t only flirting. They talked about Meryl’s predicament, too.

I mean, okay , Tressa Fay had written. like, in sci-fi when a character goes to a parallel universe, they find out they have superpowers. or their friends do. or gravity is different. or they are a villain. or they are incredibly, fabulously rich with a hot wife.

Goals.

Tressa Fay laughed. but in our case, it’s lives right next door to each other. that mostly look the same except they aren’t. and I know, I know, it’s way more complicated than that.

Because you have to consider every dimension.

I mean, I don’t. I cut hair. I flirt with redheads who consider those things for me and can make a tshirt look like a three-figure-cover floor show, but my point is that all of these different, granular decisions we’re all making aren’t opening up portals to worlds where we ride bees to work

Never stop talking to me. And yes, I’ve thought of this, too.

tell me, but go slow

Oh, you can count on me taking my time.

I need to make a chart to see if you ever miss an innuendo

Never. Okay. So I’m thinking about what James said, and my completely disappearing from where you are *does* suggest that time, in more than one universe, is distorted enough to collapse.

wait , Tressa Fay typed. Linds talked about Schrodinger’s cat when she talked about collapsing. collapsing means the other possibility is over. so if you’re gone here, the possibility you’re ever *not* going to be gone is over. I don’t like that

Mm. Okay. Think about it like this, maybe. My sister could give you a rough biography of Meryl, May through September 4.

right, okay

But I’ve already done things differently.

because of me

Because of us. So how many more *us*es can we make? Can we make enough that no us collapses? Forget about whatever happens to me in September. It doesn’t matter if we collapse everything but us.

that might be the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me in my entire life

Good. I am very competitive. I want to keep collapsing until we’re together. And to be clear, I can’t NOT do that, because of you, and because I know about September 4. Nothing I do is going to be the same. I’m talking to you over text right now. What would I have been doing if you weren’t here with me? Whatever it is, I’m not doing it.

Tressa Fay thought about Gayle’s story of Meryl with her new speedometer. Terrible. But also, for anyone who really knew Meryl, comfortingly predictable.

You know what I was thinking about at work during a very boring meeting?

me

Absolutely. Always. Especially that picture on your feed I can’t believe hasn’t been yoinked. I was thinking that maybe James is right and I disappear because of a glitch, but it’s also true that, statistically, a bad guy is the most LIKELY explanation. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t disappeared by someone not usually in my universe, but who shows up on September 4, making him unfindable and unfightable.

Jesus. you just gave me the worst kind of shivers ever.

Wouldn’t that make the cleverest horror movie, though?

if by clever you mean I sleep with the light on for a month, yes

I’ll put a pin in that. And hold you if you’re scared at night (that’s for your chart). But, but, it doesn’t scare me because I am confident in my collapsing-everything-but-us plan. The Move Things Over plan. Move ME over. Out of the universe where I disappear.

are you cheerful? you sound cheerful

I really, really like problems. My whole entire job is solving problems about water, and the main rule about water is that it always wins. So.

you’re always eighteen miles per hour, heading for a dead end

That is the very worst way to put it, but not wrong, yes.

so what do we do?

Are you ready for a stormwater engineer metaphor?

wait, let me slip into something more comfortable

You are really healing every single one of my nerd wounds. Okay, because our stormwater systems are old, getting older, fragile, and we often don’t have good records about what has been done when, we have to start very cautiously. Say we’re not getting any movement at the terminal end of a system of stormwater, and a street miles away keeps flooding every time it rains, we might assume there’s an occlusion near to that street. Like maybe a big tree root.

in London they have fatbergs, I read about it

We have fatbergs here, too. I love that you read about them. So, we’re cautious. We don’t want to collapse this system. We don’t want to fuck something up farther down the line. We use the smallest tools we can, we go slow, we send in cameras, we stand around and talk about it, someone like me does some back-of-the-envelope math. But nothing happens when we do that. Nothing is fucked up, but also nothing changes. We have exactly our same problem. Great. Then we know we can do more. What happens, then, bit by bit, is that it works or it breaks, but also, we know things.

you are very, very attractively terrifying

I bet you say that to all the girls.

Tressa Fay loved this conversation, because she loved talking to Meryl, and Meryl made it sound easy. Do more. Collapse everything but the moment they were kissing.

But then Tressa Fay was standing behind her last client of the day, styling his hair in the mirror and showing him how he could mess with it to make the most out of the cut, when she felt like she was standing in a new world, her hands full of warm hair.

“You okay?” Her client looked at her in the mirror. He had a kind smile. He’d been thrilled with his cut and very sweet.

“I’m sorry.” She tried for a little laugh, but her throat was too tight and dry. “I went away there for a minute.”

“No worries. I do that a lot.”

Her senses had gone to static. She made herself reconnect with him by turning them back on, noticing his blue eyes, his soft hair, the music, the sticky texture of the hair balm. She managed to stay with him through the rest of his appointment until he left happy.

More , Meryl had said. Try something small, and if nothing changed, try something bigger. Based on the way Tressa Fay felt—like she’d scraped both palms tumbling into another world—Meryl must have tried something pretty big. She wasn’t teasing a tree root out of the way anymore.

Tressa Fay walked over to Mary’s desk.

“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” Mary asked.

“That you’re ready to try some layers on your crown?” Tressa Fay’s voice came out shaky. She leaned over and sifted her fingers through the top of Mary’s thick clover-honey hair to try to ground herself.

Mary glanced at her appointment book. “Your four o’clock canceled, so we don’t have anybody else coming in. Let’s do it. But that’s not what I was thinking.”

She pulled Mary up by the hand, and while she settled in the chair, Tressa Fay took deep breaths and tried to sort through the soft churn of her feelings. Something inside her was nudging her to think about Linds on the night when Gayle and James had come to Tressa Fay’s apartment for the first time.

Mary sprayed her own hair damp with water while Tressa Fay got out her Feather razor. “James and I were talking about you and Meryl,” Mary said. “And Gayle. And Linds. And us. Michael and Guy. We actually don’t talk about it, not much, except for Meryl. I’ve been helping him reach out everywhere we can think of to try to find her. But last night we were trying to talk about all of it, and it was almost impossible.” Tressa Fay started sliding her razor through the long locks of Mary’s crown, and Mary sighed. She studied Tressa Fay in the mirror, her brown eyes huge. “Can’t always be about that linear life. James and I think it must be true what Michael said. The closer any of us are to what’s happening between you and Meryl, the more it kind of disrupts . Sometimes it generates a bigger change in memory, like the conversation you and Linds had in the summer about Amy. But for him and me, it’s usually more like a ripple in a pond after someone drops a stone in. Our guess is that the more things change, the less we’re going to notice.”

“You and James, though . ” Tressa Fay smiled at her.

Mary smiled back. “It’s very easy to talk to him. You know we had the same babysitter?”

“So you guys are way past ‘Where did you go to school?’ and into your life stories.”

“We skipped the favorite-colors questions and got right to the life stuff, actually. That’s how it’s going, thank you for asking.” Mary watched Tressa Fay’s hands, then reached up and touched a deep blond wave that had just shuzzed off the razor. “It’s going to be pretty.”

“Your hair is always pretty.”

Mary smiled at her lap, a private smile that Tressa Fay could see in the mirror. “I think I’ve known James in every life I’ve ever lived. Or every time, maybe. I’m not clear on the physics part. I leave that to Linds.”

Tressa Fay’s hands stilled. “That’s…”

“Not something you can deal with.” Mary laughed. “I know. But you know that what’s in my head, like a twenty-four-hour satellite radio station, is the people around me. It’s why you pay me so well to work at the front.”

“Because you’re the best.”

“I am. I knew as soon as I sat in your chair the first time that we should be friends, and I should work for you and make this business bigger with you, and then when I met Linds and Guy, it was obvious that I would have to shoehorn myself into your friend circle so we could be together forever.” Mary reached up and fluffed a layer Tressa Fay had just made. “But I probably had already done that. Love is probably just like that. Romantic love, family love, friend love—no matter what, we know our people.”

“Then I’m glad you’ve always loved me.” Tressa Fay started slicing again, smaller cuts now, looking for how Mary’s hair wanted to fall and what she could do to help it find the shape she could see in her mind’s eye.

“Me, too. So when I tell you, as someone who has put herself out there and who has met a lot, a lot of people, that I feel a connection with James I’ve never felt before, what I’m telling you is that I trust this, and the only explanation I have is the one I just gave you. I have always known him.”

Mary gave her space to work, and Tressa Fay listened to the razor, not really thinking about anything as her feelings drifted and floated and finally settled down. When she glanced at the mirror again, Mary had a determined look that Tressa Fay did not dare ignore, even if this conversation had ventured into territory that gave her a brambly feeling.

“Why do you think you left your apartment that night to go to Canyon Tacos?” Mary asked. “For real. Why, after exchanging a handful of texts with a stranger, when you’d already told me and Guy and Linds that you weren’t leaving your sanctuary and we couldn’t make you?”

“I liked her.” Tressa Fay tried to recapture the feeling she’d had when she and Meryl had sent those first messages back and forth. “She was funny. Smart. It had been so long since I liked someone that much right off the bat.”

“How long?” Mary raised her eyebrows. “Who was the last person before Meryl you liked so much you’d leave behind soup and Epinephrine and old records on your turntable for them?”

It took Tressa Fay a minute to find the answers to Mary’s questions.

Forever.

No one.

Her first date with Meryl in May had been ringed with glitter and anticipation. She’d thought those feelings were created by the energy of what Meryl knew—Meryl, who had already talked to the Tressa Fay who occupied a life months ahead—but now Tressa Fay’s heart was beating so fast, she had to admit that there was something to Mary’s perspective.

When, though? If what Mary was saying was true, when had she fallen for Meryl?

The months of longing since May made it seem as though she’d known Meryl a long time. There was nothing here like any of her experiences with anyone before. And wasn’t that what people who’d met the loves of their lives said? It was like I already knew them. I saw her and thought, “There she is.” It was like I had been waiting my whole life for him. It didn’t matter that it was our first date—I knew she’d be my wife.

Mary’s expression had gentled. “How are we supposed to know how to think about something like this? Especially you. You lost your mom. Your dad is sweet but also the most shut-down specimen of Green Bay Catholic manhood I’ve ever met, and you’ve made it clear he took years to get his horses pulling in the same direction after your mom died, so you didn’t have permission to talk about your feelings. You had to protect him from your feelings. And then Amy hurt you so much, in a way where your story with her stopped. She cleared her things out of your place when you were at work, blocked your number, and was gone.”

Tressa Fay swallowed over the lump in her throat, feeling the nudge again to think of Linds on that day they were all together at Tressa Fay’s apartment for the first time. How her sleeves had slid up her arms as she gestured, talking about the multiple realities of time, quantum computers, Schrodinger’s cruel treatment of his imaginary cat.

She remembered how Linds had tipped her head and smiled when she said, But the good news is that I don’t have to trust science about this, because I have personal knowledge what we’re dealing with here is real and possible. I know Meryl Whit. I’ve met her.

The memory was like a dream, hard to catch and pull into focus.

Or maybe it was that she had forgotten the old way that night in her apartment had happened. Because this was a new memory.

Meryl must have gone to meet Linds. This day in May. That was what Meryl had changed—while Tressa Fay was at work, Meryl must have walked into Linds’s office, introduced herself, and told Linds a story that meant that when Linds came to Tressa Fay’s apartment on a dark October night, she’d been able to talk about Meryl as a friend. Someone she’d already met months ago.

“Meryl’s making new stories,” she said. “Smashing all the old ones.”

Mary nodded enthusiastically. “I’m looking forward to remembering when I met her.”

Oof. Tressa Fay blew out a breath.

Mary just smiled. “Didn’t you feel so much better when you got that first box of clothes that was your mom’s, and you took it home in your car and called me to come over, and we spread everything out on your bed and made a plan for getting them restored? Didn’t it feel better because it changed the past, your past with your mom?”

Tressa Fay combed her fingers through the short, lifted waves at Mary’s crown, watching in the mirror. Her birthmark was bright red, its borders sharp where it met her other skin all along the side of her face, neck, and shoulder, telling her exactly how many feelings must be coursing through her body. “You know what Meryl said?” Tressa Fay laughed, watching her cheeks go as bright as her birthmark. “She told me she’d collapse all the universes except the one where we’re kissing.”

Mary smacked her hand over her heart and turned around. “What the fuck? Oh my God, Tressa Fay. I can’t take it.” Mary turned back around, grinning in the mirror. “I get it. I had to take math in summer school two years in a row, but I get it.” She pointed at Tressa Fay’s reflection in the mirror. “You left your apartment for this woman because the part of you that is in touch with the whole freaking universe had no doubt that this woman was your past and your future.”

Tressa Fay reached for the hair balm with shaking hands.

Mary snatched it from her. “I know how to do this part. Go in the back and call Linds. Make her tell you more about what Meryl was like, now that we’re all officially gossiping about each other. Also, I look like Brigitte Bardot, right? This is a haircut that is asking me to let my tits breathe under something silky.” She turned her head from side to side in the mirror.

Laughing, Tressa Fay went to the back, where they had a tiny table in a room with exposed brick and twelve-foot ceilings. She pulled out her phone from her bag on the table. It was bulky and heavy with its backup power brick on it. She checked her thread with Meryl to confirm there weren’t any new messages.

Then she realized she didn’t want to call Linds. She wanted to see her.

Tressa Fay put her phone back in her bag and grabbed her coat. She went back out front. “I’m going to go over to campus.”

Mary was standing in front of the mirror, taking pictures. “Got it. I’ll lock up.”

It wasn’t until Tressa Fay was pulling into a parking spot near Linds’s building that she realized she had no reason to believe Linds would even be here. Meryl had talked to Linds in her office in May, and it was fully October. The sky perfectly matched the gray asphalt parking lot.

Except as soon as Tressa Fay fished in her bag for her phone to send Linds a text, she spotted her emerging from the building’s door, her long crocheted scarf catching the wind and flying out behind her.

“Linds!” Tressa Fay’s voice bounced off the building in an echo.

Linds turned, and then she waved, running the rest of the way down the stairs toward the parking lot, laughing and breathing hard. “Dude,” Linds panted. “I was just fucking thinking about you! I was doodling my way through a budget request meeting with the dean, hating life, and then I started thinking that the meeting would probably end about when you and Mary got off work, and we could figure out how to kidnap Michael and Guy from their law firms. There’s a new boba tea place where the bead shop used to be on the west side of downtown, and it’s amaze.” Her smile dimmed. “Hang on, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Why are you here?”

“I wanted to ask you about when Meryl came to see you in your office last May.”

Linds laughed. “So weird! I was thinking about that, too, for whatever reason. Isn’t that funny? Meryl is…my God. She is something. I was in my office, putting in final grades for graduates. This beautiful woman knocks on my door and asks me if I have some time. I’m thinking, For you, yes. I have so much time. ”

Linds started to unwind her scarf, then stopped. Tressa Fay watched twenty different thoughts cross over Linds’s face, her bright eyeshadow sparkling. She furrowed her brow and closed her eyes. “That was May. It had to be, because I was grading the seniors’ papers. For sure. And I hadn’t met Meryl yet, but you’d had that impromptu date with her, so it must have been then?” Linds looked up at the sky, thinking. “Nope. That’s not right.”

Tressa Fay didn’t rush in to explain.

Instead, she felt her heart go warm, beating hard with a sensation she could identify only as surrender . To the universe, maybe. To what Mary had said. To whatever had lit up her phone on a cold night in October and connected her to a person who felt like hers .

“Don’t worry about it,” she told Linds. “Just tell me about what you and Meryl talked about.”

Linds nodded, folding up her scarf. “Hot. She’s hot. But you know that. There must be a painting, somewhere, of her naked holding a bunch of grapes. If she were mine, I would be prepping my canvas right now.”

“You can’t horn in on my time-traveling mega-crush.”

“We could share.” Linds grinned. Then her face went blank. “Time travel. Gayle. And James. And your phone. Oh, that’s why Meryl talked to me.” Linds shook her head, then grinned again. “You’re right. I’m not going to worry about the specifics. Linear-schlinear, right?” She leaned on the car next to Tressa Fay. “So I tell her to have a seat, and she tells me she’s Meryl Whit, and that she was sorry she had made you angry.”

“I wasn’t angry. I was hurt.” Tressa Fay started buttoning her coat. It was cold standing in the parking lot.

“Don’t worry—that’s what I said. Then she told me the most incredible story. You know I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to show up in my office and tell me a story like that. She showed me her phone, which has pictures of you from what was then the future, when it was cold, wearing a coat I’d never seen before”—she gestured at Tressa Fay—“which is the coat you’re wearing now, with your hair grown out from the length it was at the time.”

Tressa Fay smoothed her hand down the corduroy collar of her mom’s coat. “What did she want?”

“She wanted to talk about you. She wanted to tell me about herself and ask me questions.” Linds crossed her arms and slouched her weight into the car. “You know what? She just wanted to meet me and see what happened. That’s what I mostly remember.”

“She hasn’t texted me this afternoon. Probably because, I guess, she was with you in May. Where she lives.”

“Whoa!” Linds laughed. “Walk with me? I came outside thinking I’d tromp through this path over by what used to be the golf course. The leaves are so pretty today.”

So they walked together. Linds showed Tressa Fay a part of the college campus where a narrow dirt path littered with yellow maple leaves wound through the woods, and she told Tressa Fay about how her life had changed since she met Meryl.

“I had been hurting. For a while,” Linds began. “Remember Ren?”

“The guy you were seeing last winter.” He was at least six inches over six feet, and he had a beard he styled in long ringlets. Linds had been truly enamored, but she didn’t say much about him when people asked questions.

Then Linds didn’t talk about Ren at all or bring him around.

“I was so hopeful, Tressa Fay. He got me, you know? My humor, my little routines. He’d bring me huge mugs of spiked tea when I was writing. We’d talk about what love was, what it meant, and I’d connected with him on an app for polyamorous folks, so I felt safe. I felt like we were talking about the same kind of love in every way.”

Tressa Fay reached down and took Linds’s hand. “What happened?”

“We met someone.” She cleared her throat, then swiped at a tear. “Fuck. Fuck all of that. February is the worst month anyway.” Linds looked at Tressa Fay. “Don’t be so worried. It’s okay. I should’ve talked about this ages ago, but you guys could do better about understanding who I am, sometimes. You could do more to get the incredible depth of polyamory, instead of treating it like it’s kind of funny or not quite real.”

Tressa Fay felt her heart stutter with the shame that followed a hard truth. “Yeah?” She was embarrassed at how weak her voice sounded.

Linds laughed. “I know. Before I knew , I was the same way. I didn’t know the difference between nonmonogamy and polyamory or, actually, that there could be a difference that meant something to me. I knew I was queer, like you did.”

Tressa Fay nodded, remembering. “You thought you were bi.”

“That’s as close as I could get at fifteen, even though how I really felt was incredibly turned on with the idea of kissing someone who was bi. Who was more . Who saw possibility and love everywhere. Look, king-size beds used to make me blush, and not only because of sex. Because of something big I wanted.”

“Oh.” Tressa Fay tried to think of something to say, but she laughed instead. “ Fifteen .”

“Yeah, and I thought college would make it clear. But I couldn’t pull in college. I was a gamer, I hung out with gamers, we were only just learning how to talk to each other. Did I go to grad school hoping for an extension on my sexual awakening? Indeed I did. And it worked. The first relationship I was in that made sense happened by accident. I brought my best friend in the program, April, who I had such a mad crush on—”

“I remember her.”

“Yeah, to that open mic where I knew Linh would be reading, because I had the worst crush on her, which I didn’t even know, right? I thought I was simply very fond of Linh. And the whole way there, I was talking to April about Linh, and April was asking so many questions, looking at pictures on my phone of Linh. One might ask why I had pictures on my phone of a woman who was in my comparative lit seminar, but April didn’t ask those questions. She asked me more questions about Linh, which made me so, so happy.”

“I have always loved this story,” Tressa Fay said. “April and Linh were so good for you.”

“Yes.” Linds walked for a while, not talking. “April held my hand when Linh started reading. We hadn’t held hands. My heart felt huge . She leaned over and whispered against my neck, ‘Is this okay?’ I mean, was I in a novel? Hallelujah! Then April kept whispering to me how beautiful Linh was. What a good writer she was. Did I think she’d sit with us? I died. My corporeal form couldn’t handle the heretofore unfelt feelings. Everything finally made sense.”

Linds had told Tressa Fay this story, but never in a way that made Tressa Fay imagine herself in the moment, filled with something new that was exactly right.

But also, Tressa Fay hadn’t asked for this story.

She hadn’t offered the same love to Linds that Linds had offered her. That meant Tressa Fay had left parts of Linds on the table, unacknowledged. Unloved.

She reached out and took Linds’s hand to apologize, but Linds shook her head and kept talking.

“It wasn’t an accident, even though I always tell the story that way, and I wasn’t afraid. It’s something I thought about after talking to Meryl, how I knew what to do after that night. I had gorgeous, sweet, crunchy apple knowledge, and it led me to a beautiful relationship that taught me about what I was and what I wanted and how much I had to know about myself, how honest I had to be with myself in every part of my life, to have it.”

“And Ren?”

“Ren. Beautiful boy, Ren. We had been writing and designing a D&D campaign to open up to new players at Gnome Games. Sometimes these things have a bit of a draggy start, but the group that signed up was amazing. El was…well. They were immediately magnetic. And when Ren noticed, too—when Ren couldn’t wait to talk to me about them, too—it felt like it was my time to start my epic love story, you know? I was so ready. Tiff, I was thinking about babies . My God.” Linds’s voice was watery even as she laughed over it.

“What happened, honey?” Tressa Fay’s chest felt tight.

“Ren had thought he understood about himself. He thought he’d made that journey, and for a while he tried, but he kept getting hurt, over and over. No one wants to hurt the person they love, and not because of love , right? I had all this love for Ren, for El, for me, for us, but it was hurting him. And then it was hurting El. Then it was over before it had even barely begun, before I had talked to any of you, and I just never said anything. Because…”

“Because we haven’t seen this important part of you.”

“Yes.” Linds stopped and dropped Tressa Fay’s hand, reaching up to hold on to a branch. “?‘But how do you know you’re polyam? What if that’s not real? What if you’re making it up? What if you’re fooling yourself?’?” She asked these questions in a sarcastic voice that Tressa Fay recognized as the voice of Linds’s own self-doubt, turned on her by others. “That relationship shoved me headfirst into the worst second-guessing and gaslighting period I’d ever had, and I was so alone in it, Tiff. It was like I was hurting myself with staying alone in it. Until I talked to Meryl.”

“Meryl.” Tressa Fay’s chest lightened.

“Meryl. Time and space and what it meant that she had your picture on her phone. The more I thought about it, the more it felt like I’d been given a glimpse of—of how we know anything, I guess. How we recognize who and what we love.”

“Mary just said this to me. Today. Right before I came over.”

“I bet. Watching her and James flirt on the group chat like we can’t tell what’s going on has been something. But in my case, it’s knowing myself . It’s the fearlessness I had, taking April to Linh’s open mic, and how I didn’t feel that with Ren and El. Can the assurances the multiverse offers that every love is possible explain to a person the shape of their queerness?”

Tressa Fay and Linds had walked so many miles together as teenagers, talking and feeling and complaining and arguing, comparing experiences, trying to figure out how to survive the horrors of growing up, and growing up queer, and growing up queer in Wisconsin. It seemed correct that what was happening with Meryl would be a part of their story, too.

Tressa Fay kicked leaves at Linds. “I’m sorry I haven’t shown up for you. I’m glad you told me.”

Linds looked at the sky, where blue was starting to break through the gray. “Yeah, me, too. And maybe because Meryl led me to thinking about all of that and gave me a chance to heal more, there are some already possible and new things happening.”

“Reeaally.” Tressa Fay bumped her shoulder against Linds’s until she let go of the branch and grabbed Tressa Fay’s hand again as they started to walk. “You haven’t shared.”

“You know, actually.” Linds took them back toward the parking lot. “Mary was supposed to introduce you to her. At the taproom. But you decided not to go and instead found a time-traveling wormhole, so I feel like this girl is fair game. Probably Mary just misinterpreted the intentions of the cosmic weavers.”

“Oh! This is very new.”

“Brooklynn,” Linds said. “Maybe. On the other hand, haven’t you been listening? No such thing as old or new. But I’ll tell you one more thing I just remembered about Meryl’s visit back in May.”

“What’s that?”

“When we were done talking, her plan was to go find you.”