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Persephone stares ahead at the trees and bushes surrounding the back lawn. Ruben steps from the guesthouse, a glass of lemonade

in hand.

“It was nice of Christine,” he says, “to make the lemonade before she headed back to Canada again.”

Persephone smiles and takes the glass as Ruben jogs back into the house to get his own.

Just when he sits in the deck chair beside her, a chime goes off and Ruben glances at his cellphone. “Bean says John will

be here in a few minutes.”

“ Bean says —you realize we’ve never heard him actually speak? So how’s the arm?”

Ruben’s right arm rests in a black sling to match his black cast. It’s got drawings all over it, white-markered chimeras and

dragons and some Hokusai-esque ocean waves and even U-Man. The first time Ruben showed it off, he explained how his tattoo

guy was able to copy new designs onto his cast the way he’d done his sleeve. Going to get U-Man added to my arm once this cast comes off. “Still broken. But at least it’s not my drawing hand. That’d be torture.”

Ruben looks at his phone again and Persephone thinks back to a few days ago, ages, to the last time she saw Parker: The first time you got in trouble, I should’ve said something.

But the rest... it’s not my fault, Parker.

Parker leaned in, his face an inch away from the thick Plexiglas that separated them.

What are you talking about? It was hard to see him like that.

Like nothing for him was ever going to change.

You know , she said , what happened to you and everything after.

Because of that day. Parker rubbed a hand over his chest, over his orange jumpsuit.

I know that’s not your fault, Funny. I did that.

You think I’ve been blamin’ you all these years?

It was what she needed to hear. And it was what she didn’t because she had to come to that conclusion on her own. Other people

can’t hand you the answers you must find yourself.

“You OK?” Ruben says.

They both know how not OK she was when John first told her what happened all those years ago. She was already lying down—he’d

told her during her two-day stint at the hospital in Corpus Christi—and it was probably a good thing, because sitting wouldn’t

have been enough. She can’t remember exactly what she said, but she does remember asking him to leave. And he did. They haven’t

spoken since, even though he did send a message through Ruben that he’d been asked to do this last Lee Kingston interview

and that he wouldn’t do it if Persephone didn’t want him to. She didn’t know how she felt about that, but before she could

decide, Hannah called to tell her it was really important John did it and that Persephone wouldn’t be mentioned much and in

her customary Hannah fashion, she was pushy, so Persephone said OK. She isn’t pissed. Anymore. But maybe she never was pissed.

Because pissed isn’t really the best way to describe the feeling you get when someone you care about tells you that they were the reason

your whole life took a left turn. If her hip hadn’t ever been... She shakes her head. She can’t go there. She’d been in

that place for so long, ten years to be specific, and she won’t go back. She’s still making her peace with some aspects of

things that have happened, but in other ways she is already resigned, though not unhappily. Neither, though, is she exactly

contented. Relieved. Because finally, she’s faced herself and... Ruben is staring at her and she realizes she hasn’t answered

him. “I’m OK,” she says. “I’m OK.”

“Do you... think you guys will be all right?”

She sighs. If it weren’t for John, for what he did for her in that car, she wouldn’t even be here. And he chose to help her help Parker over saving himself. No one can change what happened ten years ago, and anyway it doesn’t seem like John will be here much longer. No one can change that, either.

“You believe me, right?” Ruben says. “That I didn’t do an Overlay before he went on that show?”

By the time he’d come to the hospital to see her, John was barely visible. It wasn’t hard to miss him entirely if you didn’t

already know he was standing there. “I know he needed it for that interview. I’m just surprised Hannah decided to do it, especially

after you said he told her about the risks. I’m kind of surprised he did it at all, even if she offered. I don’t know...

We don’t know how much those things took out of us, Rube.”

He smiles at her nickname for him and he’s too earnest to even try to hide it; it’s one of her favorite things about him.

“I think this interview is more for Hannah than for him. And he helped us, with the Reverse Overlays. We’d be dead in that

field if it weren’t for him.”

“I know.” But if it weren’t for John, would they have even been in that field?

Ruben closes his eyes. “I don’t want him to leave.”

“I don’t, either.”

“Is he dying for real this time? Or is... Like, where is he going?”

None of them know.

“I know you don’t want to talk about it,” Ruben says, “but they’re going to want to ask you about what you saw when you were...

you know...”

“Dead?”

Ruben nods.

“I’m not telling anyone anything.” After the accident, everyone thought she was dead and she nearly gave an EMT a heart attack

when she came to, gasping for air in the ambulance. They kept her under observation for two days but couldn’t figure out how

someone who’d been shot and officially dead for nine minutes could come out squeaky clean—no brain damage, no nerve damage,

no damage, period—with just a rapidly healing bullet wound (the bullet had gone straight through) to show for it.

Of course, she knows she didn’t make it out squeaky clean. Persephone can’t file under coincidence the random slush-waves of ice that chill her body even when she’s out in the sun, even when the thermostat in the guesthouse is turned up so high the place might as well double as a sweat lodge.

And Persephone doesn’t remember much about the accident, though there’s a vague image of grey and John and maybe even Mabel,

but who knows what that means. She didn’t share that with John in the hospital because she was too upset about the ramming-into-her-with-his-BMW

thing, but she’s pretty sure she wants to bring it up later, one day. As for everyone else, they won’t ever hear a word about

it. But Ruben knows, and that’s enough.

She hears footsteps on the stone walkway and looks up to see Bean trailing John as they round the back corner of the main

house. Her breath catches, because John finished the live taping probably all of three hours ago yet he looks about as faded

as he did in the hospital in Corpus Christi. She wouldn’t be surprised if he was beyond Overlays at this point.

He raises a hand and she raises a hand and she smiles a little, even though, somehow, this feels like goodbye instead of hello.

2

John didn’t expect it to be easy, speaking to Persephone after that first day in the hospital, which is good because he comes

prepared; he’s got a pocketful of banal small-talk starters. He finds Persephone and Ruben at her guesthouse, in back, laid

out on the two deck chairs near the tree line.

There’s an extended moment of awkward silence, and then John opens his mouth and Persephone opens hers and they’re both apologizing.

And then, because John feels compelled to defend himself, he says the same thing he told Persephone when he’d called her about the recent Lee Kingston appearance: “I didn’t want to do it, but Hannah said she needed it.

” Actually, Hannah said You owe me, John, but he hasn’t told them this because it makes Hannah sound so much harder than John has finally realized she is. Hannah had

added, You are leaving, but we can’t let you turn into some Tupac-Elvis situation, the John Was Spotted in a Montana Grocery Store

story. And you’re my biggest client in history—you’ve got to let me finish this out strong. Even after he’d explained the Overlay risks, she was adamant.

But she made the decision for herself and he gave her what he hoped would help and now he’s barely visible and struck by how

much more he is focused on the moment and on what really matters, which right now is Persephone and Ruben and here and now.

They are his friends, but more than that, in these few short months they have become his family.

John says to Ruben, “Sorry about your arm.”

“Dude, thanks to you it’ll heal in no time.”

John points to Ruben’s cast. “You’ve been busy.”

Ruben pulls the sling back to reveal a panorama of artwork. There’s a superhero character who is slightly familiar. The mask,

the cuffs... John remembers seeing this character when glimpsing a flash of Ruben’s childhood, when they’d first met, though

it’d only been a partial view of the drawing. The character looks a lot like Ruben, and John is transfixed by the hypnotic,

mirror-like mask that covers the entirety of the character’s face...

“U-Man,” says Ruben with unveiled pride.

John blinks, unaware of how long he’s been staring.

“I made him up when I was a kid.”

“Interesting mask.”

“It’s mirrored. For reasons.”

John gives the character another long stare, having lost his train of thought. And then he catches another one. “Ruben...”

But Ruben must sense his forthcoming words, because before John can say anything else, Ruben is shaking his head.

“We already went over this,” he says. “I can figure it out myself—”

“What’s there to figure?” John says. “You need money for art school. I have money, more money than I’ll ever need because... well, you know.” He leaves the obvious unspoken for their sakes, not his own; he’s come to a quiet acceptance about the situation.

Ruben glances at Persephone. At some point, or perhaps it’s been a gradual thing, Ruben and Persephone have developed a closeness

apart from what the three share together.

She says, “Take the money, Rube.”

Rube. Yes, definitely something happening here. John is glad. But why is Ruben so stubborn?