It was Edith’s final year of grad school, and her astronauts were finding their way home. The Roman Christians were facing death but would live on as martyrs. Here were lives she could control. She was done with classes and hadn’t seen another writer in months.

Adam sent her a picture of his face, his upper lip faintly shadowed. He’d been on T for six months. How’s your gender stuff? he asked. You still feel good about being called Edith?

She did. The surprise of the name gave her vertigo. The rightness of it.

It’s, like, impossible to get on HRT in Alabama, though.

I wish I could mail you some. Or you could drive up here.

She didn’t tell Adam about the bottles of blue-green pills she’d poured out in a final, inconsequential ritual. A winter’s dream of drawing Val back. I’ll be out of here soon, she said.

But not back to what she’d left behind. All the cigarettes shared on cold New England sidewalks. The press of Tessa’s body. An endlessly iterated joke, laughing until her cheeks ached. The miles covered in Val’s car—to Birmingham, to the movies, to get ice cream cones at Trader Joe’s. Wherever she went next, she’d go alone.

At night she dreamed of empty industrial landscapes. Someone walked beside her and did not speak. Silent ex-girlfriends lounged in pools of clear blue water. One night, she was pushing a hospital gurney through the blighted world, a body hidden beneath its sheets. Not dead, she knew, and not asleep.

Adam told her he wished he could give up sleep to get more work done.

Not me, Edith said. There’s nothing that feels better than sleeping.