Vesna told me this years later, and she got the cold part right but I think she lied about the rest.
VESNA, at the furnace. A vessel cooling on the bench, breath-cloud rising off the glass, off her mouth, the two indistinguishable. She held her own wrist. Felt the pulse there, untransmitted. The interface sat dark on the shelf, a small black tooth. She did not pick it up.
TOMAS, across the city, in the loft that smelled of cedar dust and solvent. Hand flat on the lid of a piano he'd spent a month unwiring. Old work-light, orange. His thumb traced where her scar would be — on his own forearm, on nothing.
She told me she could feel the heat off the furnace mouth like a body standing too near, and that she let herself imagine the weight of a hand a centimeter above the burn scar. Not landing. Deciding whether to land.
He never told her this: that he sat with his interface in his lap for an hour, the wedding band on the wrong hand, and that switching it on would have been one gesture, the smallest gesture, and that he wanted her at the original resolution or not at all. At some point he became aware he was holding his breath and had been for so long that when he finally exhaled, he laughed — a single, private, humiliating sound — and then pressed his mouth shut as though someone might have heard.
Here is where I get it wrong, mid-telling, the way you realize a thing while your mouth is already moving: there was no furnace beside his piano. No piano in her studio. Two rooms. Two cooling lights. The same held breath.
Each decided, alone, for the other.
Both kept the device dark.
