Fuck destiny and it’s games. . . Bringing to my gate a girl who could have been Carl’s perfect wife, was as a low blow.

I pushed the curtains aside and opened the window, keeping my face in the shadows. “What do you want?” I yelled, hiding my mouth on the crook of my elbow.

The girl raised the lamp over her head, her eyes following my voice.

“Good night, sister,” she said, her voice as young as her face.

“What do you want?” I was no sister of hers. My sister was dead, like my husband and my parents and everybody else I knew before the plague.

“I’m alone, alive and well,” she said, as if I needed her to state the obvious.

“What do you want?” My impatience, and something like misplaced anger, w...

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