When she turns her head, her eyes widen. “Oh, it’s beautiful.”
I’m not looking at the view. I’m looking at her when I say, “Yeah, it is.”
She’s sitting up now, properly awake, staring at the coastline like she’s trying to commit it all to memory.
“Come on,” I tell her, nodding toward a low barrier at the edge of the gravel. We sit on it, legs hanging. The drop below us is steep enough to matter and far enough away that it’s just scenery. The wind is wild, and it blows her hair around her face.
She hasn’t styled her hair since she left the church, and it’s falling in its natural waves. It suits her.
“How long was I asleep?” she asks.
“An hour and a half, maybe.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“You needed it.”
She leans back on her hands and looks at the water. “I had a dream about the county fair.”
“Gerald?”
“He could talk in the dream. He had opinions.”
“About what?”
“Everything, weirdly. He was very confident.” She tilts her face toward the light. “You were there, and you kept winning things.”
“Naturally,” I say.
“You won a second penguin, and you were trying to decide what to name it. You kept asking me, and I kept saying I didn’t know. You got very stressed about it.”
“That sounds like me.”
“It does, right? Even dream-you is very invested in things being named correctly.”
“Thingsshouldbe named correctly.”
“Gerald Two was your frontrunner.”
I laugh under my breath. “That’s fucking terrible.”
I peer up at the clouds that have been building to the south for the last forty minutes. They’ve moved faster than I calculated. The sky is dark gray and looks angry.
“Can I ask you something?” she says.
“You know you can.”
“The Meridian bridge. When it’s done, what does it look like?”
I think about it. “Cable-stayed. Two pylons coming up on either side, with the main span about three hundred meters. The cables fan out from the tower heads, and from a distance it looks like—do you know what a harp looks like from the side?”
She turns toward me and nods.
“It’ll look like two harps, facing each other across the river.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “You didn’t tell me that part before.”
“The harp part?”
