Page 123 of Wells

She stands at the front of the room in fitted black leggings and a loose white tank. Her hair is pulled back in a low bun. She isn't wearing makeup. She looks rested, settled in a way I never once saw on her when she was mine. That's the thing that takes me apart. She's happy, and I had nothing to do with it.

Six months of silence, of building a life where I didn't reach for the things I used to reach for, of believing I'd never see her again, and she's standing ten feet away.

Then her eyes move across the room and stop on me. I watch it land. The instructor's calm holds for a second, two, and then something behind it slips, and I know she sees me.

Neither of us moves. The room settles around us, mats and towels and somebody's low laugh, and none of it reaches me. There's only her and the impossible fact of the same air.

I can't move. I can't breathe. After six months of becoming a man she might have stayed for, she's standing in front of me, and I'm the one who can't survive it.

TWENTY-NINE

Cera

The St. Joseph Altar: On March 19, New Orleans families build altars heaped with food and give every bit of it away to whoever walks through the door, gratitude paid forward to strangers. She found her own dream standing in the world, built by hands that asked nothing back.

My breath stops halfway through my greeting. My palms go damp against my thighs. The words in my mouth dissolve, and for one sharp second the room blurs at the edges before it sharpens again.

Wells Stone is sitting ten feet away from me in my yoga class. Yoga and Wells. Surely I'm seeing things.

But I'm not. Sure as shit, Wells is sitting in the second row of the class I'm about to lead.

He doesn't move. His eyes lock on mine, and I watch the shock mirror back at me. He looks different. Broader, maybe, his face sharper. But it's him, the same dark intensity, the same stillness that used to make me want to crack him open just to see what was underneath.

My heart slams against my ribs, and my throat goes dry.

I'm standing at the front of a full class, and twenty people are waiting for me to begin. I pull air into my lungs, force my shoulders down, and drag my gaze away from him, sweeping it across the rest of the room.

"Let's start in child's pose."

My voice comes out steady, calm, like the instructor I've become. Inside, I'm free-falling. I wasn't prepared for this on my first day back.

I kneel at the front of my mat and fold into child's pose with everyone else. My forehead presses into the floor. My breath drags in through my nose and barely makes it past the knot in my chest.

"Draw your awareness to your breath."

I'm saying this to them as much as I am to myself.

"Feel your ribs expand on the inhale. Release on the exhale."

I count four in, six out, the way I taught myself to reset a thousand times in the ashram when the grief swelled bigger than the room.

It doesn't reset me now.

I lift my head and move into tabletop. My hands press into the mat, and I guide the class through cat and cow, the slow ripple of the spine that's supposed to wake the body gently.

"Inhale, arch. Lift your gaze. Exhale, round. Chin to chest."

My gaze lifts, and Wells is still there in the second row, near the window. His spine curves on the exhale, and his shoulders move exactly as I cue them. He's following the class without looking like a deer in headlights. He's comfortable in his own skin, and his body moves fluidly.

"Walk your feet to the top of your mat. Fold over your legs. Let your head hang."

I guide them through sun salutations. The rhythm should soothe me, but it doesn't. Every time I glance up to check alignment, my peripheral vision catches the second row.

I make it through the whole sequence without losing my place, and by the time we near the end, some of the tension in my chest has loosened.

"Lie down on your backs. Savasana."

I hold the room in stillness for a few minutes, then guide them up and sit back slowly, pulling my legs into an easy pose.