At Friedly’s Exchange, residue clung to fingertips and grabbed at the soles of shoes. Tattered books, chipped pottery, a dead man’s suit—all less tinged with nostalgia than ruined by desertion.

Ginger’s parents went thrifting most Saturdays, bent on a course of rescue and appeasement. Malcolm looked for old, odd compasses for his collection; Edie for gardening tools, china, decoupage.

One Saturday Ginger tagged along. She peeled a tiny sock off a music book whose cover was gone. Ribbons of rubber cement leaked from the binding. But there was a promising Table of Contents; and the inside pages were creamy and fresh, notes and staff lines black and substantial.

Home that afternoon, Ginger discovered, in the preface, obscure lyrics from a Goldberg Variation. At the piano, she worked the passage. “It is so long since I’ve been with you,” went the melody, cool and green and staunch. Buried, lost in a swirl of harmonies. She pressed the ache from her shoulders. Time, patience, repetition, belief. She tried again, and again, and finally her fingers lifted the punch line from the keys: “Cabbages and turnips have driven me away.” 

She’s the only daughter of an actuary and a homemaker. Good-hearted, decent people—among the few Mormons in the Delaware Valley—they showed up for work and kept the house nice. They were devoted to their pretty, earnest daughter. They wanted so clearly, through piano lessons, an orderly home, their new faith, to ensure her successful life.

“Ginger!” Edie called. “Come help with dinner.”

Ginger tapped a loose-hinged, responsive ivory key. Chipped, deckle-edged. Imperfect. She took up the song again, relieving the uncertainty she could only escape through pursuit. Time, patience, repetition, belief. Intensity like Ginger’s could mask reservation, shyness, turn these into something aloof. She’s heard the soft voices of her parents. “People will have to get to know her,” said her father.  “Not so serious, honey,” sighed her mother.

Edie was referring to her daughter’s torturous expectations. Where did they come from? Where would they take her? Ginger’s sober face held a look of hope and capacity. Other girls become audacious, street-wise. But Ginger could not change the fact that, well, she did not wish to change the facts. What was significant and extraordinary would present itself if she remained patient, attuned for it. The nuanced, the forgotten, insignificant detail. “It is so long since I’ve been with you.” A detail like that could change everything.

Edie walks into the living room, her mouth set in a thin line. She twists a dishcloth; she may just slide the piano lid over Ginger’s fingers. But the music stops her. Edie drops into an armchair. She listens. It is so long since I’ve been with you….

At Ginger’s high school, ordinary details merged in a pleasing mix. Inky dittos, rubber-tipped bottles of glue, the dry residue of chalk in a blackboard tray. A busy hum between classes, the slap-slap sneakers of someone running late. She felt locked in tension, ready to spring—the word picked up in French class was couchant; her senses pulsed with a tight-stretched thrum. Who else felt this way? Not her classmates, loud and breezy with confidence, or gloomy and sad, slipping along the margins with downcast eyes. One afternoon Ginger slipped into a woody, fragrant supply closet. She took a black-and-white theme book from a shelf and opened to a random page. She wrote:

September 22nd, 1962.  I have a new lipstick, Tangerine Tango. My bicycle’s flat, and Ed Briscoe says he can fix it during lunch. This afternoon Mr. Shumway will demonstrate the solving of oblique triangles. The best ice cream is strawberry, from Delsa’s on Kelty Street. If you are reading this, maybe you know me   

She added a flourishing exclamation mark. Her shoulders tingled, but how poorly the careful writing expressed this—not what she’d meant at all. She replaced the book with a sigh, eased the door open and joined the channel of students in the hallway. 

After school, Ginger worked at Krummerhorn Bakery. It was old-fashioned, with a bell at the door. Swirl-textured, faded red paper covered the walls. Tin lampshades housed bulbs hung on thin cords, spreading circles of light over pastry cases and wooden counters. At the till, Ginger was expert at adding long columns of prices in her head and making change.

As if to add to its nostalgic qualities, two older women worked there. Lorraine was slow-moving, with sad eyes and hair stuffed into a colorless net. She polished the shelves and patched icing in the pastry cases with thumb and forefinger. Betty had black, bouffant hair and nails and lips painted red. She presided at the counter, refilling straws and napkins, making small talk. Betty refused to step into the back room to retrieve trays of cakes and cinnamon buns. Lorraine moved the goods, shuffling across broken linoleum with plastic trays pressed against her concave chest.

Mornings, Fasching the baker plunged his hands into vats of dough and shaped hot cross buns, French bread, Kaiser rolls with sprinkled sugar. He spoke broken English and never wasted a moment, nearly always finished by three o’clock. Ginger had seen him only a few times.

That day, Lorraine telephoned. She wasn’t feeling too pert, so Betty pulled a stool to the till. Ginger stacked three spattered trays and backed through the swing-hinged door to get them washed.

Fasching stood in the shadowy corner, drinking from a metal cup. Perhaps he’d killed the yeast that morning with hot water, stayed late to remix the dough. Light was poor, and near the sink was a refrigerator. Ginger stood on tiptoe to place her trays on top of the fridge. Her arms rose and her head tilted up, like a dancer.

Freeze her for a moment: soft-limbed, supple and dewy. Her yellow top slid above her jeans, and her Laurel advisor, Sister Connor, came singing into her mind: Raise your arms; if your tummy shows, put them down and go buy new clothes.

Sister Connor was the mother of four genius boys and seemed to have long forgotten what it was to be a young woman. A girl. Who should—approach? invite?—well no, she should simply be, in an artless sense, never in a conscious, adjust-your-clothing manner. Anything more is pretense, distraction. Cabbages and turnips. A girl be’s simply lovely. To be was enough. The best books and music would agree.

These were the thoughts on the dreamy fringe of Ginger’s mind as she placed the trays. Her waist became especially thin; the gap between her denim waistband and her torso widened. She made a sound, a tiny, feminine noise. It seemed to flip a switch in the baker.

Ginger jumped as his cup clattered onto a jumble of knives and shakers. A blur of motion, and Fasching clamped one hand over her mouth. He thrust his other hand into her jeans.

Her body must have been to him the whitest, most tender and fragrant of pastries, and he whispered hot against her ear. A threat, a demand, an assurance. His fingers smashed against her. She kicked at the refrigerator and jabbed his legs with her heels. 

Stay miss, now miss, stay miss. Finally his fingers found her, crammed themselves, burning, one at first, then two and even three, inside.

Ginger began silently reciting prime numbers. One, three, five, seven.  Eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen.  Twenty-three, twenty-nine. Thirty-one. Eleven prime number days each month. Eleven itself a prime number! No, some months had fewer days. Fewer numbers. A spasm of panic, and Fasching tightened his hold. A furious search for a pattern to the numbers—nothing—this lack of design seemed itself enough to make her expire—and then he released her. He clambered to the exit,  scattering a stack of pastry boxes. One hand fumbled at the door; the other hand he held to his nose.

In the bathroom, light gave a blurry, silvery sheen, and Ginger’s skin was gluey with sweat and fear. She worked her jeans down. Her panties, their dark blue flowers like gravel, or buckshot. The cotton liner was unstained, childish. This brought some relief, but these panties could not be hers; they belonged to the girl who’d yesterday slid them neatly into a drawer. She touched herself, tender, bruised; but her fingers were cool. She pressed, trying for something substantial, restorative in the softness there. Or maybe it was better, more normal, not to find a there there.

That night and next day were weathered in a numb shock. Her limbs were heavy. Walking home from school, Ginger saw a mother duck with her chicks tottering behind, yellow down; rippling, fragile, and bold. Ginger thought of her mother. She should tell Edie.

Could she have picked up yeast, or worse, from the baker? Could she be pregnant? It might depend on where Fasching’s fingers had been. Even if they hadn’t been “anywhere,” fingers were part of him. Who was to say that ejaculate—a fluid, after all, thin and soapy, if Ginger’s friend Daisy was to be believed—who was to say it couldn’t migrate? That it wasn’t found all through people—through men—even in their fingertips, like blood? As for blood, Edie’d recommended against tampons. “Darling, let’s not try those yet. That’s where the man goes, after all.”

Edie’s words—delicate, courteous—brought both parents to mind. If Ginger told Edie, Edie would tell Malcolm. Something clutched her ribs. Her father called her “Sissy.” He came in the living room rustling his newspaper when she played piano. Not a demonstrative man, he’d once bought her a collection of show tunes for the piano and left it on her pillow. Carousel. Oklahoma! They seemed preposterous now, a cruel joke from someone else’s life.

Was this one of those reasons you were supposed to see the bishop?

Was she still a virgin?

These were real questions, but they were nothing against the question of her father’s regard. Malcolm, knowing—a certain, needless heartbreak—and whose heart? Hers, or his?

The ducklings made their way into the cold pond, paddling crazily this way and that. The water swirled. She’d carry this knowledge herself. And somehow remain intact. Otherwise, in Malcolm’s eyes, something would be broken forever, something that, despite the baker, had not broken yet. Something had happened to her, something awful. Like the monthly gift, ugly and messy. Also private. Adult. To be assimilated, with other adult things.

Ginger said she needed more study time and quit the bakery. Beyond that, the single change anyone might have noticed was she could not endure the smell or taste of soft breads or raised donuts. Puffy, smooth—nauseating. She thought rarely of Fasching as she moved toward graduation the following spring, at Blackhawk stadium. Before the procession, students lined the walls of a concrete tunnel. Morning breezes had wilted, the air already oppressive.

Ginger watched the restlessness of the graduating class. Ahead, a boy with wiry blond hair was wrapped around her friend, Daisy. He kissed her hard like a soldier back from war, and when they staggered apart, Daisy lit a cigarette and leaned against the concrete wall, hooking the toe of her shoe around the boy’s ankle. He shrugged her off and stabbed at the asphalt with his sneaker. Daisy pulled so hard ash consumed a third of the cigarette, and she blew a stream of smoke through a jagged sigh, languid and weary beyond tears.

Daisy’s drained, heavy-lidded manner seemed to carry Ginger’s spirit away from the line, out of the heavy day, back to the burnt-sugar scent of Krummerhorn Bakery. She saw Daisy’s motions in the older woman, Betty; saw Betty’s refusal to step into the bakery’s back room. Watching Daisy, Ginger understood: Betty recognized something, the remnant of a fever, the answer to an old question, in Fasching. She knew what he might do to a girl who’d not known better. Yet Betty let it happen anyway.

Well. Why not you? Ginger could imagine Betty saying, with her chopping laugh. It’s time you recognized the way things are.

She, this girl next to her, Daisy up ahead—they were nothing alike. Sister Connor had often shared a scripture about how each girl was fearfully and wonderfully made. Pretty, pretty words that  brought Sister Connor to tears. But rather than fearfully and wonderfully, perhaps that verse should say regretfully. Disastrously made. Who’d suspect that Ginger, the only Mormon at the school, took the sacrament each Sunday and wondered, as she dropped the paper cup into the tray, if that meant she could still be a virgin? Rumor held that Diana Bruceton hosted séances on Sundays. For some reason, Michelle Forster never did sleepovers or field trips. It was whispered that Krystal Granger ran a prostitution racket, marked by tennis racquets in basement windows. Daisy swallowed her mother’s tranquilizers at the communion cup. Here in the tunnel beneath the bleachers, the uniform of graduation equalized them. Easy pickins, however wonderfully made. Accomplices to the way things were, to what Betty understood.

Then she remembered the other, listless woman in the bakery. Lorraine, in her hairnet, patting her sunken chest. Ginger saw warning, knowledge there, too, in Lorraine’s refusal to tempt the fever of Fasching. Some people had twice the store of fearful as they did wonderful. Was there some ticklish honor, a feather of satisfaction Ginger had taken, in being desirable?

If so, it had only gotten her hurt. Graduates moved through the tunnel now, walked toward who knew what. For a second, she had it back, she stood on the verge, recalled the sensory quiver, the lovely poise—couchant. It faded as quickly as it had arrived. Here was the mouth of the tunnel, the edge of shadow and darkness. Ginger stepped forward, emerging to sunlight bright and dim, the kind of light that puts dark shimmering circles before the eyes. The sort of light she had to look around to see through.

At Rutgers, Ginger studied mathematics. She admired clean, logical processes, the building of one step on another, proving thus and so forth. She’d underlined a phrase in a textbook: The goal of dynamical systems is to understand the nature of all orbits . . . generally this is an impossible task. The notion struck her as valiant. Fearful and wonderful. Her pages of proofs, notes on systems and processes; the old musical languages of Bach and Mozart. If design could not be understood, at least there was the attempt, the rare achievement of elegance.

The thought was a stretched, gossamer thread, a thinning link to the Church; but as years ticked by, it was not enough to hold her. Gradually, she stepped away from Mormonism, to the regret of her parents and certainly of Sister Connor. Time, repetition, patience, belief … they’d fallen short for Ginger, who now saw impossibility, absurdity rather than hope. Men were likewise disappointments. A graduate student with a sheaf of grievances against family, employers, his mechanic; the coworker taken with her intelligence, but scornful of everyone they knew, including finally, herself. 

One evening, a young artist drove her to a secluded pond. Solemn geese stood, heads beneath their wings. As one awoke and stared at them, the artist caressed her shoulder and touched his fingers to her neck, and she shuddered. She recalled the mother duck, her zig-zag ducklings. The darkness that was Fasching.

Home that night, the artist having dropped her at the curb and sped away, Ginger rifled through her music and found the thrift shop book. She played a Chopin prelude, got lost in its deep bass octaves. Then she settled on her couch with a glass of wine. She tore up the young man’s phone number and dropped it into the glass.

By her late thirties Ginger edited textbooks for a publishing firm. No real money, but self-respect, a living in a field she’d once found fascinating. Math analysis, differential equations, chaos theory. Love had become even more dreary. Obsessive and humiliating. The secretary of the county coroner incumbent had seduced a rival candidate, taken him to a motel where a photographer waited in the closet. If we’re not lame jokes we’re disasters, Ginger thought. Even her elegant Bach inventions seemed contrived, misshapen, products of a merely human mind. 

Her reclusiveness may have been connected to the bakery, to old Fasching. Of course this was too simple. So long ago! That girl was full of folly, the fearlessness of youth. She knew better. She reflected on limitation, the certainty that if you slice each pace in half as you cross a room, you’ll approach the opposite wall. But you will never reach it.

The lecture took place downtown on a gray, chilly day. The autumn sky threatened, Ginger had a headache. At home waited her cushy robe; she could almost hear the light clicking of branches, the hush of raindrops against her window. All tempting.

All stale.

She resisted, and went to the lecture. The sound system was faulty, so things were getting off to a slow start. Ginger pulled colored pens and a folder of work from her bag.

A man called Ripley McCord was in the same building for an investment trade show, but had wandered into the wrong room. He knew his mistake but lacked energy to continue with his plans. The predictable contacts, the handshakes. Perhaps here he’d find some diversion.

He squared his shoulders and took in the scene. On a program sheet he caught the word Fractals. Grim prospect. But a screen, sweet Lord, something to look at, or to shut your eyes against. The room was nearly full of men. Well, then. Substance. No Mary Kay ladies, no frou-frou, no sniveling about something you couldn’t quite name. His ex-wife knew a poem about this, the need of the world of men for me. Look, horn-rimmed eyeglasses, sportcoats. His fingertips twitched. You never knew, he’d once turned a cocktail party remark about conical energy into a cool thirty grand.

And women, some. Some. He ran his tongue over his teeth, trimmed up his gut. Shirt was fresh, from a lunch-hour laundry service, because you never knew.

Two women caught his eye. One held a plastic cup on her palm, listening to someone tall and enamored. She jabbed her ice with a toothpick, lifted it to her lips and plucked off a cherry. Pretty mouth. As she listened, her eyes narrowed like fishhooks. She flicked her gaze over the man’s face, a flash of contempt crossing her features. How weary of people and agendas McCord was. Still. If she turns from him, and those ivory shoulders face my way, I’ll go to her.

The second woman: slender, pretty, not striking. Seated, ankles crossed, she made delicate circles and notes on some papers, quick strokes of her pen. Her bright hair escaped a clip, and she tangled her fingers in it. She touched her pen cap with her tongue.

He’d bypassed these earnest, inward-looking types. They so quickly made him feel his lack. But this woman. Self-contained, calm, untrammeled. Near the end of a row, and God love her, the next seat open. If she touches that pen to her mouth again, I’ll go to her.

Ice Woman, ahh, walking away. Beautiful hips. He turned toward Slender Bookish, and  … there, pen to her lips. He made his way over, lifting a briefcase and an umbrella.

When he took his seat, older gentleman beamed quietly across Ginger’s radar. She read and marked a paragraph on Bolyai’s geometric intervals. There seemed little progress with the sound system; perhaps the meeting would be canceled.

Then he spoke.

“So this is what happens when you’ve got a roomful of academics and no engineers.” 

She looked up and let her eyes linger. His were green with gold flecks. His voice was practiced. Maybe an academic himself.

He settled in his chair, feeling a welcome mix of contentment and challenge.

The lights dimmed at last. An apology and introduction, polite clapping. Then, an Indian mathematician presented a glittering array of slides called the Mandelbrot Set. His English was barely decipherable, but what he shared was fascinating. 

The Set was a perfectly balanced graphic, the illustration of a series of complex numbers resulting from a simple polynomial function. The series long since discovered, but only recently plotted and visualized.  Slide after slide showed dazzling paisley-like formations, unseen before the advent of high-speed computers. A murmur filled the room. Ginger realized she’d been part of the reaction. She caught Ripley’s eye and smiled.

“That’s so beautiful,” he said. 

It was. The Mandelbrot Set had a heart-shaped body, curved and sensuous, two small orbs flanking each side. Below the heart, a circle, then a circle smaller still, spilling toward an elongated vee-shape like a birth canal. Mandelbrot was of the class of complex number sets known as fractals, where any cutaway contains endless small copies of the whole. Ginger’s mind fired on connections—corona, eclipse, exquisite crystal.

At the next slide, Ripley gasped and felt it necessary to apologize.

“My lord,” he said. “Just when you think you’ve seen it all.” 

“Yes. I know what you mean.” 

He had a single thought, cutting through the fervor of the presentation: there was kindness in her voice.

When had he begun to care about kindness?

The speaker moved on—Julia sets, Lorenz attractors, Fatou dust. Light from the images played on Ginger’s face and stained her features blue, fuschia, orange-gold. She began an association with scenes from her solitary life. A green Set’s luscious heart became a sliced apple, seeds in symmetry on a ceramic plate. A red Mandelbrot, the symbol of her own virginity, velvet chambers within her body. 

I will praise thee, the words rose to mind. For I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are thy works. Sister Connor’s scripture seemed perfectly chosen.

Ripley McCord wasn’t sure about what he saw, not at all. A lot of brouhaha, —a Spirograph onscreen. Theoretical nonsense. He was wrong, and he knew he was wrong; but look at her—lovely, captivated, self-forgetful—(again, he thought, probably wrong). No, but he’d ride her interest. He felt that somehow—not a moment too soon—his shoulders were being dusted off. There seemed to be a search for underlying dignity in him. She made him want to stay and see if it was really there.

When the lights came on, Ginger felt damp and drowsy. She startled herself, nodding abruptly. Embarrassed, she lowered her gaze to McCord’s shoes. Thin, supple leather. A glint of gold from threads in his socks. In the lobby, she bought a book of glossy Mandelbrot images. People laughed, talked, brushed past. McCord stood near the doorway, glancing through an open newspaper. 

When she approached, he folded the newspaper. He asked where she was parked. She accepted his offer to share an umbrella, and they set out.

He asked about her work, how long she’d lived in the city. She answered with reserve. He turned as a car sped past, to shield her from the splashing water.

Then: “This chaos theory. What do you know about it?”

“It’s about … predictability,” she answered. “Scientists rely on theories of cause and effect to explain the way things happen.” 

“Like gravity, causing an apple to break from a tree and fall.” He steered her around a puddle.

“Exactly. But some systems don’t obey the rules, so to speak. Their behavior can’t be predicted.”

He chuckled. “That couldn’t be a new idea, could it? We were expecting no more than high clouds today. Perhaps a little breeze.” The rain, a slight hush over the umbrella, strengthened and fell in juicy drops.

She laughed. “Some people are convinced that if we could predict the weather we’d be a step away from controlling it. But with chaotic systems—no prediction, no control.”

Her words mixed with those from the lecture. Butterfly effect, Fatou dust.

Ripley McCord asked, “What do you make of this … discovery, this evidence of randomness in the world?” They’d reached her car. He looked past the cold stem of the umbrella to her eyes.

“As I understand chaos theory, it doesn’t explain truly random progression. Just, some systems are difficult to predict, based on what’s known. They may appear to be random, but really we don’t see the underlying causes.

“Yet.” She lifted her chin.

“Yet,” he repeated. “Such hope in your voice! Is the idea to someday achieve prediction—and then, as you say, control?”

She lowered her eyes. “Some people love to be surprised. The other day”—how easy to talk with him here in the rain, as the light of day was fading—“I noticed a new establishment, a coffee shop. Opening near my apartment, on Cameron Boulevard.”  She was conscious of slipping him this information. “And I’d not been aware of it being built.”

The shop. He’d stood before it himself, not long ago. He recalled its craftsmanship, its sober plenitude. Potential.

“A surprise,” she continued. “Never saw it coming, being built on the side of a bank as it is—my own bank.” She touched the car and rubbed her thumb and fingers absently. 

“It sprung up overnight. Unsettling, you know? Not to read about it in the paper. Or notice it being constructed. No franchise, nothing with backing. Someone spent a lot of money, perhaps their life savings, on a venture that may very well fail. On the chance …” she looked full into his face, “that so many people will want to buy coffee when they go to the bank.”

He was retrieving his wallet. “And yet,” he said. “On such chances fortunes are made.” He fingered a business card. For a moment she thought, Amway. But no—Ripley McCord, this man’s name. His company, a securities firm.

“I’d like to help ensure its success by having coffee with you. I hope you’ll call me.” He pressed the card into her palm. His fingers were warm. Hers closed over them. She rummaged for keys. She thanked him quickly and slid into her car.

That night Ginger dreamed of Benoit Mandelbrot. He stood before a Bunsen burner, holding a beaker. Into this he poured, then stuffed, the blocky shapes of numbers. 

The numbers in the beaker took on meaning. Her birthdate. Her age. Her phone number. A number standing for freckles on her body. A prime number representing hairs on her head. Mandelbrot took a mallet and pounded the numbers in. She watched, amazed the beaker did not shatter. He adjusted the burner’s flame.

An image was released—a large glowing jewel—like a genie discharged by a magic lamp. The jewel grew and took the luscious, fertile shape of the Mandelbrot Set.

She woke as the dream broke into fragments. She dressed in a light robe. Found her book of Mandelbrot slides, and stepped outside. On the top step, she sat and hugged her knees. The book rested on her thighs, over the thin robe.

The moon rode high in the clean scent of after-rain. A cluster of red leaves hung like a birthmark over the street. Something brilliant flashed—star? Satellite? It reminded her … she had it: the gold thread in Ripley McCord’s socks.

Behind windows across the street, people slept. All seemed connected: breeze, sky, people breathing quietly in bed. The pulse knocked at the base of her throat. Such an impossible effort: to stand and turn, step inside, hear the metallic k-dlick of the door behind her. Finish the night, and wake to the incessancy of another day.

She counted the steps to the sidewalk—sure enough, still eleven—and opened the book. Lingering over the pages, the blooms of fractal color and light, Sister Connor’s verse rose again to mind. I will praise thee. For I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

In the Mandelbrot Set was a glimpse of all she’d longed for. There was intention in the universe. Some semblance of design after all, in an unimagined beauty. An intersection of hope and circumstance settling near that pulse in her throat—no astonishment or fanfare, more a tiny key turning sweetly in a familiar lock, recovering a door of possibility. It is so long since I’ve been with you. The pieces of her life—pencil marks in the margins of her Chopin nocturnes, the voices of her quiet, aging parents. The sweet patience of Sister Connor. The shape of her wrist bones and fingers, her piano, droplets of rain on her windshield, even the coffee shop under construction, coming to life—all were precisely placed in a pattern of meaning. This pattern had never happened before, could never happen again. As unique as the record of an empire, it had brought her to this exact moment. She’d stepped into the original autumn moonlight, the first best autumn moonlight. The world was not arbitrary. 

The man, Ripley McCord, appeared in her mind’s eye, perhaps outside his own empty apartment at this very hour. Her stomach dropped with pleasure, a ripple of light, the possibility—up to me—of seeing him again. This was nothing more or less than how people came together. The next step was hers. Might not work out at all—probability held, of course, that it would not. Nonetheless, something unfolded inside her. Crazy, at her age?—but what a triumph! to move forward in elementary ways, to risk benchmarks of exposure, they could lead only to greater levels. To discover where her boundaries might lie, their limit approaching infinity.

Who’d have predicted his business card—a fragile, transitory collection of fiber and ink—could find its way into her life this very day, this very moment? She stepped inside, walked her dark hallway, knees weak, shoulders aching. Touched the nightstand. Slid her fingers across its smooth wood until they reached—yes—the firm raised edge, the neat square corner. Her pulse quickened, her voice fluttered in a whisper.