A funny side effect of her parents’ accident had been the souring of her relationship with Gerardo. They’d been seeing each other for a little over a year, she a talented twenty-four-year-old medicinal chemist, he forty-seven and married and a civil engineer. When they met, he had been exactly double her age, and he’d joked he’d be sixty when she turned thirty, then a hundred when she turned fifty. Larissa was the only one she’d told; her mom would’ve lost it if she’d found out. They had been instantly, madly in love, and with him she’d felt sheltered and cared for in a way she never believed she needed, and was almost embarrassed for. So naturally, when everything happened, she’d imagined falling onto him like a shipwrecked sailor on a raft, as if that were the natural thing to do. Gerardo had thought so, too, it seemed, and redoubled his attentions while also pulling away just enough to give her the time she needed to grieve, proving his innate ability to always do and say the right thing. And yet. And yet what in the end did happen was she’d cooled off, toughened herself up to survive in a world where everything you loved got revoked from you like that, and it was better not to need anything outside of you at all. Weird how these things go.