The gate at the Botanic Garden let them through into a green that had nothing to do with Manhattan’s version of green wider, slower, air that smelled like something other than exhaust for the first time in longer than Mike could place.
Phoebe walked half a step ahead of him down the gravel path, guitar case left at home for once, hands doing the thing they always did when she was deciding what kind of afternoon this was going to be.
“I should tell you something about myself,” she said, without any preamble, the bright lift in her voice that Mike had learned, over the last couple weeks, to recognize as the sound of a story about to arrive.
“Okay.”
“I was raised by circus people.
Albanian ones.
Very traditional.
There’s a whole it’s a whole thing, actually, the training starts really young.” She said it the way she said everything, plain and total, daring the sentence to be questioned.
“Also I invented the high-five.
That’s not, like, a bragging thing, it’s just a fact about my life that happened.”
“The high-five.”
“The concept.
The gesture.
All of it.
Nobody credits me, obviously, because there’s no paperwork for a high-five, there’s no patent office for hands touching, but it happened, and it happened because of me.” A beat, and then, tossed in almost as an afterthought, the way she always dropped the biggest thing last: “Also my real name is Regina Phalange.”
He let that sit a second, turning the whole absurd architecture of it over circus people, the high-five, a name like a magic trick and felt, underneath the impulse to laugh, the much stronger pull toward the easy response, the one that would’ve kept the afternoon light and asked for nothing: sure, okay, that’s great, a smile and a nod and a subject change, the exact shape of a man letting a strange woman’s stories wash past him without ever actually engaging one of them.
He didn’t take it.
“Regina Phalange,” he said instead, testing the weight of the name like he meant to remember it.
“That’s a lot of vowels for someone who grew up with circus people.
I’d have expected something shorter.
Circus names are usually efficient.”
Something flickered across her face not quite surprise, closer to recalibration, the look of someone who’d thrown a fastball and gotten a real swing back instead of a polite miss.
“The Albanians valued syllables,” she said, recovering fast, doubling down instead of retreating.
“It’s a whole cultural thing.
You wouldn’t get it.”
“Try me.”
Some things you just have to have lived.”
“Fair enough.
What was the training like?
For the circus thing.”
“Rigorous.” She said it with total confidence and zero further detail, which he was starting to understand was its own kind of answer not a story running out of material, but a story that had never needed material in the first place, existing entirely on the strength of how completely she believed it while she said it.
“There were ribbons involved.
I don’t want to talk about the ribbons.”
“Understood.
No ribbon questions.”
“Thank you.
That’s very respectful of you.”
They walked on past a bed of something orange and structural, the path curving toward a pond where a heron stood in the shallows with the pointed stillness of something that had opinions about being watched.
Phoebe didn’t stop escalating she never seemed to run dry, each story arriving with its own internal logic, each one stranger than the last, and Mike found himself doing the thing he’d started doing back at the funeral conversation weeks ago: not laughing them off, not calling them out, just leaning into the specific shape of each one and asking the question that took it seriously on its own terms, the way you’d ask a real question about a real thing.
It worked, in the sense that she kept going.
It also, he was fairly sure, wasn’t actually working not in the sense of passing whatever test this was.
Every question he asked, every story he engaged instead of deflecting, seemed to sharpen something in the way she was watching him rather than settle it.
He could feel the test shifting shape under his feet, less “will he believe the ridiculous thing” and more something else entirely, something he didn’t have language for yet and wasn’t sure he was supposed to.
“You know you don’t have to do that,” Phoebe said, eventually, when the heron finally moved and the moment that had been building around it broke.
“Do what?”
“Ask a real question about every fake thing I say.
Most people either believe me, which is boring, because then I have to keep escalating forever to get any reaction at all, or they call me out, which is also boring, because then it’s just a game about who’s smarter.” She kicked a pebble off the path, watching where it landed instead of looking at him.
“You’re doing a third thing.
I don’t have a category for the third thing yet.”
“Maybe it doesn’t need a category.”
“Everything needs a category. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
That’s how you know if it’s safe.”
He thought about that for a second the shape of it, the thing underneath it that she’d said light and moved past fast, the way she moved past everything that mattered too much to sit with directly.
He could’ve let it go.
The easy version of the afternoon wanted him to let it go, wanted him to make a joke and keep the gravel path light under both their feet the rest of the way to wherever they were walking.
“Out of all of it,” he said instead.
“The circus, the high-five, Regina Phalange all the stories, whichever ones there’ve been before today, too.
Which one do you most wish had actually been true?”
Phoebe stopped walking.
It wasn’t dramatic no gasp, no held breath, just a full stop in the middle of a gravel path, her weight settling back onto her heels like the question had physical mass and she’d needed a second to absorb the impact of it landing.
She looked at him with an expression that had dropped every trace of performance out of it at once, direct and unguarded in a way he hadn’t seen from her yet, not once, not even at four in the morning over cold tea.
“That’s a mean question,” she said, quiet.
“I didn’t mean it to be.”
“I know you didn’t.
That’s what makes it mean.” She wasn’t smiling anymore.
She also wasn’t walking away, wasn’t deflecting into a song or a joke or a new impossible story to bury the old one under.
She just stood there on the path, considering him, considering the question, the whole easy architecture of the afternoon suddenly balanced on something a lot more fragile than circus stories.
hey quick one before you close the tab.
if the cliffhanger is killing you, the future already exists.
you just need a ticket through.
every chapter the second i finish writing it.
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P.S.
in a parallel timeline, the rest of this story runs completely free on unwrittenrealm.com.
just saying.
that timeline also has more chapters.