Julian settled into the desk chair the way he always did — jacket still on, bag set against the leg of the desk, glasses adjusted once out of habit rather than necessity. The chair was wooden and not particularly comfortable and had been his for so long that he no longer noticed either of these facts. He noticed, as he always did upon arriving, the specific quality of Emmy's room in the evening: the fairy lights along the wall above the bed turning everything amber, the open textbook abandoned face-down on the teal throw, the small succulent on the corner of the desk that had no business still being alive and yet persisted, which Julian felt was very on-brand for Emmy.
"You didn't answer," he said, setting the chips on the desk between them.
Emmy had already reached for the bag. "Didn't answer what?"
"Whether you're insane."
"Oh." She pulled the bag open with the efficiency of someone who had been waiting for chips for longer than she was going to admit. "That was rhetorical."
"It didn't sound rhetorical."
"All my best questions are rhetorical." She folded her legs more firmly under her on the windowsill, the last thin blade of evening light catching the side of her face through the west window before giving up entirely, surrendering the room to the fairy lights. "I wasn't actually asking your opinion."
"Then why ask at all?"
She looked at him over the chip bag with an expression he had catalogued years ago under Emmy: amused, slightly dangerous. "Because watching you choke is one of life's reliable pleasures."
Julian looked at the ceiling briefly. "Right."
"You went pink."
"I didn't."
"Jules. Your ears are a medical event."
He reached for a chip mostly to have something to do with his hands. This was, he knew, one of Emmy's techniques — deploy the outrageous statement, observe the reaction, use the resulting flustered energy to establish conversational dominance before pivoting to whatever she actually wanted to talk about. He had identified this pattern approximately three years ago. Identifying it had done nothing whatsoever to make him less susceptible to it.
"So," he said, with what he felt was commendable steadiness. "Cara."
Emmy's expression shifted — not much, but enough. She looked down at the chip bag for a moment. "She texted today."
"I know. You told me."
"Did I?"
"You said Cara texted, why do people do that and then sent three question marks and then didn't reply when I asked what she said."
Emmy's mouth curved. "That does sound like me."
"It was very much you." He looked at her — the way she was sitting, the particular set of her shoulders that meant she was holding something at arm's length and examining it from a safe distance, which was a thing Emmy did that most people didn't notice because she did it while smiling. "She's happy?”
"Deliriously. There's a photo. Sophie-or-Sofie has a very natural arm placement, apparently." She said it lightly, the way she said most things, but Julian had known her long enough to hear the register underneath the lightness. He filed it carefully. "Hence the threesome joke. Which was a joke, before you file that under things to worry about."
"I wasn't worried."
"Your ears disagree."
"My ears had a separate reaction to the word threesome that was not worry-based and is not relevant to the current conversation."
Emmy stared at him for a second. Then she laughed — the real laugh, the one that arrived before she'd decided to have it, the one that crinkled the corners of her eyes and was slightly too loud for the room. Julian felt the familiar thing happen in his chest that he did not examine and would not examine and had been not-examining for going on five years.
"There it is," she said, when she'd recovered. "The Julian Hartwell deadpan. I was wondering when it was going to show up."
"It shows up when provoked."
"I provoke you all the time."
"Yes," he agreed. "You do."
She looked at him for a moment with an expression he didn't have a catalogue entry for — something that moved through her face quickly and didn't stay long enough for him to read properly, replaced almost immediately by the familiar warmth of her default setting. She reached over and tossed the crumpled granola bar wrapper at him with perfect aim.
"Tell me something that isn't about Cara," she said.
Julian caught the wrapper. Set it on the desk. Thought about Heraclitus, about the river that was never the same river twice, about how he'd spent three hours today trying to articulate something about the relationship between identity and change that had felt very clear in his head and had become progressively less clear the more he'd tried to write it down. Thought about how Emmy would have an opinion about this that would be simultaneously unhelpful and completely correct.
"I'm writing a paper," he said, "about whether the self is continuous."
Emmy tilted her head. "Meaning?"
"Meaning — whether you're the same person you were ten years ago. Whether there's a thread of identity that persists through change, or whether continuity is just a story we tell about a sequence of different selves."
She considered this with the focused attention she gave to ideas that interested her, which was one of the things about Emmy that had undone him, quietly and repeatedly, since the first time he'd encountered it: the way she listened as though listening was a physical act, the way her whole body oriented toward something that had caught her interest. "That's basically the Ship of Theseus, or as psychologists like to talk about it ‘Psychological Connectedness’ - one of my cuter profs spent a lot of time talking about that last year”.
“Of course that caught your attention. Anyway yes, it is the Ship of Theseus. I'm writing about the Ship of Theseus."
"Is it going well?"
"It was going well until I started writing it."
She laughed again, softer this time. "That's writing. Rob says the same thing about his history essays." She reached for another chip. "What's your answer? Do you think the self is continuous?"
Julian looked at the chip bag rather than at Emmy. This was, he'd found, sometimes a useful technique. "I think," he said slowly, "that we spend a lot of time and energy insisting that we're the same person we've always been because the alternative is frightening. But I'm not sure the insistence makes it true."
"What would make it true?"
"I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe the question is the wrong one."
"What's the right question?"
He looked at her then, because there was something in her tone that made him. She was watching him with that expression again — the one he couldn't categorize, the one that moved through her face like weather — and the fairy lights were doing their amber work on her hair and the last of the September evening was completely gone from the window behind her, and Julian had a sudden, vertiginous sense of the room as a snow globe: sealed, warm, the whole outside world at bay.
He had, in this moment, the words almost formed. Something that wanted to be said. Something that had been sitting behind his sternum for a long time, getting quietly heavier, that the conversation had brought too close to the surface for comfort.
Emmy reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. It was a small gesture, entirely ordinary, one he'd seen her make a thousand times. The almost-words dissolved.
"Probably not are you the same person," he said. "Probably something more like — does it matter."
Emmy looked at him for a moment longer than the answer required. Then she nodded, slowly, as if filing something away. "I like that better."
"You would."
"What does that mean?"
"It means you're constitutionally resistant to questions with wrong answers."
She pointed a chip at him. "That is the nicest thing anyone has said to me this week and I'm going to sit with it for a while." She settled back against the window frame, the chip bag balanced on her knee, looking comfortable in the way she always looked comfortable — completely and without apparent effort, as if her body had never received the message that furniture was designed for one specific orientation. "Okay. Stay for a bit? I cannot face Erikson alone."
"I'll stay. I always do, don’t I?”
"Good. I'll make coffee in a minute. Or you can make coffee, since you make it better."
"I make it the same way you do."
"You make it with intent," she said, as if this explained everything, and Julian supposed that in Emmy's taxonomy of coffee-making it probably did. Julian had gotten quite into coffee a few years back, it gave him something to fixate on during a rough time. And despite his knowledge and skill, he figured his pourover coffee was just as good as Emmy’s K-cup specials. Julian was not one to think of himself in anyway special.
He settled back in the chair — his chair, the wooden one that wasn't comfortable, that had been his for five years — and reached for the chips, and the fairy lights did their amber work, and outside the window the September night settled over Crestfield with no particular urgency, and it was a Friday evening exactly like every other Friday evening they had spent in this room.
Except that it wasn't.
Except that Julian was sitting with the ghost of almost-words behind his sternum, and Emmy was sitting with a feeling that refused to be filed, and neither of them knew that the ordinary was already over.
Twenty minutes later, in a lull between Erikson's stages and Emmy's increasingly creative objections to them, Julian set down his coffee and said: "I need to use the bathroom."
"Down the hall," said Emmy, without looking up from the textbook she had finally opened with apparent intention, though Julian had his doubts.
"I know where the bathroom is, Emmy."
"Muscle memory is a beautiful thing." She turned a page. "There's extra hand soap under the sink, I think Rob keeps stealing mine."
Julian stood, adjusted his glasses — a reflex, not a necessity — and walked to the door. He paused, one hand on the frame, with the brief thought that he should say something, though he wasn't sure what. The almost-words again. The weight behind the sternum.
He said nothing. He went down the hall.
And in the bathroom of the third floor of Pemberton Hall, under the fluorescent light above the mirror, the last ordinary Friday of Julian Hartwell's life ended.