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argue.”
    â€œNever Lost,” she says.
    â€œExcuse me?”
    â€œNever Lost, my new name. Simone is history.”
    She crosses out Devon’s entry and writes: Simone solo-hiking the trail and renaming herself Never Lost. Me here. Me gone. See ya when I see ya!
    Devon says it is time for them to go and she looks at him, asks herself if he notices anything different about her.
    *   *   *
    Day Four of her hike, she crosses a road and ascends in elevation. Hardwoods give way to waist-high mountain laurel bushes. The air is clean and cool. She watches her quadriceps expand and contract, notes with satisfaction her shorts are already feeling looser around the waist, not so much they are in danger of coming off, but enough so that she thinks she is losing weight.
    She comes up behind a hiker headed north. He’s an older man, a slow hiker who started the same day as she and Devon. Christopher Orringer walks with his head down, plodding steps, and he starts his day early and ends it late. She and Chris O, which is his trail name, have talked a few times, and he is a widower with no kids, had decided to thru-hike before his body gave out and he wound up sitting in a nursing home for the rest of his life. He steps aside with a grunt and allows her to pass, which she does with a quick hello, knowing he’s too out of breath for conversation.
    An hour later the trail tops the ridge, and she sees Devon sitting on a ledge. The mountains are blue and ripple into the distance. Down in a narrow valley smoke curls above the trees and bends in the wind. She imagines a house, or a factory down there, a place where humans live out normal lives.
    Devon faces the expanse, shaking his head, as if locked in silent debate. She gazes at the flat spot between his shoulder blades. Estimates the distance, twelve feet across gray rock, and takes a step his way, heel to toe, like Indians walked when they stalked these mountains. He grips the ledge, and his fingers whiten at the knuckles.
    â€œI want you to come sit by me,” he says.
    Simone closes the gap one step at a time.
    â€œIt’s beautiful,” he says. “I love the azure tint.”
    He’s shaking, doubting her love.
    â€œIt’s my breath, isn’t it?” His laugh is feeble and ends abruptly. “I knew I should have carried some mints.”
    â€œI can’t believe you’re testing me.”
    â€œWe can fix this, this, whatever it is,” he says. “It’ll go away . . . therapy, whatever you need, we’ll get it.”
    Simone raises her arm and in her mind sees the sudden shove, followed by the sprawl of his body into open air. She hears his scream, long and shrill, stops mid-stride, and backs up a step. The ring comes off in a single twist. She releases it into the air and watches it drop and bounce at her feet. His face pales, and his eyes open wide.
    â€œYou can catch a ride into town back on that highway,” she says. “Plenty of cars coming by.”
    Simone jogs down the trail, bends her knees more than usual to reduce impact. She will not allow herself to feel sorrow for the breakup, hopes leaving Devon is the catalyst for the change she seeks, imagines DNA bubbles inside her cells, molecules heating and realigning, cooling into something benign. The scientist in her says this cannot happen, that she will remain who she is until she dies, but she ignores the thought, wanting, for at least one time in her life, to believe anything is possible.

3
    MY ROOM’S OKAY for a hundred and fifty a week. I’ve lived in worse places in downtown Atlanta. An air conditioner blows cold wind across the bed, and on the wall I’ve hung a picture of a hiker on the Appalachian Trail. The hiker stands on a rock at the edge of a cliff and has a cocky smile. He’s in Virginia, on McAfee Knob, and the mountains below are green as a fairway. A cloud floats in the sky, far off, a