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I’d been thinking of her as all grown up—but she hasn’t aged; she hasn’t changed. She’s still the Trish that I remember: that same dreamy girl who filled her room with books and art and unicorns; that hardworking girl who was supposed to be the first Milltown kid to go to Harvard; that heartbroken girl who cried in her bed at night, where nobody but me could hear her—while Mom and Dad kept saying that really, community college would be just as good, and she could live at home and keep working at Denny’s, and Harvard wasn’t for people like us.
    She’s still
that
Trish, just like I remember.
    But I’m not the same Jimmy, and we’re not the same family. Thirteen years is a long, long time.
    *   *   *
     
    Should I stay or should I go?
    Goddammit, if Trish heard that song one more time, she was going to curl up on the cracked pavement with her backpack over her head and howl like a dog. Since the news of the Lost Years had hit like an atom bomb, it seemed like every street singer in Bordertown suddenly wanted to be Joe Strummer, singing or shouting their raucous: “
If I go there will be trouble, And if I stay it will be double
.”
    She couldn’t stand it. She had to go; she knew that. She had to get home to her family and see if they were all right. And let them know that she was okay, too. Had they even gotten her postcard? She’d sent it over a week ago. But was that before or after the terrible split? She couldn’t count right. It made her giddy: “As bad as ants crawling around in your head,” as Princess Eilonwy would say in the Prydain books. What would Eilonwy do? She was impetuous and followed her heart. So she’d go back to Milltown, wouldn’t she? But what if … what if they weren’t all right? What if something had happened, something awful? What if they hated her for staying away so long? What if she got there, and they’d moved and left no address?
    And what if she went back home to Milltown, just to see them, and then she never managed to leave again?
    But of course she had to go back now … didn’t she?
Should I stay or should I go?
    *   *   *
     
    There was a simple solution to Anush’s problem.
    The trouble was, it would utterly destroy his life.
    But wasn’t his life pretty well destroyed already?
    “Stop sulking,” his lover said. “Or is it brooding? The distinction evades me.”
    The elfin woman paced across the floor of her loft, her white robes swirling around her, dappling with dusty sunlight as she passed between the high, paned windows. All the room’s pipes were exposed, showing the raw industrial space it had once been—but the pipes changed color, humming musically with each shifting hue.
    “What am I to do with you?” the woman asked the air. “It is hours till sunset, yet. Come.” She patted a velvet hassock. “Come sit at my feet, and ask me more of your questions.”
    “What’s the point?” Anush said. He’d given up not speaking. Either way, it was just too painful.
    “What was the point before? You were eager enough with your rude questions then.”
    “You don’t understand!” Anush exploded. “There’s no point to any of this now! My research grant ran out twelve—no, almost thirteen years ago! No wonder the university never answered my letters asking for an extension. I’ve got no funding! No scholarship! I’ve probably been kicked out of my department for truancy, vagrancy, playing hooky—”
    “But …,” said the woman, “you attain all the information you were seeking.”
    “Beginning to,” he muttered.
    She swept across the floor again. “Look! I’ve an invitation.” She opened her fingers, and a piece of paper fluttered to the floor, turning to silver powder just as it touched the wood. “Death apples,” she swore. “It wasn’t supposed to do that. These Border magics are so unreliable. Never mind, I know what it said. We’re invited to a garden party on the Hill at my cousin Windreed’s. We must