These Dreams of You

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Over the coming days Viv rides a roller coast of highs and lows. Every new twenty-four-hour cycle brings a new email resolving nothing, and adamantly she won’t be dissuaded by circumstance or Zan that she is directly responsible for what’s transpired and setting in motion a chain of events, even as it’s unclear what that chain is or what’s the consequence of the motion that is its result. With this, Zan realizes that, whatever the risk, Viv’s trip to Ethiopia is inevitable. No one will be able to live with Viv otherwise, least of all Viv herself.

Lying in bed in the dark, she says, “What if the bank takes the house while we’re gone?” It’s the night before they leave for London. Zan is encouraged by the question not because he believes Viv will abandon her plan to go — at this point he’s no longer sure she should — but because, in what quickly has become the all-consuming Ethiopian drama, she hasn’t forgotten other realities.

“Well?” she says.

“I guess whether we’re here when they take it isn’t going to matter.”

“When?”

“If.”

“You said when.”