The Comfort of the Lost

They stood on the edge of the pavement until the last echo of Marissa’s parents faded from the air, until the street resumed its ordinary flow and the cold settled into its old familiar angles. Then Marissa stepped away from the spot where her parents had vanished and started walking, arms crossed tight against her ribs. Andy followed without comment, his own hands stuffed deep in his pockets, head down as if he needed to keep an eye on the cracks in the sidewalk to stay upright.

They walked for a block without a word, just the rhythm of heels and shoes on the frozen grit, and the ghosts of all the things that hadn’t been said vibrating in the space between. The city gave them distance: no other pedestrians for three blocks, just the hum of distant traffic, the clouded breath of two people working out how to hold the impossible in their heads at the same time.

At the corner, Marissa stopped at a crosswalk even though there was no reason to, looked both ways, and then turned to Andy, her voice so quiet it might have been a thought.

“They weren’t my parents from this time,” she said. “Not the ones we saw in the theater.”

Andy nodded, his voice low. “I know.”

She looked at him, a kind of raw clarity in her eyes that would have scared the shit out of him, if he hadn’t seen it before in the other women he loved. “I think they were my parents from now,” she said, as if afraid that to name the truth would make the grace she had received vanish. “Or from somewhere after.”

He said, “I realized it when they spoke about the accident.”

Marissa let out a breath she’d been saving, shoulders sagging. “I thought I would see them just the way I remembered. But it was better, wasn’t it?”

Andy thought about it, weighed the memory of the moment against the shape of what it had given her, and said, “It was what you needed.”

She gave a short, wet laugh. “I’m still not over it. I don’t think I will be. What my mother said—about not wanting me to carry Sarah’s life as if my own didn’t count—” Her voice cracked, just for a moment. She pressed the edge of her hand to her face, as if she could iron the tears right back in. “It’s like she knew what I was doing before I did.”

Andy waited, not trusting himself to say anything that wouldn’t feel like an interruption.

Marissa started walking again, slow and purposeful. She made it half a block before the next words came out. “I don’t know what you did back there,” she said. “How you made it happen.”

He said, “I’m not sure either.”

She stopped, turned to him, her face searching. “You’re not surprised, though.”

He shrugged. “Things like this have been happening for weeks. Whenever I want something badly enough for someone I care about, the world… bends. But I didn’t call them specifically. I just wanted you to have whatever you needed to get through tonight.”

Marissa stopped walking. She turned to look at him fully, and for a moment her face did something complicated—cycling through disbelief, then a kind of vertigo, then something that wasn’t quite anger but was adjacent to it. “You’re saying you did that,” she said. Not a question. “You’re saying my parents—” She stopped, pressed her fingers to her mouth, looked away down the empty street. A long breath out. Then she turned back. “And you just—what, you just wanted it, and they were there?”

He met her eyes. “Something like that. It's not something I can control.”

She looked at him for a long moment, and he could see her working through it—the way you work through something that doesn’t fit any category you already have. He wanted to say something that would make it smaller, more manageable, but there wasn’t a version of the truth that did that, so he said nothing.

She started walking. Arms still crossed, jaw tight. He fell into step beside her, and for half a block he watched the city go about its business and tried to decide how he felt about what he’d just admitted. The honest answer was that it unsettled him in ways he hadn’t found words for yet—not the wanting, which felt clean and simple, but the fact that the wanting was enough. That he hadn’t chosen it, hadn’t weighed it, hadn’t even fully understood it until after. That the world had just—complied.

Marissa’s pace slowed, almost imperceptibly. When she spoke again, the shock had gone out of her voice, replaced by something more careful, like she was feeling her way toward a question she actually wanted the answer to. “Does that ever bother you? That you can do things that big, and not choose to?”

He slowed, considered. “It would bother me if it made me into something else. But I still feel like me. I just want the people I love to be okay.” He let it hang, not sure if it was the right answer.

She nodded again, as if she’d expected it. “That’s the right answer.”

They walked on. For a long stretch, neither spoke. Andy was thinking about what it meant to bring back the dead, about how many versions of himself he’d have to stack up before he started to believe he deserved any of this. But Marissa seemed lighter, even with the cold and the crying and the weight of the day.

After a while, she flexed her hands in front of her, fingers spread wide. “Her hands,” she said, and her voice was almost normal again. “They were exactly as I remembered them. I was afraid they’d look wrong, or that the years would have made them unfamiliar. But they didn’t.”

Andy looked at her hands, saw the knuckles and the nail beds and the elegant way she held them, even now. “They looked like yours,” he said.

She almost smiled, then let it fade. “I’ve been treating this day like a series of things I just had to get through. And I didn’t expect to come out the other end of it wanting things.” She stopped walking, really stopped, turned to face him. “But I do. I want dinner. I want to go somewhere I haven’t been in a long time. And I want to go back to the island, with you.”

Andy said, “We can do all of that.”

She looked at him, for a long time, like she was memorizing the contours of his face. Then she said, “Thank you,” and hugged him, and when she kissed him, it was a thing of gratitude and of having survived, both at once.

He held her for a long time, until the wind made her shiver and she stepped back, wiping her face with both hands and laughing softly at herself.

She said, “There’s a place two blocks over. It’s called Edelweiss. My parents used to take us there on birthdays. I haven’t thought about it in fifteen years, but I want to go there, right now.”

Andy smiled, and for the first time in hours, it felt easy. “Show me the way.” And she did.

Edelweiss was exactly where she said it would be: halfway down a side street off First, wedged between a florist and a nail salon so freshly renovated it made the rest of the block look sepia. The restaurant’s sign was understated, the kind of gold-leaf script that belonged to another era, and the window was fogged just enough to obscure who was inside. Andy recognized it from two long-ago dinners in the city, back when he’d first moved to Scarsdale and had thought, for a month or two, that he might become a person who went out for German food in the city on weeknights. He hadn’t been back since. He wondered if Marissa knew this, or if the world had simply bent around the memory and picked it for him.

Inside, the restaurant was small and warm, a wedge-shaped room lined with dark wood and old travel posters, every table crowded with white cloth and flickering votives. The air was heavy with butter, cheese, and the invisible threads of every conversation in every language Andy had ever half-understood. It was the kind of place where nothing had changed since before the internet, and nobody wanted it to.

They were seated immediately, at a corner table beneath a painting of the Alps. Marissa looked around with a stillness that was nearly reverent, her hands folded together in her lap, eyes scanning every detail of the room. It took Andy a minute to realize she wasn’t just looking for the memory of her parents—she was looking for herself, or the version of herself that used to exist in places like this, at ages seven, or twelve, or fifteen. She seemed to drink in the room like someone who had been thirsty for decades.

The waitress approached in a flurry of practiced cheer, menus in hand, and set them down with a little flourish. She lit the table candle with a cat-shaped lighter—its smiling plastic face oddly dignified in the flicker of flame—and Marissa smiled, tiny and genuine, a reflex she couldn’t have faked if she’d tried. The waitress lingered just long enough to take their drink order, then disappeared into the kitchen, her presence replaced by the hush of low conversation and the buttery fug of melted cheese.

For a few seconds Marissa sat silent, turning the pages of the menu but not really reading. Andy waited, elbows off the table, giving her space. He was acutely aware of the way their knees almost touched beneath the tablecloth, the way her eyes kept scanning the room like she expected someone familiar to materialize from behind the bar or emerge out of the kitchen in a cloud of steam.

Only when the last of the candle’s wax caught and the flame steadied did she speak. “We used to come here for birthdays. Every year, right after the holidays.” She shook her head, a soft snort. “It was like a peace treaty. Nobody could be upset about coming to a place with embroidered napkins and Christmas lights in February.”

Andy smiled, glancing around at the garland still strung in the window. “It looks like a good place for that. Safe. Out of time.”

Marissa let the menu fall gently closed, her thumb pressing the edge as if the paper might flutter away without her vigilance. “It was.” She leaned in, whispering like a child at confession. “My mother always ordered the same thing. Zurcher Geschnetzeltes. She’d read the whole menu front to back, pretend she was torn between the Jaeger Schnitzel and the pork roast, but it was always that.” Her face softened, older and younger at once. “She liked the name. She’d make us say it at the table—try to roll the R’s and pronounce it like the servers did. And then she’d laugh at how American we sounded.”

Andy said, “What about you?”

She hesitated, then grinned, a shade mischievous. “I changed it up. It was my one rebellious tradition. I tried the weirdest thing on the menu every year. Pfefferpotthast, Blutwurst, liver dumplings—if it had an umlaut, I was in.” She looked up at him, eyes brightening. “My dad was the only one who could finish the spätzle, though. You know how it comes out in a pile the size of a baby’s head? He said it was a moral failing to leave any behind.”

Andy laughed, picturing her father. “That sounds exactly like a dad. My own would say something about starving children in Hungary, which made no sense because he didn’t have a single Hungarian bone in his body.”

Marissa let out a low chuckle, and for a moment she looked like someone Andy might have met at a college party or on a subway platform, instead of a woman who had already lived several lifetimes in the span of a year. “I’m getting the Geschnetzeltes,” she said, tapping the page with finality. “For her.”

Andy nodded, closing his menu. “I’ll have what your mother had, too.”

She studied him for a beat, then laughed again—brighter, realer, a color he hadn’t realized he’d missed in her palette. “You’re not going to try the Currywurst? I thought you were an adventurer.”

He smiled, shrugged. “Tonight I’m a traditionalist.”

The waitress reappeared as if conjured, took their orders, and when Andy asked for a bottle of Riesling, she flashed him a smile of what looked like approval. The moment she was gone, the mood shifted; the little drama of choosing and being seen was over, and it left in its place a quieter, more ambiguous intimacy.

Marissa was looking at him again, her stare a little too direct for safety. “Thank you,” she said, and left it hanging.

He hesitated. “For what?”

She didn’t look away. “For letting me have all of this.” She gestured, not just at the restaurant but at the entire night, maybe the city itself. “The concert, my parents, the walk, this—” She took a breath. “I know it’s not completely real. I know it won’t last. But thank you.”

He shook his head, not out of disagreement but uncertainty. “It’s real enough for me,” he said.

She nodded, lips pressed together as she considered this. “That’s good. I just—” She stopped, looking down at her hands, which were knotted together in a way that reminded him of someone bracing for a car crash. “I think I needed this more than I thought I did.”

Andy waited. He was learning to leave space. A year ago, he might have filled the void with a joke or a compliment, but now he just let the moment stretch, trusting that if she wanted words, she’d find them herself.

She reached for her water, sipped, then set the glass down with a careful precision that told him her hands were trembling, even if her face was steady. “When I was twelve, I came here with my parents and Sarah. It was the night before my first piano competition. I was so nervous I couldn’t eat. I kept staring at the spätzle, just poking it with my fork, and my dad finally said, ‘If you don’t eat that, you’ll forget all your music and embarrass yourself.’ My mother elbowed him so hard he almost spilled his drink.”

Andy smiled. “What did you do?”

She shrugged, lips quirking. “I ate the spätzle, obviously.” She looked up, expression radiant in its vulnerability. “I lost the competition, but I never forgot the music. Or the dinner.”

He pictured her as a child at the table, brow furrowed with anxiety, trying to memorize every note and still be the daughter her parents needed her to be.

She watched him, measuring him, as if looking for any cracks in his sincerity. Then, satisfied, she let her posture soften and turned her attention to the little tableau around them: the drowsy candlelight, the reflections in the window, the murmur of families making private memories at the neighboring tables.

The waitress brought the wine, poured them each a glass, and left without a word. The hum of the room seemed to fade for a moment, leaving only the two of them at the table.

Marissa took a long sip, then exhaled. “I was worried, before tonight, that if I saw them again, I’d ruin that chance. That I’d say the wrong thing, or that they’d be disappointed in me.”

Andy shook his head. “They weren’t.”

She smiled, a little broken. “No. They weren’t.”

He watched her as she relaxed, the tension leaving her spine, the hard lines around her mouth fading. The noise in the restaurant grew around them, but she didn’t seem to hear it. She told him about the arguments they’d had, about the time she refused to play a duet with Sarah because Sarah was off-key and Marissa was a perfectionist even then. She told him about her mother’s hands, about how she’d hated her own hands until the day she realized they were the same. She told him about the year her father tried to teach her to drive on black ice, and how they ended up in a ditch on the way home from Edelweiss, laughing so hard they didn’t even notice the tow truck had arrived.

Andy listened, really listened, in a way that would have embarrassed him if he’d realized how deeply he was being drawn in. He watched Marissa let her stories accumulate, layering one on top of the next, each anecdote a weightless stone in the span between the nervous girl she used to be and the poised, thoughtful woman sitting across from him now. It wasn’t just the stories themselves—though there was something in the way she spoke, the bright, almost brittle humor she used to deflect her own vulnerability, that made him want to laugh and wince at the same time. It was the growing sense of momentum, the feeling that every word she offered was a footstep across some invisible rope bridge neither of them had trusted to hold their weight. He felt something in his own chest loosen with every step she took.

The food came. It looked exactly as Marissa had described: a delicate tangle of veal in cream sauce, spätzle cooked to a golden crust on the edges and fluffed like a child’s pillow at the center, cucumbers pickled to translucence and coiled atop a plate like a garnish in a storybook. The presentation was almost laughably old-school—he could imagine the same dish, the same arrangement, being served at a state dinner in 1973, and nobody would have thought to improve it. The waitress brought it with a practiced pride, as if this was her favorite table of the night, and Andy wondered again if the world was bending around Marissa’s nostalgia just to make sure tonight was perfect.

Marissa ate as if she hadn’t eaten in days. At first she tried to make it look casual, but after the first bite—after that first, almost involuntary moan of pleasure—she gave up any pretense and just let herself enjoy it. Andy joined her, less ravenous but no less appreciative. The food was honest: heavy, creamy, and perfectly unpretentious. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten something so immune to interpretation or irony.

They didn’t speak for a few minutes. Andy found the silence oddly companionable, a gentle hum beneath all the noise of the restaurant. He was aware, in a distant and almost embarrassing way, of how good it felt to sit here with her, sharing a meal in a place that belonged more to her past than his present. It felt like a privilege, and with it came a new kind of responsibility—not to fix her, or to heal her, but simply to be the person she needed him to be, right now.

Halfway through the meal, as Andy was methodically portioning his spätzle to make it last till the final bite of veal, Marissa put her fork down, wiped her mouth with a napkin, and fixed him with a look that was both probing and unexpectedly gentle. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

He considered lying—something shy, or romantic, or self-effacing—but decided against it. “Honestly? I’m thinking about your parents. About whether what happened tonight was real, or if it was just something that happened because I needed you to have it. And I’m thinking about what it might cost, if there’s a price for making the world fit the shape of our want.”

She held his gaze, searching it for something he couldn’t name. “Does it matter, if it felt real?”

He shrugged. “I guess not. But I still find myself worrying about it.”

Marissa nodded, lips pursed as she weighed this. “I do too. But when my mother touched my face tonight—” She paused and swallowed, as if the memory was too big to fit in her throat. “I didn’t care about the explanation. I just wanted it to be true, for as long as it lasted.” She set her hands on the table, fingers interlaced. “I think maybe that’s what you’re supposed to do, when you get a miracle. Let it happen, and pay the price later.”

Andy smiled, softer now. “You make it sound simple.”

She laughed, pushing a lock of hair behind her ear. “Maybe it is.”

For a little while, they ate in silence again, each retreating into their own thoughts. The hum of other conversations faded to a pleasant blur, and even the clatter of cutlery seemed lighter, less urgent. Andy found himself watching the way Marissa moved—how she wielded her fork like a scalpel, dissecting each bite with an almost clinical precision, then pausing to savor it as if each mouthful was its own separate world. He wondered how many meals she’d eaten alone, in the last year. He wondered if she gave herself the same permission to enjoy things when there was nobody around to watch.

When their plates were finally cleared, Marissa leaned back in her chair, exhaled, and fixed him with a look that was almost grateful. “I’m glad I came tonight. I’m glad you came with me.”

He nodded. “Me too.”

She looked down at her hands, then up at him again. “This is the first time in years I’ve been on a date and not felt like I had to worry about the other person.” She paused, her eyes flicking away, then returning. “Or about Sarah. Or about what was waiting for me in the morning.”

Andy said, “That sounds like progress.”

She blinked, surprised by her own words, then smiled. “It does, doesn’t it?”

He raised his glass. She raised hers. They toasted, and it didn’t need a name.

They lingered over the last of the wine. The conversation drifted from heavy to trivial and back again, like a pendulum that refused to settle in one emotional register. They talked about music, about the absurdity of reality TV. Marissa told stories about her childhood—about the time she and her sister had filled their mother’s piano with Silly Putty, about the neighbor who claimed to be a retired astronaut but was afraid of elevators. Andy told her about his own childhood, which was less colorful but no less strange: endless afternoons in the library, entire summers spent trying to teach himself to code, the way his parents spoke to each other in a private language of tiny gestures that nobody else could parse.

At one point, Marissa asked him about the app he’d built, the one that had briefly made him rich and then left him unmoored. “Was it ever as good as they said?” she asked, not unkindly.

He hesitated, then shook his head. “It worked for what it was. But I always had this feeling it wasn’t—” He searched for the word. “Sufficient. I kept thinking, if I could just add one more feature, one more layer of complexity, it would finally feel meaningful.”

She nodded, understanding instantly. “That’s how it is with music. You’re never done with a piece. Even after you play it perfectly, you hear all the places you could have done it differently.”

He smiled, surprised by the analogy. “I guess we’re both terrible at being finished.”

She laughed again, more freely this time. “Maybe that’s why we’re here.”

Eventually, the restaurant thinned out. The tables around them emptied, the waitstaff shifted to end-of-night autopilot, wiping surfaces and stacking chairs. The candle on their table guttered, burned to a stump, and the window fogged so completely that the world outside might as well have ceased to exist.

After dinner, they walked. The city had settled into its after-hours rhythm: lights in the windows, cabs off-duty and coasting, the last runners of the evening in fleece and gloves and reflective stripes. The cold was different now, less adversary than companion, a clean clarity to the air that made every word feel like it traveled further than it should.

They didn’t talk at first. Marissa kept her hands in the pockets, but her shoulders had lost the defensive tilt they’d carried for months. Now, she walked with her head up, watching the windows above, the storefronts, the familiar and unfamiliar streets. Andy watched her in profile, memorizing the small changes: the half-smile when they passed a bakery still baking, the little spark of curiosity when a police car idled with its lights off, the way she squared herself to the wind instead of leaning away.

She glanced at him after a few blocks, then at the sky overhead, where the city glow had erased even the brightest stars. “What’s tomorrow?” she asked, the question so simple and so sudden he nearly tripped on the seam in the pavement.

He let the silence spin out, partially out of habit, partially because he didn’t know how to answer her in a way that didn’t sound like a performance. They walked beneath a scaffolding canopy, its supports covered in flyers for bands neither had heard of, past a bar with two men shouting at each other happily through a haze of cigarette smoke, then emerged into the sharp, cold clarity of the next block.

“Tomorrow is Chloe’s date night,” Andy said finally, surprising himself with how certain he sounded. “She’ll want to do something elaborate, maybe a picnic or an all-day movie marathon. Then we’ll have the usual breakfast drama—Claire and Norah have an ongoing feud about whether toast is better with butter or peanut butter, and neither of them has the attention span to actually debate, so it devolves into passive-aggressive sandwich construction. I’ll probably spend half the morning refereeing.” He stopped, watched the orange-white swirl of a passing delivery truck. “After that, I guess I’ll try to figure out how to get ahead of the Ereshkigal thing before it turns into a real disaster.”

Marissa nodded, as if she’d expected as much. “And you’re not tired of it?”

Her tone was curious, not accusatory, but Andy felt the question land somewhere vulnerable. Not tired of it, he thought. The phrase was like a pebble dropped into a still pool—concentric rings of truth, denial, and something close to longing. He tried to remember what he’d imagined his life would be once he’d achieved all the things he was supposed to want. He’d never pictured this—a rotating carousel of impossible women, a bureaucracy of affection, a running tally of points and consequences. Yet here he was, and for the first time in a long while, the dissonance felt more like a melody than noise.

“There are worse things to be needed for,” he said, and felt immediately exposed, as if he’d stepped out of a warm room into a sudden gust of wind.

Marissa kept walking. For almost a block, she didn’t say anything, and he wondered if he’d somehow miscalculated, said the wrong thing, left her adrift. But then she stopped, turning so that her silhouette was framed by the gossamer glow of a bike shop’s neon sign.

“I’m not afraid, anymore,” she said. “I thought I would be, but I’m not.” She studied the sidewalk, then looked up at him, her eyes wide and unguarded.

He asked, “What changed?”

She shook her head, as if the answer was both too simple and too complicated to say at once. “I spent years afraid of losing what I had, or failing Sarah. Or not living up to whatever I was supposed to become. Even tonight, I was scared the whole way here—of what I’d say, of you seeing me mess up, of breaking the script I’d written for myself.” She looked at her shoes, then back at him. “But somewhere between the concert and now, it went away. Maybe not all of it. But enough.” She paused to let the thought settle. “I think I know why.”

He waited, half expecting a punchline.

“I spent the day wanting things,” she said quietly. “And having them. And it turns out, it’s harder to be afraid when you’re allowed to want.”

He let the words sink in. He remembered the way she’d looked at the piano in the empty concert hall, the way she’d reached for his hand on the walk to the restaurant, the way she’d finished her meal without apology. She hadn’t once asked if he was okay, if he was bored, if he was embarrassed by her appetite or her laughter or her awkward pauses. She’d simply been present, hungry in body and mind, and somewhere along the way, that had become a kind of courage.

“I’m glad you did it,” he said, almost reverently.

She smiled, sudden and genuine. “Me too.” She glanced down the street, then back at him, as if searching for the next foothold in a conversation they were both afraid to break by naming too directly. “I know what I want to do when this is over.”

He waited, willing himself not to rush her. “What?”

She took a few steps ahead, then stopped beside a bus stop bench, the ad on its side promising a new life through targeted fitness. She sat, gestured for him to join her, then said, “I want to want something.” She let the words hang in the air, then clarified: “Not a plan. Not an outcome. Just… a want. Without a caveat attached. It’s the first one I’ve had in years.”

He sat beside her, the cold of the metal seeping through his jeans. “What is it?” he asked.

She regarded him with a mix of mistrust and mischief. “I’m not going to say it out loud yet. If I say it out loud, it’ll have edges. And I’m not ready for that.”

He grinned. “That’s allowed.” The phrase felt like a private joke, a remnant of some earlier, more innocent conversation, but she smiled as if she recognized it.

She drew her knees up, heels perched on the edge of the bench, and wrapped her arms around them. For a moment, she reminded him of a much younger Marissa, the one who had stood at the edge of the practice room, afraid to enter, fighting the urge to run. Only now, the fear had been replaced by something else—anticipation, maybe, or just the rawness of being unshielded.

She looked at him sidelong, then said, “You know, I used to think love was a reward for being good at life. Like, if you did everything right, you got to have it. And if you weren’t good at life, if you were broken or messy or unfinished, you didn’t deserve it. For the longest time, I thought I didn’t.” She gazed past him, into the swirl of headlamps and late-night pedestrians. “But now I think maybe it’s just something you get, if you’re lucky. Even if you’re not good at it.”

He considered this, wanting to disagree, wanting to reassure her that she was good at it. But he knew how shallow that would sound, how easily it could be mistaken for pity. He remembered the moment, years ago, when he’d realized that he loved Laura not because she was perfect, but because she was the only person in his life who didn’t ask him to be.

“I’m not very good at it,” he said. It was the most honest confession he’d made in weeks.

She laughed, bright and sharp, the sound echoing off the brick wall behind them. “No, you’re not,” she agreed, and the words felt like a benediction. “But I think that’s why I like you.”

They sat for a while, letting the world drift past, each content with the company and the not-knowing. At some point, Andy reached for her hand, and she took it, their fingers interlacing with the ease of people who had decided to stop pretending otherwise. It was almost too much, the simplicity of it, the lack of tension or performance. He wondered if this was how normal people felt, on a date, after dinner, on a city bench—a little sad, a little hopeful, a little less alone.

Eventually, the cold began to press in, not urgent but insistent. Marissa stood, shaking out her legs, and said, “Want to show me your elevator?”

He blinked, startled, then laughed.

They walked in silence for a while, the city empty and safe. The elevator back to the Hotel waited where Arabella had promised, two blocks off in an alley lined with dumpsters and the faint smell of old bread. It looked wildly out of place: stainless steel, backlit, the call button glowing green.

Marissa looked at it, then at Andy. “I want to come back here with you, someday,” she said. “When we don’t have a reason. Just to come.”

He said, “We will.”

She looked at him, to see if he meant it. He did.

They stepped into the elevator together. The doors closed, and the city disappeared, but the memory of the night—of parents returned, of the music, of the food and the walking and the possibility of new wants—carried forward with them, into whatever world waited on the other side.