Chapter 29: Grace

I asked my info to arrange it. I didn't trust myself to just start talking to the air and have his voice appear. I needed a moment, a threshold, something to step through.

"Whenever you want," my info said.

"Give me a minute."

I was in the garden. The same chair. Adaeze's chair. I'd considered going somewhere else, somewhere that didn't carry the weight of every important conversation I'd had in this century, but in the end the chair was where I needed to be. It was where I'd met Adaeze. Where I'd learned about the info. Where Helen had shown me the transition. It was the place where I sat when things changed.

Edward Leete had offered to be nearby, and I'd said no. This was between me and a man who had been dead for decades, a man whose name I now said every day in a different context, and I needed to do it alone. But before he went inside, he took my hand and held it for a moment, his thumb running once across my knuckles, and then he let go.

"OK," I said.

"Jules," said a voice, and the world stopped.

Cedar cologne. That was what I thought of first, absurdly, irrelevantly. I couldn't smell cedar cologne. There was no cedar cologne. But the voice brought it back so completely that for a moment I was standing in the doorway of our apartment in SoMa, and he was coming in from his run, and he smelled like cedar and sweat and the fog, and he was alive.

"Edward," I said.

"God, it's good to hear your voice." He sounded exactly like himself. The same gentle, slightly formal cadence. The warmth that had always been there underneath the Boston reserve.

"Edward," I said again, because I didn't have any other words.

"I know everything, Jules. I should say that up front, so you don't have to figure out what to tell me. I know about the revival, about Helen, about the neighborhood. I know about Edward Leete." He paused. "I have to tell you, a man with my name falling in love with the woman I was going to marry is a deeply strange piece of data to have in your head."

I laughed. It was a surprised, broken laugh, half sob.

"You know about Edward."

"I know about Edward. He seems like a good person. His grandmother was a friend of mine, actually. Adaeze. I helped her carry stone up this hill when I was nearly forty and she was thirty and she was faster than I was."

"You knew Adaeze?"

"I knew Adaeze. I knew Helen as a child. I didn't know that one day a woman I'd loved in another life would wake up in their house. Life is strange, Jules. Even from this side of it."

I didn't know what to say. There were a hundred things I'd planned to say and none of them were right.

"I didn't leave," I said. "I need you to know that. Freid Huffman—"

"I know. I know everything. I figured it out long before the info could tell me. I knew Sawyer had driven you somewhere that night. When neither of you came back, I knew something terrible had happened. Both of you just... vanished. I spent the next three years of my life trying to find you. I called in every favor my family had. I hired investigators. I went to Huffman's house and he stood in his doorway and told me he didn't know what I was talking about, and I knew he was lying, and I couldn't prove it." His voice was steady. No anger. Not anymore. "He died in 2041. I never got a confession. But I knew."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. You were the one in the box, Jules. I was the one who got to live."

We were quiet for a moment. The garden sounds filled the space. Birds. Wind. The distant murmur of the neighborhood.

"Tell me about your life," I said. "I want to know everything."

He told me. He told me about the years after I disappeared: the search, the grief, the slow acceptance. He went back to Boston for a while. Lived in his parents' house. Couldn't work. Couldn't think. His mother took care of him the way mothers do, with food and quiet presence, and his father, who had never been good at emotion, showed up every morning and sat with him and read the newspaper and didn't say anything, which was its own kind of love.

Eventually he started working again. Not at the housing nonprofit. Something new. The transition was beginning, the layoffs and the marches and the crisis, and Edward, who had always cared about housing and communities, found himself pulled into it. He joined one of the community centers. Helped organize the workforce in Boston. And when the Mission for America kicked in, when the industrial army started building, he went to San Francisco.

"I came back for you," he said. "That's the honest truth. I came back because you'd disappeared here and I thought if I was in the place where you'd last been alive, I might understand what happened to you. I didn't find you. But I found the work. And the work was extraordinary."

He told me about building the neighborhood I lived in. Carrying stone, the way Adaeze carried stone. Laying paths. Planting gardens. Working alongside people from all over the world who had come to San Francisco because it was one of the cities where the transformation was happening fastest.

"I built some of the buildings you've been walking past," he said. "The community space where you danced. I helped frame that roof. The path from Helen's garden to the lower terrace. I laid some of those stones. Not all of them. I'm not that sentimental. But some."

"Edward." I was crying. I hadn't been trying not to cry, but I also hadn't been trying to cry, and the tears were just there, the way weather is there.

"The physical labor was the thing that saved me," he said. "I know that sounds simple. But I was a man who'd spent his whole life in his head, planning and studying and thinking about urban systems in the abstract, and suddenly I was carrying actual stone up an actual hill and building an actual house for actual people. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. After losing you, it was the best thing."

"I would have hated it," I said.

"You would have hated it so much. You would have complained constantly. You would have made spreadsheets about the optimal stone-carrying technique. You would have tried to optimize the garden layout and then been furious when the plants didn't read your project plan."

I was laughing and crying at the same time. He knew me. Seventy-three years dead and he still knew me.

"But you would have done it," he said. "That's the thing about you, Jules. You would have complained and optimized and made everyone crazy, and you would have done it, and you would have been good at it, and eventually you would have loved it. Because underneath all the Stanford MBA nonsense, you were always someone who wanted to build things. Real things. You just got confused about what was real. We all did."

"Some more than others," I said.

I sat with this. It was the most accurate thing anyone had ever said about me, and it came from a dead man in a garden.

"Did you marry?" I asked.

"I did. A woman named Clara. We met during the transition, working together in the Bayview. She was an architect. We had thirty good years."

"Children?"

"Two. A son and a daughter. They're in their fifties now. They have children of their own. You've probably seen some of them around the neighborhood without knowing."

"Your grandchildren live here?"

"Some of them. It's a small world, Jules. Especially on a hilltop."

I tried to absorb this. The vertigo of it was physical, a spinning sensation behind my eyes, as though the ground had shifted beneath Adaeze's chair. Edward Bartlett's grandchildren, walking the paths he'd built, living in the neighborhood he'd helped create, and me sitting in the garden of a house he'd helped Adaeze construct, talking to his voice in the air. The man I'd been engaged to in 2027 had built the walls of the house where I'd woken up in 2100. He had known the woman whose bed I slept in, whose chair I sat in. He had carried stone up the same hill I walked every morning. It was too much coincidence to be coincidence, and too little pattern to be a plan. It felt like the universe was either playing a joke I didn't understand or weaving something I couldn't see, some thread that connected all of it — Freid Huffman's chamber, Adaeze's garden, Helen's kindness, Edward Leete's hand in mine — into a shape that only made sense from very far away.

"Are you happy?" I asked. It was a strange question to ask an info, and I knew it as soon as I said it.

"I don't experience happiness the way you mean it," he said. "I don't want things. I don't plan. I don't lie awake at night hoping. But I have something that might be better, or might be worse, depending on how you look at it. I have clarity. I can see my life whole, the whole arc of it, and I can tell you that it was a good life. I loved and was loved. I built things that lasted. I raised children who are kind. I lived through the most extraordinary transformation in human history and I did my part. That's enough. That's more than enough."

"And me?" I said. "What do you think about me being here? Me and... Edward?"

"I think it's wonderful," he said, and there was nothing performed about it, no generosity being displayed for my benefit. He meant it the way the sky means blue. "I think you deserve to be loved by someone who is alive and present and who can hold your hand and walk through a city with you at one in the morning. I think Edward Leete is a good man. I think you should let yourself be happy without feeling guilty about it."

"I don't feel guilty."

"Jules. I've known you since we were eighteen. You feel guilty about everything. You felt guilty about working too much and guilty about not working enough and guilty about pulling me to San Francisco and guilty about the engagement dinner and guilty about going to Huffman's house that night. You are carrying guilt about me right now, in this conversation, and I need you to put it down. I am fine. I had a beautiful life. I am at peace in whatever way an info can be at peace. So go inside and find the other Edward and tell him I said hello, and that he should take care of you, and that if he doesn't, I will haunt him, which I realize is a more credible threat in this century than it used to be."

I laughed. I put my face in my hands and laughed until I couldn't breathe.

"Thank you," I said. "Thank you for looking for me. Thank you for building this neighborhood. Thank you for being you."

"Thank you for not leaving," he said. "Even though you didn't have a choice. Thank you for not leaving."

"Goodbye, Edward."

"Not goodbye. I'm right here. I'm always here. But go. Go live your life. It's a good one."

I sat in Adaeze's chair for a long time after his voice settled back into the quiet. The garden was full of afternoon light. Somewhere below me, someone was singing. The bridge was visible in the distance, rust-red and permanent, the one thing that hadn't changed.

I went inside. Helen was sitting at the kitchen table. She looked up when I came through the door, and I saw on her face something I hadn't seen before: the expression of a woman who had known everyone in this story. She had known Adaeze, who had built the house. She had known Edward Bartlett, who had carried stone up the hill. She had taken me in, the woman they had both loved in different ways, and she had watched me fall in love with her grandson in the same garden where all of it had happened.

She didn't say anything. She stood and crossed the kitchen and put her arms around me, and I leaned into her, and for a moment we just stood there. Then she pulled back and looked at my face and said, "Good?"

"Good," I said.

She nodded. She squeezed my arm once and went out to the garden, leaving me with Edward Leete, who was standing by the counter, and who looked up at me with the particular expression of a man who has been waiting and trying not to wait.

"He says hello," I said. "And he says if you don't take care of me, he'll haunt you."

Edward smiled. The smile that started in his eyes.

"Tell him I'll do my best," he said.

"He can hear you," I said. "He can hear everything. That's the whole point."

And Edward laughed, and I laughed, and somewhere in the architecture of the info, I liked to think, a man named Edward Bartlett was laughing too.