The following morning, I awoke early and washed away the restlessness from the night before. My mother texted me as I ate breakfast.

We’ll see you in an hour.

I pushed away the bowl of cereal. I didn’t need it anymore, not when my stomach was flooded with anxiety. Swallowing, I started to type out a response before realizing it wasn’t necessary. It’d been a more than a decade since I’d last seen her. Would seeing her bring it all back? Trigger my childhood? Jacob may have wanted me to reconcile, but Jacob didn’t have a Lala. I did.

I needed to make an appointment with Dr. Brewer soon.

I dressed in plain clothes, not wanting to overdo it for my mother. I didn’t want to be her best friend. Truthfully, I didn’t even want to be an acquaintance. If we could both be zapped by those memory erasers from the Men in Black movies, we’d all be better off.

The gallery was quiet when I let myself in thirty minutes later and flipped the switch on all the lights. One by one, they lit up from the front to the back, a row of lights displaying all the empty space that would soon be filled by, hopefully, dozens of bodies. The bare walls, waiting for my paintings.

I reached over the front desk and checked the schedule, noting that no one else would be coming in for the day. There had been a showing over the weekend, and the place was primed and ready for the paintings by other co-op participants to be hung back on the wall until my showing. Showings happened twice a month on Fridays and Saturdays, but Fridays were the preview day; Saturdays were when the art was actually for sale, when refreshments and time with the artist was expected.

Heaving a breath, I tried to imagine the space filled with my artwork. A dozen butterflies blew up my belly and I pressed a hand to it to calm them. I wasn’t sure if they were due to my mom’s impending visit or the showing in two weeks, but either way nerves settled on me like a second skin.

In the back were stacks of paintings waiting to be re-hung, so I grabbed them. It wasn’t my job—it was the responsibility of the person who had the last showing, but I needed something to do. Not working at the bakery meant there was a buildup of restless energy waiting to be set loose.

I catalogued each painting, making sure they were all there, and then carried them out to the hooks that were designated for each one. Some of the paintings were small—postcard sized—while others were nearly the size of me. Naturally, one of those Mira-sized paintings required a step stool in order to hang it where it belonged.

After double checking that the wire on the back of the painting was strong enough, I lifted it and hung it while on my tiptoes. My calves stretched, and I imagined my toes like anchors, holding me still as I precariously wobbled until the painting was secure on the wall.

Lowering my feet flat, I felt that brief, stomach-emptying sort of supreme terror when I realized that there was more air under my feet than stepstool.

Arms flailed, heart skyrocketed to my throat, and then, in an instant, my arms stilled and my heart calmed and my feet were still walking on air but a warm hand was pressed against my tailbone, holding me.

I closed my eyes and swallowed. I knew exactly who it was.

“I didn’t want you to fall,” he said. “I hope I didn’t scare you.”

My hands gripped the step stool handle in front of me and I arched enough to remove Six’s hand from my spine before taking the five steps down to ground level.

I waited a full three heartbeats before looking up at him—which wasn’t as impressive as it sounded, because my heart was galloping like a mother fucking racehorse. From the near fall and from him.

“Hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“There are only so many gallery co-ops on this side of the city.” He met my eyes briefly and looked away, taking in the rest of the room. “I took a chance.”

In his black slacks and black dress shirt, he looked every bit the dangerous, tempting person he’d been thirteen years earlier, when he’d walked me to my apartment door for the first time, when I’d wanted him to follow me in.

“That doesn’t answer my question.” I thought my fuck you text had sufficed, but I should’ve known better after dear old Vicky’s phone call. “What are you doing here, specifically? I’m not interested in how you found me—you had three years to find me.”

“Well, you weren’t planning on catering my upcoming wedding then.”

“And I’m not planning to now.” I snapped the stool to it’s folded up state and stepped behind the desk, tucking it away for the time-being. “I was pretty clear with your fiancée about that. Guess it’s hard to hear when you’re that dense.”

A tick formed in his jaw, but his eyes didn’t change. “That was low.”

“Yes, well, some things don’t change, do they?” I leveled him with a look. “But then, some things do.” I glanced meaningfully at his hair, then paused on his shirt and his pants.

“You look different too,” he said, reading my mind. “Your hair…”

I wasn’t self-conscious, but I had a sharp worry that my hair looked like I’d jammed a fork into an electrical socket.

“It’s short. And tame.”

“And?” I put my hand on my hip and looked at him with all the impatience I could possibly hold. “In case you forgot, you are engaged. To be married. Probably shouldn’t be commenting on how another woman looks.”

He stepped up to the counter and I willed myself not to back away. One muscled arm leaned on the counter as he looked harder at me. “Are you really sober? Completely?”

“Yes,” I said with a hiss. His eyes moved to my arms and I laid them on the counter. “No more scars, either.”

“What’s this?” He pointed to the semi-colon.

“Life goes on,” I told him dispassionately.

“What about endings? The Mira I knew believed in endings.”

“She still does.” I pulled away, pretending to be busying myself with filing paperwork, but I just ended up ‘filing’ paper from the scrap. “I have a lot to do,” I said, remembering my mom would be arriving any minute. “So feel free to leave, if you’re just going to stand her dissecting me.”

“I’m not dissecting you.”

I lifted my head and braced my hands on the scrap paper. “What do you want, Six? What do you fucking want from me?”

“I’ll start off with the easiest request. I want you to not cater my wedding. It’s a reasonable request.”

“Are you as dense as your golden goddess? I. Am. Not. Catering. Your. Fucking. Wedding.” I bit each word off with my jaw clenched. “As if I’d be interested in it, anyway.”

“You seem awfully interested in infiltrating my life.”

“You’re infiltrating mine,” I snapped. “You’re the one calling, texting, hunting me down to my place of work. Trust me, I want nothing to do with your perfect wedding and your perfect bride and whoever the fucking hell you are now.” I stepped around the counter, moving with purposeful steps to the back and slammed the door closed behind me.

Bracing my hands on the wall, I took a deep, filling breath.

I wanted him to leave.

I wanted him to look at me and see that the old Mira still lurked under my skin. Embedded in the scars that crisscrossed my skin was the woman who had loved him with all the depth she didn’t know she possessed. A woman who had loved him with the kind of love she didn’t think she deserved, a woman who had been loved harder than one ought to love.

Love, for me, had never made me happy for long. Love had never come without strings, without side effects. Before Six, love had made me do and say things that weren’t appropriate. With Six, love made me hungry. I was starving for attention, for affection. The best part about loving Six was that he fed my hunger as much as I demanded it, not once holding it hostage in exchange for something else. He fed me so fully with love that I was surprised my skin wasn’t clinging to my bones in my self-imposed starvation since I’d left him.

With Six, things had been different. I’d been scared, down to my bones, of loving him, of what it would do to him, to me, to us. But even if I had had the power to, I couldn’t have stopped it.

And here he was, back in my life, but he didn’t have anything to offer me. Anything to satiate my hunger, my thirst. He’d made gold-encircled and diamond-topped promises to a woman who was nothing like me. A woman who was his fucking ten, when I’d been, at best, an eight.

In the back bathroom, I splashed water over my face to cool down the nerves. I didn’t want to already be worked up when my mother showed up. The mirror showed my red face, bright eyes, and hair that was tame. He’d been right about that. My reflection also revealed the t in fight, backwards for anyone who looked at it but in the mirror, it was in the right direction. The tattoo was for me, solely, and looking in the mirror was when I needed the reminder the most, so it made sense to have it backwards for everyone else.

I plucked at the collar, concealing the word from view, and opened the back door to the gallery. I had a gut feeling he’d stuck around, but had hoped he’d left anyway.

The hope was dashed as I caught him standing in front of a painting—the painting—he’d pulled from behind the desk. It was the woman, wrapped by the love serpent. The painting I created the night we moved into our home.

He didn’t see me at first, watching him take the painting in. I had no doubt that he recognized it, and I wondered what he thought, about it being on display for all eyes to see. The woman looked a bit like me, sure, if you looked at her with drunk goggles. Her face was blurry but serene—the focus rested solely upon the snake that squeezed around her body, and the hand that protectively held it.

I could still see myself as that woman, still believe in that feeling. Even more so now, having been removed from Six as long as I was. The serpent had wrapped around me, had threatened to squeeze the life from my limbs, but now that I was free of it, I missed it. The suffocating, intoxicating, mind-numbing freefall of love.

When I looked at Six, I could still feel its remnants. I thought I’d been emptied of love when I left him, but that wasn’t the case at all. The love was there, tucked away, dormant until awoken again. And as I stared at the lines of his back, the back I’d memorized over many sleepless nights, the love flooded in painlessly.

The sound of the bell over the door pulled my attention from him.

It was a woman, in a wool, taupe-colored trench coat. Her glasses were larger than necessary for her face, a face that had been kissed by a scalpel under the hands of a steady surgeon more than once. Her black hair was sleek, curled at the ends under her chin.

Anxiety chased the love away as she approached, her heels loud on the concrete floors.

Her companion stepped through the door behind her and in an instant, my legs went numb.