Lily appears at the bottom of the stairs. She looks at Mother, her eyes hopeful, filled with the something that occupied Claire's just a moment ago. Mother lifts her gaze to meet Lily's, a long exchange in a language only they know. And finally Claire sighs and asks, "Shall I put on a pot of coffee?"

A billion years of spinning. We are not immune to momentum.

Lily nods. "I'll help you."

We untangle ourselves and are just at the bottom of the stairs when there is a firm knock at the door.

"Who could that be this early?" Claire asks.

"It might be Simmons," Father answers.

Or maybe someone else, I think. Maybe someone Allys told. Maybe someone who is here for me.

"I'll have to break the news that we don't need storage anymore," Father says as he reaches for the door handle.

Should I warn them?

The door is already swinging open. Father's surprise is obvious, and he hesitates, not knowing the visitors.

Mother steps forward. "Can we help you?"

"Are you the parents of Jenna Fox?"

Mother and Father exchange glances. I see Mother's body weight shift, like she will change into a wall if she needs to.

I step from the shadows. "Yes, they are," I say.

"We're Allys's parents, your daughter's schoolmate."

"Yes?" Father says.

"We know about Jenna," her father explains. "Our daughter — " His voice cracks.

"Our daughter is dying," Allys's mother continues. Her face is rigid. Frightening. I watch her swallow, her hands tight fists at her sides. "Please, can you help us?" Her rigid mask breaks and tears follow. Her sobs echo through the hall.

"Come in," Mother says as she reaches out, putting her arm around Allys's mother. She holds the sobbing woman in a way that surprises me. Like she has known her for years. Like she understands everything about her.

"Let's go into my study," Father says. "We can talk in there."

"We'll be a while," Mother says to Lily over her shoulder. "Will you bring the coffee in when it's ready?"

They slowly usher Allys's parents into Father's study and shut the door behind them.

Lily and I remain in the hallway, staring at the closed door.

"Here we go," she finally says.

I shake my head. "Allys wouldn't approve."

Lily lets out a long breath. "What did you say about change? Small steps? If the world changes, I suppose minds do, too. Sometimes it just takes time and perspective."

Have my perspectives changed? Yes. But Allys? The world?

"I'm not so sure," I say. "But I suppose you're right about some perspectives. Just a few weeks ago, I thought you were a dickhead."

She smiles, tired lines tanning out from her eyes in a way that seems like we are sitting at her kitchen counter and not three years and three thousand miles from who we were. She puts her arm around me. "Come help me with the coffee. And if you don't tell your parents, I'll let you have some."

Baptism

We walk through the church as though it is a day like any other. Lily dips her hand in the holy water, bends her knee and moves her hand like a musical note across her chest — she, on her way to discuss seeds and plants, and I, on my way to meet Ethan.

But it is not a day like any other. Something is different. Something that is small and common like a whisper, but monumental and rare at the same time. I stop in the crosshairs of the church and look upward to the cupola. I close my eyes and feel the cool, smell the mustiness of history, wood and walls, listen to the echoes of our shuffles and my memories. I breathe in the difference of being on this earth now and maybe not tomorrow, the precipitous edge of something new for me but as ancient as the beginning of time.

Lily's feet shuffle closer and I open my eyes to see her standing just inches from me. Her fingers are wet, freshly dipped in the holy water, and she raises them to my forehead. I close my eyes again and she whispers a prayer, her hand touching my forehead and then passing across my chest and shoulders.

"How can you know?" I ask.

"Some things aren't meant to be known. Only believed."

A drop on my forehead. Hardly enough to feel. But still enough for Lily. And maybe enough for me. Washing away the old, believing in the new.

The world has changed. So have I.

Two Hundred and Sixty Years Later

I sit in the center of Mr. Bender's garden. He has been gone for so many decades I have lost count. I live here now. I moved here forty years ago when Mother and Father's house burned down. They've been gone even longer than Mr. Bender.

Father was wrong about the two or two hundred years I would live, but I'm not bitter. Faith and science, I have learned, are two sides of the same coin, separated by an expanse so small, but wide enough that one side can't see the other. They don't even know they're connected. Father and Lily were two sides of the same coin, I've decided, and maybe I am the space in between.

"Jenna?" I hear the call of the only person on the planet whom I can now truly call a peer. "There you are," she says. It is Allys. She does not hobble. Her words are not harsh. She is a happier Allys than the one I met so long ago. The new Allys. Twenty-two percent. Not that percentages really matter anymore. There are others like us now. The world is more accepting. We worked and traveled for many years to create awareness about people like us. But I am still the standard. The Jenna Standard, they sometimes call it. Ten percent is the minimum amount. But people change. And the world will change. Of that much I am certain.