I had a lot of time to wonder what that meant. A lot of time during which Nick sat stoically beside me, waiting, I assumed, for me to fall asleep. There was the obvious meaning—that what we’d been doing was too much—but I worried maybe he meant the whole experience, or the effort to save the planet, or something else bad. The ‘something else bad’ part opened up another can of worms entirely, and I spent what felt like hours ticking away the seconds in my head. If he couldn’t change Vera’s mind… If he changed her mind, and then they disappeared… When they disappeared… I think I passed out eventually out of sheer exhaustion, and when I woke up the next morning to sunlight shining through our tent, Nick was holding me. I felt like nothing could go wrong ever again, and I wanted to stay that way with him forever. Finally, I put my hand over his and squeezed his fingers, and our eyes met. His were warm. “How did you sleep?” “Not bad.” “So…bad?” “At least I slept a little.
