“I said I hated it.” “It still put bread on your table. Between a job and starvation, you’d still choose the job.” * A little further back and I see a jigsaw puzzle. A memory surfaces, and it tells me 1000 — 1 = 999. “What happened here?” “I thought you knew everything?” “I do. I just wanted to hear this story from you.” Her wish is my command, and the story goes: “It was my 11th birthday. Or maybe my 12th. So, my grandpa gave me this puzzle as a gift. It was ‘The Fall of Icarus’, that painting by Bruegel, in a thousand pieces. My grandpa loved puzzles, you know, so we worked on it together, me and him. Slow, painful work. A thousand pieces, after all. “But, it all came together nicely. Three days in, and the puzzle was almost complete. Almost. One piece went missing: a spot of blue in the middle of the sea, on the painting. I must’ve turned the house inside out looking for that missing piece. Nine hundred and ninety pieces, all perfectly assembled — but then this missing piece... It was a tiny hole in the puzzle, a little gap near the corner, but it was the only thing I saw when I looked at it. “So... I got so frustrated looking for it, I started blaming grandpa for it. I yelled at him. It’s your fault, I said. You should’ve let me do the puzzle by myself, I said.” Oh god, I don’t like this one. This is a bad place. “And...?” “After I yelled at him, he had that heart attack.” The woman in black is smiling again. I want to scream at her. Another part of me also wants her. “They all reach the finish line, Whitney.” I wonder if her embrace is as warm...
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