Most nights I dream of her. I am in a strange city and I see her sitting in a café, drinking coffee and writing in a notebook. She is frail beyond anything I could have imagined, barely able to pick up her cup with two hands, but she's happy to see me. I run to her, kiss her, and she pulls herself up in my arms to sit in my lap and curl against me like a little bird.
"I thought you were dead," I say, joyful because there she is, still alive, still mine. I wrap my arms around her, her forehead pressing into the curve of my neck. "Everyone think that you're dead."
"I had to try to get better one more time," she says, her voice tired. "I just didn't want to put everyone through it again, me trying to pull myself together, me failing." She tells me she is in a very secret rehab. It is only for people who everyone thinks are already dead. There is only a fifty-fifty chance of her making it, but if she got through the program she would be clean and well forever. "I figure this way if I die no one will know it, no one will have to go through all that sadness again, and if I live I'll be absolutely better and then everyone will be so happy to see me."
"We'd be happy to see you no matter how you are."
"Trust me," she says, touching my wrist.
In the dark bar, which might have been Café Drummond in Aberdeen, she is on my lap and I am tearing up tiny bites of croissants filled with almond paste and feeding them to her, when I suddenly remember something. "Oh my God, Lucy, I'm writing a book about you being dead." I feel embarrassed somehow, as if this proves I had lost faith in her ability to still be alive. "I'm so sorry. I'll throw it away."
Lucy shakes her head. I could feel her in my arms, just the weight of her bones, the brush of her head against my cheek. "Go ahead and write it," she says. "I'll probably die. Even if I don't die now, I'll die sooner or later, right?"