Adam is crying and somewhere inside of me I am crying, too, because I'm feeling things at last. I'm feeling not just the physical pain, but all that I have lost, and it is profound and catastrophic and will leave a crater in me that nothing will ever fill.

I'm also starting to wonder something else. If maybe the point of this crazy quest I'm on wasn't to help me find Willem. Maybe it was to help me find someone else entirely.

If these walls could talk, I wonder what secrets they'd tell.

Life might take you down different roads. But each of you gets to decide which one to take.

The whole night had been a mistake. It's not going to let me rewind. Or unmake the mistakes I've made.Or the promises I've mad. Or have her back. Or have me back.

For the hundredth time tonight, I’m back with Lulu, on Jacques’s barge, the improbably named Viola. She’d just toldme the story of double happiness and we were arguing over the meaning. She’d thought it meant the luck of the boy getting the job and the girl. But I’d disagreed. It was the couplet fitting together, the two halves finding each other. It was love. But maybe we were both wrong, and both right. It’s not either or, not luck or love. Not fate or will. Maybe for double happiness, you need both.

But what if Shakespeare― and Hamlet― were asking the wrong question? What if the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?