“That was an excuse,” she said.
It was, he thought, and it wasn’t. A lie and a truth contained paradoxically within a still-closed box that perhaps not even Regan had any interest in opening.
“I don’t care if they like you or not,” she informed him.
For a moment, his heart raced, stomach plummeting. His momentary loss of breath was acutely sharp, everything abruptly too fast.
“Okay,” said Aldo, opting not to file it under SIGNS.
* * *
“YOU REALLY HAVEN’T changed at all, have you?” Aldo had said in his usual matter-of-fact way.
Later, Regan would replay the evening in her head, running backwards through time to identify her errors, but in that precise moment she felt trapped, unable to move.
She only saw Aldo with his back to her, his green eyes on her painting.
“Where’s the real one?” he said stiffly.
Her first thought: He really was a genius. She’d left the original artist’s signature, forged it perfectly, but out of something ill-advised—hubris, maybe, or some unexamined need to leave her mark on something, anything, just to prove she’d been part of the art in some small, insignificant way that her father would never possibly notice—she had added one tiny embellishment. One nearly invisible mark; a little flaw, just to prove her existence in the world. To prove to herself her location in time, in consequence.
And Aldo had seen it.
Telling the truth seemed too vulnerable; old habits. “What do you mean?” she said, hoping he would drop it, but she wasn’t surprised when he hadn’t.
“You’re lying,” he said, only this time, for the first time, it was an accusation, not an observation.
“Aldo, listen—”
“You really haven’t changed at all, have you?”
It stung, knowing what he meant even before he said it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“This, the painting, it’s a forgery. You called yourself a thief when we met,” he reminded her, and she felt something seize her.
Maybe panic. Maybe the fear she’d been waiting so long to feel.
（He can always undream me, unbelieve me—）
“Why did you do it?” he asked her, and she shook her head.
“I told you, I don’t know. Because I was good at it, because the idea stuck in my head, because—”
“Because you needed to?”
She suddenly felt too exhausted to argue with him, or to re-explain something that her mother had asked countless times; that a judge had asked; that her psychiatrist had asked; that they had all asked and never sorted out, but that Aldo, only Aldo, had always willingly trusted.
“Yes,” she said, and whatever answer he’d dreaded, that seemed to have been the one.
“And you still need to?”
That question was slightly different, but still, the same.
“No, Aldo,” she sighed, “I was just—”
“You’re not okay, Regan,” he said, suddenly agitated, and she blinked. “This isn’t normal.”
“What isn’t?”
“Any of it.” He rubbed at his temple like she was a headache, a formula that wouldn’t obey, and it stung her. She, like his thoughts, had drained him, and the pain of knowing it festered in her chest.
It felt unfair, unjust, that the things that had so easily been shared between them—I’m strange, no I’m strange, okay we’re both strange, nobody understands us except for us—were now hers to bear alone.
“I’m not okay?”
He looked at her blankly.
“You’ve never been okay,” she flung at him, and Aldo turned his head away, neither surprised nor unsurprised by her tone, which made things infinitely worse. “You think you fixed yourself, Aldo?” she snapped, desperately seeking higher ground and only managing to shrink inside it. “You didn’t. When I met you, you were empty, not fixed. You were trying to find meaning in nothing!”
“You think I don’t know that there’s something wrong with me?” He looked strangely disenchanted, like he’d woken from something. （He can always undream me, unbelieve me.） “It’s all my father ever tells me, Regan. My brain is broken,” Aldo said robotically, “and your brain is broken, but we can’t both be broken. One of us has to be fixable—no, one of us has to be fixed, or else—”
“Or else what?” It came out sharply escalated. “What happens, Aldo, if you can’t fix me?”