What he remembered: Deven had been sitting across from him at the kitchen table, and she had gone very still. Not the way a person goes still when they are thinking. The way a person goes still when they have made a decision. He had been reading something on his phone. He had looked up because of the quality of the stillness. Then she had relaxed, and she had picked up her coffee, and she had asked him how the commute had been the day before. He had answered. He had not thought about it again for three months.
Three months later he had read a study on what were then being called wish correlations: statistical anomalies in outcome data that clustered around specific people and could not be explained by available variables. The study was rigorous. It described a specific physiological signature: a period of complete muscular cessation lasting between eight and fifteen seconds, followed by an abrupt return to normal activity. Noel had read the study in full, and then he had sat with it for a while, and then he had gone back through his memory of the morning at the kitchen table.
He had not said anything to Deven.
He had gone back through everything else he could find. The car that had nearly hit her outside the hospital six years ago and hadn't. The apartment fire that had stopped at the third floor. He could not count all the wishes, but he could see the shape of them: the things that should have been worse and weren't. He had also read enough to understand what the mechanism took. He knew about the gaps. He had noticed, over the years, that Deven would sometimes look at photographs of her daughter's childhood with an expression that was not nostalgia exactly, more like reading from a language you once knew.
When his wife was diagnosed eight months ago, Deven had come to the hospital the same day. She had stayed for three hours. At one point she had excused herself to the hallway. He had followed, quietly, and stood near the door, and he had watched her go still in the corridor, facing the window at the end. She had stayed still for what felt like a very long time. Then she had come back.
After that he had started watching the way you watch something you can't stop and can't help.
Tonight she had gone home at nine. She had left a glass of water on the kitchen counter, perfectly placed, centered on the tile. He stood at the sink for a while. He thought about what she was deciding, alone in whatever room she was in right now. He thought about what it would cost.
He straightened the glass she had left perfectly straight.