Declan was thirty-four. His last sight, at nine years and three hundred and sixty-four days, had been his own wedding.
He had been standing in the kitchen of his parents' house, eating cereal before school, when it arrived with the particular clarity of something close rather than distant. He had seen the church, a specific one, stone, with a certain quality of light through tall windows, and a woman standing beside him, and himself in a suit he did not yet own. He had been nine. He had not known what he was looking at.
He knew now. He had been married for six years. The church had been Elena's choice, not his; he had agreed because it was the right one. The light had been exactly right. The suit had been slightly wrong, as it turned out (the real one was a darker blue than the one in the vision), but the fact of it was correct. Elena knew the whole story. He had told her before they got engaged, which she had found romantic and strange, and which she had eventually, after some time, found to be neither, just a thing about him, like his habit of reading the last page of a book before the first.
The problem was not that he had seen it coming. The problem was that he had seen the wedding and nothing after it, which left him with three possibilities he had been carrying for twenty-five years: the faculty does not project beyond a certain range; there is nothing after the wedding worth seeing; or the life after that moment was not yet determined at the age of nine, which would mean something about the nature of determination that he preferred not to think too hard about.
His thirty-fourth birthday was in March. He had decided, some time ago, that this would be the year he stopped trying to figure out which possibility was true.
He was not sure what stopping looked like, exactly. Elena had made a cake. The children were asleep. He sat at the kitchen table with a piece of cake and did not think about anything in particular, and the March night was very quiet, and outside the window the street had the particular look of a street that is not going to do anything.
He finished the cake. He went to bed.