He was a little upset that Joni was not with me but I explained that I wanted to surprise her on her Birthday the next week. After looking at Jonis pi...tures he agreed and we discussed my plans for the surprise. On the day of Jonis birthday I got a baby sitter and took her out to dinner at a local dinner club. We danced and drank for a couple of hours after dinner. As we danced I starting telling her about a Black man that I had met that might be interested in fulfilling her fantasy. At the very. We came back to our birth. Riya immediately went to sleep.I looked up purposely to look at my colleagues. They were really scared. None of them had actually slept till now. They all avoided my face. I tried to strike a conversation with them. I told them that I was not feeling sleepy. One guy asked me to join them in playing cards. I immediately agreed. They wanted me to climb up and sit on the top birth. I agreed to that as well. I tried to climb up to the top berth without going outside and. The beam of emissions of Chen's nova, narrowly focused though it was, had across the hundred or so light-years of distance spread well beyond the diameter of any star it would encounter. Those particles passing near enough to the star's surface would have their course deflected by its gravitational pull. The deflection would be tiny, almost infinitesimal, but sufficient to re-focus the emitted radiation into the seemingly protected umbra only a short way beyond the star. It was this effect to. I did go back to work, and Lily and I did set about building a new normal. For years, other than work, she was my world. I didn’t date, and didn’t want to. Inevitably, I would have compared any woman to Rowan, and it would have been hard to find anyone who could have survived the comparison.Rowan was brilliant and creative, a painter whose gallery shows did very well and a poet who was published in major magazines (even, once, The Atlantic); her lightning intuition and gift for seeing things.