One evening, the light in the bookstore flickered. Maya looked at him, her expression unusually serious.
"I got the fellowship, Julian," she whispered. "The one in Vienna. It's two years. I leave in three weeks."
The world felt like it had lost its structural integrity. Julian looked at his sketches—the perfect lines, the controlled environments. He realized that for all his talk of building bridges, he hadn't built one that could span the distance between Seattle and Austria.