Page 125 of The Circle

I sit beside him, bringing his head onto my lap and resting it against my stomach. He reaches up and paws at my belly as I stroke the side of his face.

After a few moments of just sitting there, being, he says, “Alec?”

I smile. Because even though… everything… it is the first word he utters.

I don’t respond with words in kind, just maneuver myself out from under his head and help him to stand so that we can look over the wall together. We see…

The two guards. Dead on the ground.

Anton. Splattered onto the earth below.

Zander van den Berg. Alexei Gorny. Whoever he was. No more. Gone. Ended.

And Alec, our Alec—for better or worse, in murder and in ecstasy, until death tries to do us part but fucking can’t because somehow or another we always find a way not to let it, Alec—holding onto a sobbing, wailing Andra.

All else is silence.

I turn my head to look up. I don’t know why. I just do.

In the sky… the moon. Full. Bright. Shining. Round. Casting an eerie black-blue tint over everything.

Holy shit. We crushed it open.

This world. This life. This… “thing” we share, as Zander called it. We crushed it open.

Time and time again.

That’s what we’ve been doing all along.

Trying to break it, maybe to see what makes it seem so pretty despite all the ways in which it shouldn’t be, especially given who we are and what we’ve done, but…

At the end? The source, the genesis, the thing that explains why we held onto hope and belief and never let go, the beauty that came spilling out of the crushed-open blueness…

Was us.