Years later, when Mara and Ethan moved, she found the brittle page in a shoebox labeled miscellany. She held it up to the light; the ink had feathered, the paper softened with the oils of time. She considered tossing it, filing it, or framing it. She decided instead to place it in a new book with other small artifacts—ticket stubs, a Polaroid, a pressed lily—and in the booklet's first page she wrote, in a hand that had grown steadier: Sometimes a drunk text is just a sheet of music waiting for the right fingers.

Don't play it like a robot. The metronome is your enemy here.

The elevator chimed on the fifth floor. He held the phone against his palm as if that could warm the letters into sense. He typed and erased a dozen replies before leaving the message unsent. Instead he walked the few blocks to her building because drunk texts, he decided, were not invitations but breadcrumbs; you followed them if you wanted to know where the kitchen was.