Page 92 of Canadian Boyfriend

“Yeah, it’s not like a shooting star where it’s there and gone. When they’re out, they’re out. People call it dancing, actually. The dance of the auroras.” My heart squeezed. “Maybe your mom wasn’t so far off with your name after all.”

“You want to hear something lame?”

“Yes,” I said immediately. I wanted to hear whatever she had to tell me.

“I decided Iamgoing to rename myself if we see the lights. Well, not rename myself as in change my name. But change the story behind it. You remember we talked about that in the studio?” She snorted. “It sounds stupid when I say it out loud.”

“No, it doesn’t. You were Ballet Aurora, now you can christen yourself Northern Lights Aurora.”

“That’s exactly it—a christening. I thought if I saw the lights on this trip, it could be a self-christening. It’s perfect timing. After all, I fired my mother, right?”

She was making light, but I heard the seriousness of her intent. Damn, I would have paid any amount of money to guarantee those lights for her. “It would be better if there was no moon.” I was trying to temper her expectations, even asmy brain was firing up, trying to figure out how I could take her somewhere this coming winter that would be a slam dunk. Maybe over the holiday break. Maybe I could send Olivia to—

Aurora interrupted my inner travel agent. “You know that saying,I love you to the moon and back?”

“Yeah. I used to read that book to Olivia all the time when she was little.”

“It’s from a book?”

“Yep. It’s about parent and kid polar bears.”

“Really?I thought it was just an expression.”

She seemed oddly interested in the origins of the phrase. “Why do you ask?”

“Lying out here looking at all this, I was thinking it’s kind of a funny sentiment. It’s supposed to be an expression of the most you can possibly love someone. But the moon is the closest thing to us in the sky.”

“Maybe we should say, ‘I love you to Alpha Centauri and back’… except I think Alpha Centauri is pretty close, too, cosmically speaking.”

“But it still sounds good. ‘I love you to Star 82673’—or whatever’s really far away—‘and back’ isn’t very poetic.”

We lapsed into silence and stared at the sky while my heart felt like it was undergoing a slow-motion cracking. The thought of Aurora renaming herself was slaying me. It was amazing how people could remake themselves. I’d thought so much about Aurora’s being a witness to my doing it as she moved in and helped stabilize my little family. But she’d been doing the same in parallel, just in a way that was less public than the guy with the dead wife. “The thing about the northern lights is that they’re there whether you see them or not.” My voice cut through the cozy darkness with an urgency I should have been embarrassed by but was not.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re solar flares hitting the Earth’s magnetic field. They’re happening all the time. They’re all around us. Seeing them is a matter of the right conditions, but just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they’re not there. So you could…”Still christen yourself.I was going to sound way too invested in this. I made myself stop talking.

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “Maybe I could.” We lapsed into silence, and after a while, she started yawning. Eventually, her breathing lengthened. I told myself to stay awake, to watch for the lights.

Hours later, when I woke up shivering, Aurora and her sleeping bag had migrated so she was cuddled against me in mine, and the lights were streaming across the sky. Otherworldly green whorls were tinged with violet wisps around the edges. I’d seen the northern lights a dozen times in my life, but they never failed to take my breath away. It was strange to think about how much upheaval there had been in my life since I last saw them—and strangely comforting how immune they were to the travails of humanity. They just did their thing, displaying their cold beauty regardless of our suffering. I shifted, intending to wake Aurora, but froze, leveled by the image of Aurora under the auroras.

I could see the truth, suddenly and clearly, as if it weren’t the northern lights above me but a cosmic spotlight shining relentlessly into the dark corners of my heart.

Like the aurora borealis, that truth was there, in the background, whether I chose to see it or not. It probably had been for a long time.

I was in love with Aurora Lake.

My mom had been right. Ivan had been right.

God damn it.Fuck.

I wanted to tip my head back and howl over the sheer fucking unfairness of it all. Because whether I loved Aurora or not was completely irrelevant. It didn’tchangeanything—except for the fact that it was going to make everything harder. Icouldn’ttake up with Aurora right now. I had to finish rebuilding things, getting Olivia and me back on our feet. I couldn’t risk Olivia’s happiness. And dating Aurora would eventually lead to not dating Aurora. You don’t marry the first girlfriend you get after your wife dies.

I took a moment to let myself feel the injustice of it, to integrate this new and unwelcome information. Another fuckingthingI would have to carry around.

But I didn’t let myself wallow too long, because none of this was Aurora’s fault, and she couldn’t miss this show. I laid my palm on her cheek, which only had the effect of making her murmur and snuggle in closer. I shifted until I got an arm around her, shamelessly encouraging the cuddle. “Aurora,” I whispered.

“Mmm.”

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