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As Zainab finishes up her paperwork across the waiting room, she flashes me a knowing look and winks. Prathiba approaches to usher Alice away, like a security guard who is making up for slackened duty. “Perhaps we should move outside into the sunshine.”

Alice asks me, “Are you taking a day in Kigali?”

I can’t speak. I shake my head.

“You fly straight back? Oh, that will be hard on your rear.” As they move to the sunny corridor, Alice says, “It’s okay to cry about it.”

I face the room of travelers with their eyes glued to the TV above my head; it’s as though I’m on stage. I can’t stop it. I burst. As everything goes blurry with tears, I shield my face, my wet hands spread open to cover my eyes. My shoulders are shaking, my belly heaving. I am doing my best to be silent. The packed waiting room pretends they don’t see my full-on melt down. I shrink down the wall.

I huddle on the floor of the waiting room in unending sobs.

CHAPTER THIRTY

In-Between

I’M ON STAGE in front of a public meeting hall, alone. I scan the sparse audience. Blank or pained expressions stare back at me as some remove their hands from their mouths or ears. I’ve just told Generose’s story. An African woman towards the back of the room gets up and dashes towards the bathroom, followed by her American companion.

I look down at my outline, written in block letters on yellow legal paper. I’m not even halfway through. I stray from my notes, “This is really long . . . and dark. . . .”

They still stare at me blankly. The African lady’s friend discreetly grabs their things from the pew and the two exit quietly through the back door. I dump my outline and make a mad dash for the finish line, quoting every hopeful anecdote I can come up with.

As the stragglers find their way to the door, one of my mom’s friends stops me. She has booked me for a talk at her church, so she emails often, anxious to hammer out the details. Now she lays down the law. “That was way too dark for my church.”

Though I try to reassure her it’s no problem to edit a talk to be church-appropriate, she follows up by demanding an advanced copy of my speech to preapprove.

AND THAT’S HOW it will be this year; every speaking engagement will be a prenegotiated tightrope walk between taste and truth. A more strategic mind might break it down carefully, analyzing the lines and the limits. Instead, I retreat to my easier-to-digest, pre-Congo talking points, which are laced with only occasional illustrations from my trip and result in an unavoidably flat delivery.

The hard truth is that I made no plans beyond Congo. After years of cashing in every karmic credit I had for this work, it is time to face reality: tanking stock-photo sales reports and, in front of me, the years it will take to untangle my business and financial bonds with Ted.

We have only a few weeks to endure together before we turn over the house to the new owner and execute complicated plans to avoid each other until Ted finds a place in New York and I move into my new house here in Portland. In the interest of civility, we go out to breakfast. Ted and I slip into a booth at a hipster dive, each sipping cups of tea while waiting for brunch to arrive. He stirs the milk in his Earl Grey, his head dropped. A tear hits the table. His lips shake as he struggles to form words. “I’ve been thinking; I wasn’t there for you when you needed me. I’m sorry.”

I watch him. He seems like someone running after a bus, pounding on its side after it has pulled into traffic. It is the beginning of Ted’s months-long campaign to get back together, which I meet with patient sympathy and a clear view of the impossibility of two lives now on radically different trajectories.

Eventually, Ted gets it. At the coaching of his bachelor buddies in New York, Ted invests fifteen minutes posting his profile on a dating website. It turns out to be an instant remedy for unrequited love. He responds to one of the first four applicants, a woman who works in design for a corporate chain store.