Page 16 of Memories of the Lost

And there, in the background, was Liam. His arm and the side of his face, his blond hair. A soft puff of yearning moved through her—she wanted to touch him, taste him, watch him laugh.

Watch him laugh?She scowled. It was one thing to be thirsty and want a roll in the hay. Quite another to start mooning over his laugh. He lived inNew Zealand.

Tillie shook out her shoulders. Her mood was a little off from the migraine, and the only answer was to stay mildly busy. To distract herself, she pulled out a large pad of drawing paper and clipped it to a different easel.

Humming along with the music, she sketched an outline, the movement of the gazelle girl. It felt good to make big marks, the long line of her back, the limbs galloping gracefully. A sense of flow fell over her.

After the workshops were over, Krish popped his head in Liam’s room at the hotel. “Got a minute?”

“Sure.” Liam swung the door open, shirtless after a shower in anticipation of his evening with Tillie. As Krish followed him into the room, Liam splashed lime aftershave over a cleanly shaved jaw. “What’s up?”

“I have an agenda for the rest of the week, if you want to take a look.”

“Yeah, you sent it to me in an email.” Liam combed his hair back from his face. It would dry on the way, more or less, but he was anxious to get going. “I’ll read it later.”

“I was hoping we could sit down over dinner and talk out some finer points of the rest of the tour.”

“Sorry, bro.” He flipped through the freshly laundered shirts, neatly tended and hung by an assistant. “I have plans.”

“With the new woman? What’s her name?”

Liam looked over his shoulder. “Tillie. I met her at an art show last night.”

“Hmm.” Krish flipped the pages on his clipboard, then crossed his arms. “Magical, is it?”

A burn spread through Liam’s gut, both truth and resistance. He turned, buttoning his shirt. “Don’t do that. I’m not the boy I was.”

“Okay. Just ... remember, this is your weakness.”

“I haven’t had a date in two solid years. I think I’ve done the work.”

Krish simply gazed at him.

A rare sense of annoyance rose. Liam said, “It’s not your affair.”

“It is if it knocks you off the rails.”

“What rails? This endless train you’ve got me riding? I keep telling you that I’m tired, man.” They’d been on the road for months, through Australia, then a stop in Singapore, three sites in Hawaii, each three days, then to North America—British Columbia and the West Coast of America, the Rockies, Chicago and Atlanta, now New York. They would go to Europe next.

“We’ve sold out every city on the schedule. That’s making a fair sum of money, not to mention supporting at least forty people. Including me.”

Liam turned toward the mirror, wishing only to be back with Tillie in her apartment, drinking tea, exploring the shimmering connection between them. Away from the expectations of his crew, the eyes of the people who awaited in those cities, hungry for answers they hoped he could provide.

Once, this had felt like important work. The world needed mindfulness, and the more he could help people discover it, the less suffering there would be.

Now, he wasn’t sure. He felt imprisoned by the constant travel, the faceless hotel rooms, the lack of ordinary life to keep him grounded.

“It feels dangerous to live this way, Krish.”

“Dangerous?” He twisted his mouth in a skeptical grimace.

“Yeah. No home ground. No ordinary pleasures.” Liam couldn’t quite express what bothered him—but it was more about the constancy of expectation, the hungry maw of ego that wanted more, more, more. “We’re living opposite what we teach: simplicity and kindness.”

“Yeah, I know. You brought that up in Oz. We’ve been working on the consumption angles. It’s just a big task, and not all the hotels have systems in place. We’ve dropped the private flights and gone commercial.”

“I know, I know.” Liam took a breath, tried to settle into his patience, but it squished like a cloud, evaporating into discomfort and anxiousness. He felt both that he loved the attention of all those upturned faces, and that he was letting them down, that it was too much about Liam the Personality, and not enough about the path itself. “I just think I need a break.”

“The tour lasts only a couple of more months. Let’s finish it up, and see where you are then.”