Leona was weeping. She went missing, that girl really went missing. Leona knew her, which made it all the worse. With a shaky breath, Leona played the last thing the girl had sent her. "Hey… um I think you might not respond to this. Haha! I’m not quite sure how uhhh time zones work… at all. Hehe… yeah… You’re Canadian, right? Hold on…. Let me Google it… What… time… is… it… in… hmmm… Canada… Oh… 1:46! You definitely won’t see this then… so what’s the point of talking any longer? Uhhh… buh-bye! Sweet dreams… " It was a voicemail. The last one she ever got from her. Poor girl.

Leona did not remember her own birthday anymore. She remembered, instead, the night she stopped having one: a frost-bitten evening in 1741, somewhere along a Highland road, when a man with old eyes and older manners had pressed his thumb to her throat and asked, very politely, whether she wanted to keep living. She had not understood, then, that "keep living" was a generous way of putting it.

What she gained: a face that would not age, a hunger that never went away though she had tried everything to sustain it, and time. Obscene, glacial amounts of time.

What she lost, she was still finding out, two hundred and eighty-five years later, one dead lover at a time.

It wasn't a curse, she would never call it a curse, but it was more that eternity made her into a kind of weather system: she moved through mortal lives the way a slow-rolling front moves through a coastline, and coastlines, it turned out, were not built to last forever. She didn't kill them. She wanted that distinction noted, mostly to herself, in the quiet 3 a.m. moments when she catalogued the dead. She had never drained a lover dry in some gothic swoon, never lost control over a beating heart she loved.

That would have at least had the dignity of being her fault.

Instead there was Jenna Stone, 1886, whose train had taken a curve too fast outside Aberdeen three days after she'd pressed a tin photograph into Leona's hand and made her promise to write.

There was Edmund, 1923, who choked on a fish bone at his own birthday dinner, eleven days after telling Leona he'd never been so certain of anything as he was of her.

There was a string of names in the 1940s Leona didn't like to take out of the box very often, because war had a way of doing the work for her, efficiently and without any flourish at all, and she had learned to hate efficiency.

And now there was Jessica. Twenty-six. A barista with a laugh like a dropped glass and a profile on an app that promised, in cheerful sans-serif, Find Your Person. They'd matched on a Tuesday. Jessica had sent voice notes instead of texting, said typing felt too formal for someone she liked this much, this fast. She'd never quite gotten the hang of time zones, or of Leona's evasions about daylight, or of the fact that Leona's joke about being the only non-vegan bisexual twenty-something around didn't land.

Eleven days.

That was the average now, Leona had noticed, with the clinical horror of someone watching a pattern complete itself for the four-hundredth time. Eleven days between hello and the obituary.

She added Jessica's voicemail to the drive. The folder was getting full. She'd have to buy another one soon, and she hated that errand more than almost anything else she did in her long, accumulating life: standing in a fluorescent-lit shop, buying storage for the dead.

Her phone buzzed. A new match. 96% compatible, the app promised, as if compatibility had ever once been the problem. Leona blinked at the notification for a long moment, the way a woman might look at a lit match held over a jilted love-letter.

Then, because eternity was long and her own company was the one thing she'd had enough of, she swiped right.