A satellite doesn’t care who sent the signal or who receives it — it only carries the message across the dark, joining one distant point to another.

Ifeoma had sent a desperate signal into the night, and instead of reaching the man who let her go, she had found the man who was ready to stay.

He thought, watching the light cross the sky, about how much of his life he had spent believing the important things had to begin correctly.

He had married Adanna after a proper courtship, had built a proper life, had assumed that was how meaning arrived — through the front door, announced, according to a plan you could see coming.

Then the plan had been taken from him in a hospital corridor, and for four years he had lived like a man guarding a wound, waking at every sound, keeping the world at arm’s length, certain the only safe move left was to never again love anything he could lose.

The irony was not lost on him.