Evelyn Rivers restarts her computer with a click that's little too aggressive. It's hard to be contemptuous to a computer when the person you really want to scream at is in the mirror. Two hours and nothing to show for it but a folder full of corny images and a few jotted notes that could've been done by a high school student. And now her frozen screen staring at her. She blames Tasha, but not really. It's easier than admitting the truth.

"It's no good, Evie!" Bucktoothed Tasha had leaned over her desk, confidentially, "where's the sparkle? They want sparkle. You're just...bleh." She gestured to Evie's red sweater and roomy jeans, her cluttered desk, the coffee mug left standing too long.

She's right, of course. But Evie would rather spend her life staring at this screen than say that out loud. She'd put her game face on, told Tasha she understood. Anything to get her out.

Now the screen accuses her, staring blue and expressionless. She punches out a text to Julian from IT:

Damn thing froze again. Can you come take a look?

Her finger hovers over "send." She undoes the message instead. There are certain indignities she isn't ready for today, and nothing would make her feel less at ease than the bulky, self-assured warmth of him in her office while she was discretely and gently falling apart. As if he has read her mind, a message pings:

"Lunch?"

"I have to do this thing for Tasha. The face cream ad. She hated my last one." That's easy to dash off. It would have been far harder to dictate, "I'm staring at my screen in an eternity of frozen indecision that's just emblematic of the rest of my life, and sitting across from you makes me feel like a real human and I no longer know how to be that."

She rifles through the images on her desk. The ingredients for the face cream. Something Something Botanicals. Stock footage of a tropical paradise, as though the "botanists" of the face cream were in the jungle teasing out the ancient secrets of youth from the sap of trees. Women in tailored suits lifting champagne glasses to their lips. She closes her eyes. It's easy to be cynical, but if things had turned out differently, she catches herself thinking, where would she be?

Her mind has grown feverish from inactivity, and she wonders shamelessly.

Maybe she could be in the jungle. A lady explorer slashing her way through seething vines with a machete, her field notebook in her pocket, pausing to inhale the breathing humus of the forest floor. She actually feels the heat of the jungle on her cheeks as she sees herself seated at the base of an enormous tree, tilting her head up, way up, losing sight of anything but green in the canopy, a monochrome of alive things. Close at hand, a fire-plumed bird glides toward her, and her keen voyager's ears pick up the cackles and calls of monkeys. She herself is alive, muscled and browned by the sun, her skin specked with the cuts of a thousand strange plants and dotted with mosquitoes. She is not beautiful; she is strong.

Perhaps she is not an explorer after all. Perhaps she grew up here, scaling the trees, bringing down untold treasures with arrows. Her face, not the one she sees in her compact mirror, flat and running to doughiness, now all arched cheekbones and dark, penetrating eyes. An Amazon of the Amazon, she laughs, and turns a page in her folder.

The woman in the tailored suit. This time, it's her, sitting in a Parisian cafe, alone for the moment, but not for long. It's a sidewalk cafe, and a warm breeze ruffles the stylish bob so she looks just carefree enough. She has all afternoon. She listens to the soft-spoken Francophone meanderings and sips her glass of wine. She has all day. She can read her book if she likes. She can watch the world go by and not envy a soul because a delicious lunch is about to be set in front of her. And her lover, in French, they are always lovers, aren't they? He'll walk around the side of the cafe and see her with her face lifted to the clouds without a trace of fear. He'll smile, and she knows that smile, and she doesn't want to know it, so she turns the page in her folder.

A woman standing on a beach.

And there she is, her feet in the generous sand, the salt in her eyes and her hair because she has just come up out of the sea. The sun warming the ample curves she has never needed to hide, turning them a soft, golden brown. Perhaps she will plunge back into the sea again once the sky has finished with her. She will throw herself into the waves and feel the bracing shock of cold against her cheeks. She will let the waves sweep her up in their arms and she will laugh. For now, though, she is content to linger on the beach, offering her shoulders to be kissed by the sea air. The ocean doesn't need to be told to sparkle. She allows herself a languorous stretch in the sand. A ping from her phone. She doesn't want to open her eyes, wants the escape to be for good. She opens them just long enough to see, "I got you coffee. Let me in." and decides the infinite sky can wait.