"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the source of all mercy and the God of all consolation. He comforts us in all our sorrows so that we can comfort others in their sorrows with the consolation we ourselves have received from God," the minister intones.

Thanks be to God, the crowd recites. Elsa can feel her voice lost to that drone.

There are only 800 people in town, but Elsa has never felt so suffocated. Probably all the Lutherans and half the Catholics within a twenty mile radius have crowded themselves into this building. When they speak the reply, the noise doesn't sound like human speech anymore, but a swell of power vibrating through the walls. They could have been saying, "Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear," and it still would have sounded solemn and authoritative.

As a kid, Elsa was alternately in awe and bored to death of the weekly sermons and monotone responses. In her teenage years, she scoffed at services as an antiquated opiate of the masses. Once she left for college, she cut off any connection she had to the church and avoided spiritual discussions religiously.

Now she only wants to be swallowed up in the horde of voices, surrender her sense of individuality to accept the comfort of the crowd.

She thought coming back would be a disaster. That she would resent all the close-minded, small-town politics. Instead the entire experience is weirdly ordinary, like she's never left.

Anna starts writing a paper. And her boss asks if she can take an extra shift at the learning center. And her parents stop by to see her new apartment.

"You're so grown up," her mother gushes.

"Um, yeah. Thanks, Mom."

"Your mother's right. You've become much more responsible in the past year. We're really proud of you."

The praise is more pleasing than Anna is willing to admit.

And completely undeserved, because to her own horror a few days later, she realizes that she hasn't thought about Elsa at all. And immediately she tries to remember when the last time she fed Marshmallow. She was there yesterday morning, right?

Right?

To her relief, Marshmallow is still alive if a little frantic when she appears at Elsa's apartment.

"Rrreeeeow," he voices plaintively, practically climbing up Anna's leg as she scoops his wet food into a dish.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry about this, buddy. I'll give you a really nice backrub. I promise. No need to tell Elsa about this. Here you go."

She reaches down to pet his head, and he growls at her hand. Retreating, Anna escapes to the living room, flopping onto Elsa's couch, wondering if she's actually a good girlfriend or not.

"Your father was a wonderful man," a woman Elsa vaguely remembers from her childhood insists.

"Thank you," she replies hollowly.

"I hope you're holding up alright. Your mother is such a strong lady."

"She is. Thank you for coming."

She probably should have thought to pack a black dress when she was throwing together a bag for this trip, but it was too weird imagine her father dead. Just a few days ago, he was alive. Even though she'd ignored his existence for years, he had always been alive in the back of her mind. Forbidding, at times, but definitely alive.

It's surprisingly difficult to swallow the fact that he's gone, whatever he might have wanted to say to her permanently silenced.

Luckily, there was a black knee-length skirt tucked in the back of her old closet. After the fallout, she'd never returned home to pick up the rest of her stuff. So all of it just sat in her room, waiting for her father's death to beckon her home.

At some point that night, she finds herself sitting with Kristoff at a bench. They've both had a glass of wine and have even managed to make normal conversation with each other when yet another well-wisher drops by to tell them exactly how fabulous their father was.

Kristoff nods politely at her. Elsa reaches up to shake her hand. The woman is already well into her spiel.

"—really great man. Truly. When my son Timothy told me he was gay, your father was the one who talked me down. I didn't know what to think. He convinced me that Timmy's life wasn't over, and that he'd get through alright. He even stood up to some of the stodgier members of the school-board when they had a 'discussion' on whether students were comfortable about sharing a—"

Elsa can't stay to hear her finish the rest of her story. She can't stay still. She can't stay in this town. Impulsively, she yanks herself out of her seat and storms into the backyard. The sun has set. Fireflies glow. Behind her, a crowd of family friends are still milling about the patio of her mother's house.

"Elsa," Kristoff calls out, appearing beside her.

"Why the hell would he do that?" she spits out, swiping at the pinpricks of light in the tall grass, irrationally outraged by the beauty of nature. "Did you know he did that?"

"No! I haven't heard about that before," Kristoff exclaims. His hands rise in a gesture of surrender and innocence. "But it doesn't surprise me that he did."

"Really?" Part of Elsa's brain tells her that she's being stupidly melodramatic and people can use your emotions against you if you let them, Elsa, share your joys, but be careful in how you broadcast your misfortunes. It's absolutely maddening that she still hears his voice in her head, guiding her, pretending to care about her.

She gives in to her rage. It feels fantastic.

"He practically disowns his own daughter, but hey, at risk LGBT youth in the neighborhood? Let's go out for ice cream!"

"What do you want from him, Elsa? Would it make you feel better if he had helped run Timmy out of town?"

"Well, at least he could have been consistent with his own damn values!"

"It's not like you were perfect either," Kristoff retorts. Frustration spills over, ruining his attempt at levelheaded counseling. "Our entire childhood I remember you worshipping the ground he walked on and going on and on about how much we owed both our parents, blah, blah, loyalty and respect. But the first time there's a rift, you're just gone. You don't call or write or acknowledge our existence. God, Ma nearly cried every time you sent her your worthless, one-sentence thank you notes."

The accusation twists in Elsa's heart, but she's too mad to back down now.

"As if they ever made a real attempt to fix anything. He threatened—no, he did cut off paying for tuition. I worked hard, Kristoff. Don't pretend to be the angelic son. I was the one writing papers when you were off getting drunk and shooting squirrels in the Masons' pickup truck."

Elsa's never done this before, never lorded her status as the outstanding achiever over her little brother before, never admitted just how infuriating it was to see him off having fun when she toiling away to anyone—not even herself.

"My whole life, I wanted him to be proud of me. I did everything I could to please him. All I requested was one thing for myself, one thing that maybe he wasn't fully comfortable with, and he decides that everything up to that point was totally worthless because of that one choice."

Until she said it out loud, felt her own voice breaking as it left her throat, she hadn't realized how much it hurt. It hurt so bad.

Kristoff softens slightly. "Look, Elsa, I realize that he was a stubborn guy. He was ridiculously, idiotically set in his ways. But he loved you Elsa. He would never have done what he did for Timmy if he didn't. You know how hard it was for him to change his mind on anything. Of course you do. You're practically the same person sometimes—"

"Don't you dare compare me to him!" Elsa snaps. "If he loved me, if he really loved me, he had a messed up way of showing it."

"You loved him! You think you were any better?" Kristoff's voice swells with frustration. "For Christ's sake, Elsa, he was dying. He was dying, and you waited three days to call back. Don't give me some bullshit about losing your phone or not checking your messages. You knew. Did you want to be sure that he was too far gone to lecture you before you paid him a visit?

"I can't believ—"

"I can't believe that the two of you are arguing on the day of your father's funeral!" Their mother explodes onto the scene. Brother and sister promptly wilt like shamefaced daisies in a particularly scorching sun. It would be comical if it weren't so terrifying. "Do you have no respect for the dead? You're lucky you're so worked up, the neighbors probably can't tell what you're saying!

"Sorry, Ma," Kristoff mutters.

"Yeah." Elsa shifts uncomfortably under her mother's gaze. Neither sibling seems eager to make eye contact.

Sighing angrily, their mother deflates. "Come inside and help me clean up."

When Anna's phone rings, she's half-asleep and the noise startles her so much she jerks and lands half on top of Marshmallow.

"EEEEOW!"

"Sorry! Sorry!" The cat springs out from beneath Anna and the couch the first chance he gets and stalks over to the bedroom. "Hello," she says blearily into the receiver.

A voice echoes from the speaker, peculiarly cheerful and lighthearted. "Anna!"

"Elsa?" Anna's brain tries to catch up with what's happening.

"Yes?"

"What're you doing?"

"Talking to you." The way she answers, Anna can imagine her lying on a fuzzy comforter, twirling a strand of blond hair around her finger.

"I gathered as much." Propping a pillow behind her head, Anna leans back against the couch.

"What are you doing?" the voice from the other end asks playfully.

Anna bites her lip and smirks. "Talking to you."

"Not fair. That was my line."

Anna's heart melts. She might turn into goo before this conversation is over. "Well, it's mine now."

Elsa giggles, which is odd. Usually, her girlfriend is more reserved. Earnest, but dignified. It takes a lot of coaxing (and yeah, some under-the-covers activity helps too) to get Elsa anywhere near this lighthearted, childlike state. She's never seen it outside the shared darkness of their bedrooms.

She gets it. Elsa hates feeling vulnerable, and Anna is willing to respect those boundaries.

But this innocent delight is too precious to pass up.

"I miss you," Elsa says timidly from the other end.

"I miss you too, sweetheart," Anna replies, warming up from the inside out. But when her girlfriend giggles again, Anna has to ask the question. "Are you drunk?"

"A little," Elsa admits readily.

"I don't think I've ever seen you drunk before." It's true. A couple of glasses of wine sums up her observations on Elsa's drinking habits.

"You're still not seeing me really. We're on the phone. You can't see me."

"You know for someone who's drunk, you're pretty perceptive."

"I'm only a little drunk."

Anna finds this assertion hilarious, but she rolls with it. "Okay, so you're only just drunk enough to dial your girlfriend from—wait where are you? Wasn't your father's funeral today?"

"Yep. It was horrible," Elsa moans petulantly.

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Are you—"

"Anna?" she interrupts.

"Yes?"

Elsa's voice is deadly serious. "I wanna ride a bicycle."

"Um." Anna tries to come up with an appropriate response. "Okay?"

Apparently that's enough for Elsa. "Don't you think it's sad?"

"What's sad?"

"That once you die, you're stuck forever. And everyone makes a big deal out of burying you, but fifteen years from now, no one will even remember you existed, or whether you were important, or anything about you except for your name and the dates on your headstone."

"I guess that's kind of sad."

Before Anna can pinpoint exactly where Elsa is going with this line of reasoning, her girlfriend flies off on another tangent. "I want to scoop them all up. And then they can go riding through the countryside with me."

Maybe Anna's just too sleep-deprived for this conversation right now. Or maybe Elsa's more than a little drunk. "What? What are you scooping up?"

"Who," Elsa corrects mildly. "Enid Parker. Clarence Augustus Bell. Jean Mor-mor-ten-sen." Elsa's tongue trips over the syllables of the last name, in endearing contrast to her typically precise enunciation.

"Who are you talking about?"

"The dead people."

"What?" Just when Anna thought this conversation couldn't get any weirder. It's far too late for The Sixth Sense.

"I want to bring them with me. So they can see everything. And they can tell me about their lives. Otherwise it must be so boring for them."

"That's…whimsical," Anna manages when all she wants to do is erupt into, What the hell are you talking about?

"Do you think they'd like it?" Elsa asks hopefully.

Choosing to ignore any more mystifying questions until she figures out exactly what's going on in Elsa's head, she demands, "Where are you?"

"In the cement-ce-me-ta-ry." Elsa stumbles over the word.

"You're in the cemetery!?" A wave of disbelief and concern crashes into Anna's amused complacency. "Elsa! What are you doing in the cemetery? Did you drive there? While you were drunk?"

"I'm lying on the ground. It smells like dirt."

"Did you drive there?"

"No. It's only a few blocks from my house." Elsa seems to pause and correct herself. "From my parents' house." She revises it again, haltingly. "To my mother's house." Suddenly, she changes course. "Anna, I want to go home."

"Please do. You shouldn't be out this late."

"No, no," Elsa objects clumsily. "I want to come home. To you. You smell nice. Like dirt."

Anna disregards the way this statement makes her want to reach out and tuck Elsa's hair behind her ear. She'll relive the moment later, framed in a different context, one that doesn't involve Night of the Living Dead. "Are you alone?"

"Yes," Elsa replies happily.

"You're alone and drunk in a cemetery at…what time is it over there anyways, 11 at night?"

"I guess," Elsa agrees.

"God, what are you even wearing?"

A long pause. "…Are you trying to have phone sex with me?" Elsa finally questions, as though genuinely baffled by Anna's interrogation.

"What? No!" The blood surges into Anna's face. "Elsa, just go back to your parents' house, please."

Of course, Elsa resorts to the standard three-year-old's reply. "I don't wanna." Really, she should have seen it coming.

"Come on, Elsa. Just go home. Please. I'll worry about you if you're out there in a cemetery by yourself in the middle of the night."

"It's not dangerous, Anna. Nothing bad ever happens here. You're so cute when you're overprotective."

You're so cute when you're absolutely infuriating, Anna thinks. Out loud she says, "Please. It's late. You need to go home and get in bed."

"It's not that late," Elsa complains. "Besides, nothing happens here. Like maybe some teenagers will get drunk and driving around. Or they'll decide to start shooting at—"

"Shooting?! You're standing around in a graveyard in the dark in a town where the teenagers go out at night with guns?!"

"Actually I'm lying down. And nobody goes hunting in a graveyard Anna."

"Why are you lying down?"

"It's kind of nice."

In a last-ditch effort, Anna tries to introduce a dose of severity into her tone. "Elsa. Go home. I mean it. I'm tired. You're drunk. Just listen to me. Stay on the phone with me and walk—"

Abruptly, Elsa's voice turns cold. "Well, if you don't want to talk, you could have just said so."

The line clicks dead.

Anna wastes a full, incredulous minute staring at her phone. Where the hell did that come from? This situation is too absurd for her to process right now. But process it she will, because somewhere on the other side of the country, her lunatic, drunk, probably-grieving girlfriend is lying on her back with her head against a gravestone waiting for some small-town psycho to come murder her with a buzzsaw and a jack o' lantern—

Okay, maybe Anna's imagination is running away with her again, but still.

She calls Elsa's number, and when Elsa doesn't pick up, she calls again. And again. And sends a text that says something to the effect of, Damn it, Elsa, if you don't pick up, I swear I'm going to call the local police next and have them escort you home. Actually that's exactly what it says. And perhaps that's why Elsa answers the phone the fourth time Anna calls.

"What?" Elsa practically snarls into the phone.

"Elsa." Anna summons a wellspring of patience she never knew she had. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing is wrong."

"You called me drunk from a cemetery on the night of your father's funeral. I think it's safe to say there's something wrong."

"I love you." Apparently Elsa's anger has melted and she's returned to a state of intoxicated affability. Anna's not sure whether that's a good thing yet.

"I love you too," she responds. "Now tell me what's wrong."

"I love you. Did I tell you that?"

Now Anna's worried that Elsa has some form of amnesia. On top of everything else. It's probably just the alcohol. "Yes. Why are you at the graveyard?"

"I didn't want to stay in the house."

Feeling like world's most underpaid and disadvantaged therapist, Anna redirects her questioning. "How was the funeral?"

"Horrible."

"Why didn't you like it?"

"It was a funeral. Was I supposed to be happy?" Evidently even drunk, loopy Elsa has caustic side.

"Was there anything in particular that you didn't like?" Man, Anna would be a great therapist. Maybe she should have majored in psychology after all.

"Everyone afterwards. Everyone said he was such a great man. They didn't even know him. How could they say that?"

"He probably did nice things for them." Anna's treading in dangerous waters now. She has no idea how Elsa actually feels about her parents, but the fact that she hadn't brought them up in nearly a year of dating, the fact that she hasn't talked to them in years, the fact that she's outside in a cemetery on the night of her father's funeral are all fairly strong indicators that things are less than rosy.

The last thing Anna wants is to lose Elsa over a fight about her parents.

"Why?" Elsa asks plaintively. "Why would he do nice things for them?"

"Uhhh…because he wasn't an evil, sadistic serial killer?" Like the kind that's going to jump out from behind a tombstone if you don't get your butt inside a house.

"He makes me so mad. He's dead. And I don't know whether I hate him or not."

"You don't hate him." That much is certain. "You wouldn't cry over his death if you hated him."

"Why not?"

"I don't know," Anna sighs. "Tell me about him," she requests gently.

Yes, it's 11:30 and Anna is tired and she'd really rather do this some other day, in person, maybe with a cup of coffee, but Elsa needs this now and Anna wants to be a good girlfriend. She wants to be a good person, the kind that Elsa can depend upon for the rest of her life.

"He was…complicated." A loud, drunken sigh. "No. He wasn't complicated. Or more compli-compli-complicated than anyone else. I just—I don't know how to feel about him."

"What was he like?"

"He was proud." Something solidifies in Elsa's voice. "His parents were immigrants, so he always felt like he had to prove that he was living up to their dreams. Worked through medical school. Became the town doctor. Said it was important that we carry on in his footsteps because our grandparents had sacrificed their whole lives to create this opportunity for us. We couldn't squander it."

"That sounds like a lot of pressure."

"I guess. But I understood it. I agreed with him mostly. I wanted them to be proud of me."

The yearning in her voice hurts Anna's heart. She thinks of that wonderful moment, after years of watching her academic floundering with growing bemusement and dismay, when her father called her responsible. "Of course you did."

"He was. I thought he was. But then I told him I was gay, and it was like none of anything I did mattered." Elsa's voice wavers. "Like I ruined everything he cared about with that one thing.

"Was he mad?"

"They were both mad. They yelled a lot. And I yelled a lot. I stopped talking to them. He thinks—thought—I didn't go to med school to spite him."

"Did you?"

"No!" the unexpected outrage startles Anna. "I didn't go to med school, because he cut me off and I didn't want to graduate $200,000 in debt!"

"Maybe he thought it would force you to talk to him."

"Screw him," Elsa says with more pain than anger.

"A little late for that."

When she doesn't respond, Anna grows increasingly uneasy. What if she crossed an invisible line?

"He helped this kid," Elsa eventually elaborates. "This kid who came out in high school I guess. He helped him. Why would he do that? How could he disown me but break out the rainbow banners for somebody else's child?"

"I don't know. You know him better than I do." As the words leave her mouth, Anna wonders if she should have spoken in the present tense.

"I want to think it means he would have been okay with me. But maybe not. Maybe he'd only been willing to tolerate in someone else's kid. And I want to ask him. I want to scream at him, but he doesn't say anything. I'm screaming at him, and he doesn't say anything." The trembling worsens in Elsa's voice. Each word quivers pitifully, like baby robins fallen from their nest.

More than anything, Anna wishes she could be there, in small-town Minnesota, with a box of tissues and a comforter. She feels impossibly helpless as she tries to make soothing noises through the phone line.

"If he were here, he would be proud of you."

It's the cheesiest line Anna has. She can't even name what movie, TV show, or book she got it from because it's probably buried somewhere in all of them. There's no way of knowing whether it's actually true or not, because maybe he would only be proud of a doctor for a daughter, but if it's what Elsa needs to hear, then she'll say it every day for the rest of her life.

"You don't know that."

This is where Anna is supposed to say, "I do." Or something. Instead, the first thing that pops into her head and out of her mouth is, "Who cares?"

A surprised, stifled laugh echoes from the other end of the line.

"He's dead, Elsa. Remember him however you want." Flinching a little at her own bluntness, Anna digs for the right words. "As someone who loved you. As someone you looked up to." Anna's brain works in overdrive, trying to articulate some concept she barely comprehends herself. "There's no point sorting out exactly how he would have felt about you if he were alive. So believe in something that makes you happy."

"Thanks, Socrates."

Anna finds Elsa's sarcasm strangely comforting and appropriate. Then she starts to wonder whether Socrates would have agreed with anything she just said. After all, he did warn Crito—

"Anna?"

"Hmm. Wh—Yes?"

"You make me really mad too sometimes."

"Um…" Anna can't take much more of this cryptic stuff.

"I love you."

"I love you too." Anna imagines Elsa splayed out in a dark cemetery, love radiating from her like infrared waves. "Do you think you want to go back inside now?"

"Maybe."

She gets the distinct impression that Elsa is teasing her. So she asks the next logical thing.

"Are you teasing me?"

"Do you want me to? You usually like it fast."

Choking, Anna splutters, "What?!"

Somewhere in Minnesota, Elsa cackles like a witch in a graveyard.

"Okay. Okay. You need to go home. Like now. Clearly the boggy air is having its way with your brain." This night is already more than Anna can handle. "And don't you dare stop for anyone. No matter how pretty they look."

"Are you insecure?"

"Well, my girlfriend longs to go traipsing around the countryside with zombies. I think I have a right to feel threatened."

"They're not zombies. Just skeletons. And it's not traipsing if I'm on my bike."

Anna marvels at Elsa's ability to formulate coherent counterarguments while tipsy.

Her own rejoinder falls flat. "If you ever decide to return to the realm of the living, give me a call."

"But I'm already on the phone with you."

"I've noticed."

"But-" Elsa seems to lose track of the discussion, and Anna waits for her to martial her thoughts. It's nearly midnight. "I love you."

"You keep saying that."

"I know. I want it to count."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know."

There's no use trying to get logic from her right now. "Will you go home?"

"I guess," Elsa caves.

"Stay on the phone."

"Okay."

Aware of the creeping lethargy in that distant voice, Anna reminds her, "And make sure there are no cars when you're crossing the road."

"I'll drink all my milk too," comes the deadpan.

"Good. I want you to grow up strong." Anna's getting pretty good at this sarcasm thing. If only Elsa were here to see her perfectly straight face.

"Anna…" her girlfriend complains.

"Yes?" she answers innocently.

"Why are you being so mean?"

"I'll stop being mean when you get to your house. Now move it."

Twenty minutes of grumbling later, Elsa clatters onto what sounds like front steps. "I made it. I'm alive," she announces.

"Good. Now are you sure this is your house and not some bar with really pretty nights?"

"Yes."

"It's not your neighbor's house."

"It's not."

"Positive it's not a brothel?"

"Positive."

"Well, in that case, you—"

A faraway noise cuts in. "Elsa! Where have you been?!" Definitely her mother.

"Out," she replies shortly.

Anna speculates on whether teenage Elsa was this surly. She'd probably look cute, all sullen and sulky.

Without warning, the unfamiliar voice is right up against Anna's ear. "Who is this?"

Elsa protests in the background, "Ma, leave Anna alone."

"Go into the kitchen. You are in no shape to be arguing with me tonight."

Wincing at that stern dismissal, Anna resolves to plunge forward. She has to meet the woman eventually, right? "Hello, I'm Anna."

Best foot forward. Be charming. Dazzle her with your brilliant cordiality. Anna's pep talk is blindingly inadequate. This is worse than talking to Elsa for the first time.

"Anna," Elsa's mother echoes warily. "Do you know where my daughter has been tonight?"

Oh, God. Really? Why does Anna suddenly feel like the shady loner boyfriend? How is this fair? She didn't convince Elsa to get drunk and visit a scary place in the dark.

"Uh. She told me she was in the cemetery when she called." Please don't bite my head off. Please don't bite my head off. Please don't bite my head off. "And I got her to go home." Because I'm a good person and I'm not violating your daughter…in the creepy way.

Shuffling and further objections from Elsa reverberate through the speaker.

"Thank you," Elsa's mother says. Anna can't tell if she's actually grateful or not. She's about to force out a "you're welcome" and "goodnight", but the older woman starts again. "Are you-are you together with my daughter?"

"…yes," Anna ventures hesitantly.

"I see."

The silence is excruciating.

"I hope I'll see you at Thanksgiving."

"Oh. Um." Was that an invitation? "Sure. That sounds—uh—lovely."

"Goodnight."

"Goodnight."

Anna stares at the phone, blown away.

And then a sense of emptiness settles in. She doesn't dare call or text in case Elsa's mother still has her phone, but god, she wants to hear Elsa say, "I love you," one more time.

Kristoff and Elsa have been driving nonstop for what feels like years. Actually, it's been sixteen hours.

"Remind me again why I didn't just take the plane back?" Elsa groans as she forces herself out of an uncomfortable and unsatisfactory nap.

"Because we thought this would be a good chance to talk things out."

And it was. For the first few hours, they managed to catch up on each other's lives. Kristoff ticked off all the major hometown happenings of the last few years like a newsreel. Elsa filled him in on her job, her apartment, the city, Anna. But by the time they parked at their first rest stop, she could feel her legs curdling.

Highway signs flash past her eyes. "We're almost there. Do you want me to take over?"

"Nah. Too much trouble to stop now. Might as well keep going."

They discussed their father. Their favorite and least favorite stories about him. But neither of them acknowledge the night of his funeral. Chances are they'll never talk about it. Elsa can live with that.

"I'm going to call Anna. Let her know we're almost there."

"Are the two of you living together?" he asks. There's something askew in Kristoff's demeanor whenever the conversation turns toward Anna, like he's grappling with some thought. Elsa doesn't know what to make of it. Even if he didn't slap a rainbow sticker on his chest, he did his best to play mediator when Elsa came out. He's at least a little more open-minded than their parents.

"No." Though sometimes they're already married.

"Are you going to stay the night? You should probably get some rest."

"Maybe. I'm going on to New Hampshire. Do you have a couch I can crash on?"

"I have a guest room."

"Good enough."

Elsa's barely awake brain succumbs again to a half-sleep. A toothy grin floats through her dreams.

Anna flips through pages of Food Network recipes, hoping to figure out what she can do with a pound and a half of ground beef. She's camped out at Elsa's, waiting for her girlfriend to get home so she can shove food down her throat.

And she'll get to meet Elsa's brother…who can't possibly be as intimidating as her mother, right?

At some point, Anna gives up her attempt at sophistication and just starts rolling up meatballs. It's all very housewife-y and soothing, so when the buzzer finally sounds from Elsa's speaker, she nearly has a heart attack. Luckily the cilantro is already chopped and she only drops a box of spaghetti as opposed to the chef's knife.

"Hello?" she calls down into the microphone.

"Anna? Let us up."

"Why? Did you lose your key? Are you an imposter?"

"Anna—" Elsa starts in her quit-being-a-five-year-old-already voice.

"Okay. Okay." She punches the buzzer.

"Thank you," the voice intones, only slightly mollified.

Next thing Anna knows, they're hugging in the doorway of the apartment, Elsa's overnight bag digging into her abdomen. The body in her arms is solid, wonderfully real and annoyingly bony.

"Hey, I missed you."

Elsa makes an affirmative noise into the crook of her shoulder, and Anna tugs them both backwards, into the room to make way for Elsa's younger brother who steps forward—

—And gets her second heart attack of the evening.

"Kristoff?" she asks in disbelief, pulling away from Elsa to gape at the good-natured—if somewhat goofy—intern she met on that overseas trip.

"Hello, Anna. It's been awhile." With great determination, he grasps Anna's limp hand in his own and shakes it vigorously, all the while making excessive eye contact. She gets the sense that what he really means is, "We are never going to tell my sister about the time I drunkenly proposed to you with a lyre from the Athens national monument."

"Oh. Hey. I haven't seen you in forever," she replies, stunned. By which she means, "Agreed."

In any decent romantic drama, this ironic revelation would probably lead to some weird love triangle with an abundance of jealousy and awkward staring contests. But Anna hasn't lived in that world for a while. And she likes the new universe she's living in now, with Elsa and Marshmallow and Bertha's bewildering birthday bash, and she'll do whatever it takes to keep it. Even if that means sacrificing the opportunity for an engrossing and gut-wrenching spectacle that professes to reveal the true complexities of romantic entanglements.

So she leaves her pathetic response as is and glides over Elsa's curious, "You've met before?" with a brief, "Yeah. We were in the same overseas program." She lets Elsa go through her perfunctory expression of curiosity, even though she can tell all her girlfriend wants to do is collapse onto a bed.

The trio sit down to an urbane and comfortable dinner. Afterwards, Kristoff disappears for a shower, Elsa starts unpacking her bag, and Anna decides to deal with the dishes. It's all so stupidly domestic and boring, especially when a hand reaches out to intercept the plate she's about to place in the drying rack, and Elsa materializes by her side with a towel.

Anna can't imagine a better life.

Except it does gets better that weekend when Elsa asks her out on a date, which is weird because they don't really date anymore. Like they don't do the thing where one of them nervously fumbles through a phone call with a date, time and place and the other one becomes simultaneously elated and sick to their stomach. They sort of just hang out. When they make plans together, they make plans together. They don't have to consciously coordinate schedules anymore.

But now Elsa's asking her to meet her at some café on Saturday at two, and Anna doesn't really know why they aren't just spending the entire day together, like they usually do, lazing around. It feels good though. Spontaneous and clean after the turmoil of Elsa's family emergency.

She strides into the little coffee shop on State Street with all the excitement of a first date, and none of the nausea. From a table in the corner, Elsa beams at her in her shy, I'm-sorry-for-being-too-eager manner.

Anna rolls several suave opening lines around with her tongue. "Fancy meeting you here," or "So what's this all about?" The unbidden smile stretches her mouth so wide that it's hard to speak.

Fortunately, Elsa beats her to the punch.

"I used to see you all the time," she says abruptly.

Confusion splashes Anna in the face. Have they not been seeing enough each other? Maybe she's talking about her trip?

"I used to see you all the time at Oak's Lounge," Elsa clarifies. "The café on the corner of Eastern and King. You probably didn't notice me there."

Anna's heart swoops. She suddenly remembers her last year of college, tiptoeing through the doors of the local café, praying to see a familiar shock of blond hair hovering over a thick book, all the muscles under her skin vibrating, practically seasick with anticipation. That era of directionless despair seems like a lifetime ago. Or maybe more like an unusually bleak chapter in an otherwise sunny biography, to be put aside as soon as it has passed. Her present relationship with Elsa stands tall and sound. In its shadow, the transient, infantile infatuation she once knew is all but forgotten. She rarely even connects pantsuit-girl, that self-serving fantasy-construct, with the Elsa she's fallen in love with. It's the most natural thing in the world to tell her friends, "Oh, we met a year ago at a Dunkin' Donuts."

While Anna relives all those encounters and delusions, Elsa forges ahead, confessing, "Sometimes I used to go down there just hoping I might run into you. I wasn't sure whether I actually wanted to talk to you or not. I mean, my life was insane then. I was looking for work, and I didn't have many options. I actually ended up having to move. But before that, I saw you once in the park."

Elsa is babbling. Elsa never babbles. Anna babbles her head silly, and Elsa perches in her seat and smiles indulgently. But here Elsa is, babbling.

Anna doesn't know how to smile indulgently.

"You probably don't remember. But I saw you in the park that once, and I worked up the nerve to go talk to you. But I'd been so distracted with psyching myself up to do it, I forgot that I had Marshmallow on a leash, and when I came up to you, you were just gaping at me, and I had to explain that yes, I was walking my cat for a dumb bet. I'm not even sure how I managed to survive it, I was so embarrassed. After that, I figured it was doomed. I couldn't possibly go talk to you again, because you'd just remember me as the weird cat-lady. And I know you don't remember this, and it makes no sense for me to bring it up now. It's just that when you—"

"I remember," Anna interrupts. It seems necessary to say something before Elsa hyperventilates. "I remember you were trying to prove cats can do anything dogs can."

Elsa's face colors. Anna is still in love with that shade of pink.

"Yeah," she mumbles. "I guess that must have been a pretty interesting encounter for you."

"No!" Her vehemence startles the both of them. "I mean it was interesting. But not in a bad way. And I remember all of it." Blue eyes regard her suspiciously, but Anna is taking over the chatter train. "Your pantsuit. You were wearing this tan pantsuit that was with a really stiff-looking collar. Like maybe you ironed it a lot. I don't know. And I immediately started imagining what it would be like if we were dating," she rushes out, determined to prove that she's not telling a white lie to spare Elsa's feelings.

Elsa's face is ajar and awestruck, as though Anna is handing a kitten on Christmas morning.

"Then, another day you came up to me with the cat, and yeah, it was strange, but all I could think afterwards was, 'Wow, I'm such a loser. I can't even say hello. And why does she have to be so pretty?' But I kept going to the Lounge, because I wanted to see you." Anna finally takes a second to breathe.

The floodgates burst apart, and neither of them can get the words out fast enough. They swap stories of each other until the memories pile up between them like a mountain—no, not a mountain—a bridge. Like they're crossing a chasm they forgot existed.

It's not a wholly unfamiliar experience, this explosion of sharing. When they first started dating, it happened all the time. By sheer accident, they would discover that they both had hated the Powerpuff Girls as children, only to become obsessed as teenagers. Or that they both had eaten at the same German restaurant with the creepy waiter before. Or that they both loved Lindt truffles. Each newly uncovered mutual interest would ignite a firestorm of animated conversation and analysis. Anna assumed that they had exhausted these hidden pools of delight, that they knew each other too fully to be caught off guard by them anymore. She was wrong.

She's been bushwhacked from behind, and she loves it.

Reaching for Elsa's careful fingers, she squeezes gently. "Elsa, why…why didn't you tell me when we first met? Outside of Dunkin' Donuts. Why not say something like, 'Oh, I used to see you at Oak's Lounge all the time.'"

A small, bashful smile tugs at Elsa's lips. "I was scared I guess. I didn't want to seem too crazy. We both were a little creepy."

"Yeah. That's probably why I didn't tell you about it either."

They sit there for a while, grinning dopily.

"So is that why you wanted me to come here today? You had confess to your secret obsession with me?"

"Maybe," Elsa replies coyly. Before she continues, a tongue flicks out nervously between her lips. "I wanted you to know it because sometimes, I don't…gush about you. I'm not comfortable throwing myself at people, even if I really want to. I love you. I'd do silly, idiotic things to be around you, but I hate admitting it."

"That's okay," Anna says. Of course, it's okay. Elsa makes her head spin off its brainstem every time she picks up a dropped pencil and places it on the desk for her. If she decided to come home with a heart-holding teddy bear and make baby noises, well, Anna would probably have an aneurism.

"No," Elsa demurs resolutely. "You deserve to know that I love you to the point of stupidity, to the point of humiliating myself. And you deserve to hear it and feel it, more often than I'm willing to say it. I just need you to know that I really do love you, even when I don't say it." She looks away when she finishes speaking, avoiding Anna's gaze.

"Elsa." Touched, Anna searches for something suitably reassuring and equally goddamn romantic to respond with. Instead she finds herself fumbling to explain why she loves Elsa and why it wouldn't be the same if she started singing love songs while braiding Anna's hair in a meadow filled with prairie voles.

When she was a kid, Anna believed True Love meant fighting dragons, defying evil kings, and risking it all for another person. If you weren't willing to die for it, it wasn't True.

Then she grew up a little and realized that mortal danger rarely materialized modern Western society. In the absence of perilous adventures, Anna cast about for another litmus test for love. She latched onto rom-coms and Valentine's Day.

That's how you could tell someone really loved you: if they came home with roses and took you to the beach at sunset.

It seemed like love was all about the huge declarations, the over-the-top prom-posals, the idea that if you really loved someone, if you weren't ashamed of your love, then you'd better scream it from the tallest tower.

It seemed like it couldn't be too safe either, because if "love" was too safe, you were probably just using that person to hide your love for someone else. Love had to be exciting, to be genuine.

Once she found out what "exciting" actually meant, it seemed like you also had to be sexually attracted to that person. You had to think they were pretty all the time, even when they had a bad hair day, and when you slept, you had to adorable and appropriately vulnerable—not drooly.

But old people loved each other too. And it seemed like you had to be happy for a long time together, somehow. It was never clear how.

And it seemed like opposites attracted and completed each other. And then it seemed like they attacked each other, and that longtime couples grew into each other.

And it seemed like people fell in love for no reason at all.

It was all this stuff. It was suffocating and mesmerizing, and Anna wanted it so bad.

"Elsa," she repeats helplessly.

Elsa waits, impossibly patient.

When she first saw Elsa in the café, that's all Anna wanted: the last scene of a feel-good movie with the absolute certainty that these two people will be happy forever; "TRUE LOVE" emblazoned across her chest on a T-shirt with an arrow pointing to her soul-mate; the guarantee that her life had been worthwhile because she'd found someone to share it with.

It turned out that finding True Love was the least of her worries. She had to put her own future together, recover her lost optimism and bearing. By the time she saw Elsa again, standing in line at Dunkin' Donuts, True Love felt like a silly childhood dream. When she'd chased after Elsa a small part of her had still been chasing the crazy, doomed dream of a naïve girl. But the rest of her knew, had learned, that True Love wasn't about chasing after someone on a grey sidewalk until your legs gave out. Her desperation to meet the girl inside the pantsuit, at the other end of the cat leash, with her hands wrapped around a mug of some steaming drink, had nothing to do with losing the opportunity to find True Love, but losing the chance to know Elsa.

She'd dreamed about Elsa for so long, she needed to make sure the girl was real.

"I wasn't looking for True Love," Anna stammers at last. "That day. When I saw you again. I was looking for you."

Tilting her head, Elsa squints back at her. It was supposed to be a compliment or at least vaguely romantic, but of course, Anna botched it. She made it sound like she didn't think Elsa was attractive or something.

"I mean—It's just—" Anna doesn't know how to articulate this revelation. The idea of it makes sense in her head, but out loud the words become either pretentious or inane.

No. Elsa's not the True Love Anna was looking for. She doesn't buy roses or battle tyrants. She doesn't do grand gestures. She's safe. Sometimes she's exciting, and sometimes she bores Anna to death going on about her work day. Not everything she does makes Anna happy and warm on the inside. God, sometimes Anna wants to slap her she's so annoying, insisting with unfounded expertise that moisture was coming in through the open window, anal about scraping all the gravy from Marshmallow's cans of wet food, lecturing Anna on how to dress herself in the mornings. But they work.

They're not actually opposites, not really complementary, and not quite similar either. But they both get worked up by the same news stories, both want to leave parties at around the same time, both like to hole up in little cafés and fall in love with the people around them. Elsa can do the laundry and bookkeeping and Anna can cook and dust the furniture. They can trade off cleaning the bathroom.

And they can spend the rest of their lives together, free from the fever and paraphernalia of True Love.

"I love you," Anna chokes out.

"I love you too."

Elsa loves her, and she wants her to feel it.

"I love you," Anna restates, trying to devise an proper ending to that thought. All the lines she's ever heard, from every movie, every novel, every schmaltzy soap opera flood into her head.

The flattering but superficial. I love you, and you're beautiful. I love you because you're beautiful, because you are beautiful…on the inside. You look lovely in the moonlight. You remind me of the sunrise. You're gorgeous. I can see your beautiful soul.

The absurdly optimistic ones. Let me love you forever. Let's grow old together. We're never growing old. Marry me? Nothing can hurt us now. Love conquers all.

The bordering on unhealthy. I'll give up everything. I can't breathe when you're not in the room. I need you. I can't live without you.

The outright unhealthy. You're my drug. The only good thing I have going for me. You're mine. It hurts just looking at you. I'd kill myself. Please don't leave me.

Anna's favorites, the sickeningly sweet. You are my sunshine. Now I am whole. Sugar is sweet, so are you. My day just got brighter. You complete me. You make my dr—

"Sometimes," Elsa whispers softly, "you feel like a dream come true."

The lump in Anna's throat swells until she feels like she'll strangle herself on it if she doesn't speak. "You're better than any dream I've ever had," she breathes.

They stay in the café all afternoon until "Ice Ice Baby" starts playing through the speakers, and Elsa winces, and Anna laughs so hard she almost cries.

Hooray for completion! Overall, I am quite pleased with the way this fic turned out.

Random bits of trivia:

Elsa's hometown was inspired partly by Lake Wobegon from A Prairie Home Companion (I haven't listened to the show in forever, so a lot of it I just made up). Mostly because I was trying to figure out the details of the town and remembered that there were a lot of Norwegian immigrants in the Midwest.

When I was writing the third chapter (which was probably nearly a month ago) I wanted to give Elsa a sibling and Kristoff seemed like the best option-until I was halfway through and remembered that he made a cameo in the first chapter in Anna's foreign exchange program. Then I figured, "Who cares? He can be both." One reviewer noticed it in the last chapter, so I thought I'd congratulate them.

This last scene with Anna was originally written as mostly dialogue with Anna trying to articulate what she felt. It sucked. Some things are better left unspoken, unless you want to sound like an overly earnest motivational speaker. In a rare burst of industry, I rewrote most of the scene.

Many things in Elsa's scenes are directly inspired by specific Billy Collins poems. In total, I "borrowed" (let's just pretend I made meaningful and sophisticated allusions) lines and ideas from ten poems: 4 in Chapter 2, 5 in Chapter 3, and 1 in Chapter 4.

I was going to have some sort of contest to see who could figure out most of them, but that idea got way too complicated. In any case, I am curious to see if anyone picked up on them and how many people can name. Some of them are easy. In Chapter 3, I literally talk about Elsa reading particular poems. Others are embedded into the storyline. A few are lines I worked in from certain poems. If anyone can name them all, I will be very impressed.

I might even write something for you.