Adam almost made the move back to Manhattan, but money was tight and the only way he could support Sharon and Ellen was if he lived in the same house with them. He didn’t exactly get back together with Sharon but it wasn’t an armed camp either. He took over the small study and made it as metropolitan as he could, but the compositions he produced in it and in other cruise cabins never took him further than other cruise cabins.

Sarah kept writing. She composed about three sonnets a week for nearly a decade, and then developed a broader range, expanding into essays and stories. She learned that work produces inspiration, instead of the other way around, and she worked.

She also saw her gynecologist. She was relieved to hear she had no infection or disease. She was dismayed to be told she had insufficient natural lubrication. She’d had a hysterectomy at 35, but she remained married and sexually active till almost 40. Things had changed for her, down there, in the ensuing almost two years of celibacy, and she just hadn’t noticed. She kind of wished she could explain to Adam, but she never had the opportunity.

It’s been nearly 20 years and they haven’t seen one another again. Adam looks for Sarah on the Internet more often than he ever thought he would, and he finds a sonnet now and then with a name close enough to hers that he thinks she’s writing.

Sarah googled Adam once, and gathered from the results that he was still alive, still working cruises, and publishing some complaints about the cruise entertainment industry.

She hasn’t had her dream again. As she would say, “big surprise.” The month she began regular writing she understood the metaphor. She probably said “no duh” to herself when she realized that the forgotten room in her dream stood in for the part of her mind she was finally using.

But she always felt a little bad about the sobbing. She regretted scaring Adam that way. She wished she could have been cooler. She wondered if she’d ever have the capacity to be involved and stay cool.

It wasn’t till last week, when she told the Adam story to a new friend, that Sarah started to view the emotions of that morning differently. “Oh my,” she thought then.

She sees now that part of her sobbing was sudden grief about how much she’d miss Adam. And part of it was fear that whatever miracle had begun, in terms of confidence and about writing, might stop with the removal of the magic feather. She knew those already. What she just realized was that the sobbing wasn’t only about grief and fear. It was also the cathartic release that accompanies big achievements. Her sobs signified a colossal unclogging.

Sarah received a prophecy when she was 21. At an end-of-college party she had her Tarot read by the woman who’d taught her comparative literature course four years earlier. Mrs. Hamilton told her she’d be 40 before she got the writing started. Sarah was beyond dismayed to hear that. She would have disregarded the forecast except that Mrs. Hamilton had been a force amazing when they met before.

She was Miss Litov then. Like all freshmen, Sarah was required to take a basic reading course: English, Comp Lit, Drama or Speech Arts. English was full so she enrolled in Comp Lit. Litov was her professor.

They were assigned to write criticism, but Sarah didn’t. Wouldn’t. Instead she kept a journal. She crafted poetry and prose in the style of the selected writers or in conversation with them, and she turned in her journal at the end of the quarter.

Miss Litov had scheduled a 15-minute “oral” with each student. As soon as she got Sarah alone she faced her and asked “Why do you write like a man?”

Sarah sputtered. She answered about whom she admired: Yeats, Service, Swift, Donne. Litov then gave Sarah some wisdom. She described the effect of love on art. She argued that men have to choose between love and production, but that a woman can use her emotions for material. A woman artist, she said, can ride her hormones. She urged Sarah to keep working, and to let her femaleness flow through everything.

Sarah lost Litov after that. And when she started hearing about the mentor of a friend’s friend – a professor named Mrs. Hamilton who had a possibly Svengali-like effect on an acquaintance named Ruth – she had no suspicion that Mrs. Hamilton was Miss Litov. It wasn’t till Sarah was seated at Ruth’s close-the-apartment party, plate of spaghetti on her lap and glass of Chianti between her feet, informed at least three times that Mrs. Hamilton was due to make an appearance, it wasn’t till the door opened to admit Ruth’s teacher that Litov-Hamilton’s eyes met Sarah’s, and recognition occurred.

That was the night Mrs. Hamilton shuffled the Tarot cards and announced that Sarah would be 40 before she called herself a writer.

Sarah got busy soon after, marrying and working a financial district job that became a career, birthing babies, divorcing, marrying, divorcing, raising those kids and a sick dog and a small nonprofit. She didn’t notice till recently that she started writing regularly when she was 41, that the habit originated in a dark windowless room in the quiet center of movement, and that the genesis was a deluge and an exodus as well.