“Ollie!”
We both start and he drops my wrist, the connection severed. I turn my head in the direction of the voice and see Caroline walking toward us, her head haloed by the bright streetlight, eyes fixed on her brother. When she sees me, she slows down. “Mia . . . hi.”
“Hi,” I say, my eyes drawn immediately to the bump under her shirt. Anyone else might have thought she just had one too many burritos, but I know. My heart twists.
Her attention’s back on Oliver. “Hey—I figured you’d be back in Philly by now.”
“I thought so, too,” he says. “That hour-long crib project? Took more like seven.”
She crinkles her nose. “Sorry. But thanks for doing it.”
“Are you just now getting off work?”
“Yeah, this holiday parade thing has taken more effort and planning than I anticipated.” She glances my way again, her eyes betraying a touch of suspicion. “So what are you guys doing?”
I feel Oliver shift slightly beside me. “I stopped to grab a coffee for the drive back. Ran into Mia.”
It’s just a white lie, but it unsettles me. The fact that he feels the need to lie at all. And it brings everything into sharp focus.
“Oh, cool,” she says.
“I was just headed home, actually,” I say, and that’s when something catches my eye, just beyond Caroline. A car. A familiar car, parked at the end of the street. A silver Infiniti. And though it could be anyone’s Infiniti and Harrison is supposed to be at the hospital, something flutters in my gut. “I’m this way.” I point toward the car, even though mine is parked in the complete opposite direction. “It was good seeing you both.”
Without meeting Oliver’s eyes, I wave, leaving them on the sidewalk, and walk to the end of the street, half wondering if I’m being crazy, but when I reach the Infiniti and see the sport coat Harrison had on this morning in the passenger seat, his orange paisley bow tie haphazardly flung across it, I know.
It’s Harrison’s. He’s not at the hospital. The question is, where is he?
The car is parked in front of the Blue-Eyed Macaw, the inside of the store dark, the sign on the door flipped to Closed.
I glance up and down the street. Oliver and Caroline are gone, and though there are a few other cars parallel parked behind Harrison’s, it feels like a ghost town. But then I hear the unmistakable jangle of a door opening in the distance. I turn the corner and spy a bar I’ve never noticed before. The Quay. I hesitate for just a second before marching forward and opening the door. The inside is dim, but there are more people than I anticipated. They’re all involved in their own conversations, their glasses of beer or cocktails, and no one looks up at me. I scan the half-full tables, the soapstone bar at the back of the room, and I spot him—the familiar curve of his back, the straight hairline delineating his buzz cut from his neck. I take a step forward, not to confront him, necessarily. So he stopped for a drink after work without telling me. It’s not the world’s worst crime.
But then he turns to his right to say something to the person sitting next to him, and I stop cold. I recognize her.
The perky blonde we saw at Sorelli’s. Whitney. The patient whose life Harrison saved. The woman who is going through a divorce.
I take a step backward and nearly crash into a man carrying a tray of beer. “Sorry,” I say, my face flushing red. When I glance back up at Harrison, he’s still engrossed in conversation. He’s smiling, laughing even, and I try to remember the last time he looked at me like that.
And then, my brain unable to process anything else—or maybe it’s my heart that might explode—I turn and rush out into the dark, still night.
Chapter 20
Harrison doesn’t believe in soul mates.
I asked him once, in the early months of our relationship, on the way to that wedding in Maine, Beau and Annie’s. Four hours into the eight-hour road trip, we had devoured a bag of sour gummy worms, two Pepsis, a container of cheddar cheese Pringles and a box of Mike & Ike’s, the evidence littering the floorboards at my feet.
Harrison laughed.
“What?”
“That’s quite a leap from asking why I don’t like peanut butter.”
“So, do you?” I asked.
“Believe in soul mates?”
“Yep.”
“As in, two people who are destined to meet and fall in love over and over in all the past and future incarnations of their souls, forever and ever throughout the span of time?”
“Yep,” I said.
“Nope.” He gave his head a firm shake, keeping his eyes trained on the road. Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye were filling in the gaps of our conversation, singing about the world being a great big onion.
“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t surprised, necessarily. Harrison was more the logical one, the doctor, the science and math guy whose proofs require tangible evidence. I looked out the window. We were passing a service plaza on the Massachusetts Turnpike.
“Wait, do you?” He glanced at me.
“No, not really,” I said. I thought back—I may have at one point, but when you’re eleven and your mom divorces your dad and everything you think you know about love explodes, childish ideas like soul mates are collateral damage. And I learned happiness was a fleeting thing—something that’s here one minute and snatched away the next, like a shooting star or a moonbeam that can’t be caught or held or locked up in a cage.
“So why did you sound so disappointed that I don’t?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know. I guess I kind of hoped one of us did. I like the idea of it. That we were destined to be together. That some powerful universal force draws us to each other, time eternal.”
“Huh,” he said. “I think the opposite is actually more interesting.”
“How so?”
“That in the random chaos of life, you and I met somehow. And out of everyone else in the world that we know, we choose each other. Every day.”
I stared at him. “And here you’re always saying you’re not romantic.”
“It’s actually you who says that.”
I laughed. “You’re right.”
We barreled down the highway a few more miles, passing trees, trees and more trees. Tammi and Marvin had moved on to their next greatest hit.
“You know though, the past-life thing, I could totally buy into,” I said. “It’s so wild to think about—being somebody else, living an entirely different life. What do you think I was? Probably something really cool, like a pirate. Or maybe I had one of those weird jobs that no longer exist today—like a bowling pin resetter. Or a lamplighter. Or an orgy planner.”