He tips my jaw up, whispers almost against my lips. “If anyone can negotiate a happy ending, it’s Nora Stephens.”
Despite—or maybe because of—the sensation of my chest cracking clear in half, I whisper back, “I think one of those only costs forty dollars at Spaaaahhh.”
He laughs, kisses the corner of my mouth. “That brain.”
Neither of us leaves the shop that night. I don’t want to leave him, and I don’t want him to feel alone in the dark and quiet. Even if it can’t last, even if it’s just for tonight, I want him to know that I’ve got him, the way he’s had me. The way he has me.
For once, I sleep like a rock.
* * *
In the morning, I stir awake and piece together the night. The fight, finding Charlie at the bookstore, falling into each other again.
Afterward, we talked for hours. Books, takeout, family. I told him about how Mom’s nose used to crinkle just like Libby’s when she laughed. How they wore the same perfume, but it smells different on Libby than it did on her.
I tell him about Mom’s birthday routine. How every December twelfth at noon, we’d go to Freeman Books and browse for hours, until she picked out one perfect book to buy at full price.
“Libby and I still go,” I said. “Or we used to. Every December twelfth, at noon—twelve, twelve, at twelve o’clock. Mom used to make a big deal of that.”
“Twelve’s a great number,” Charlie said. “Every other number can go to hell.”
“Thank you,” I agreed.
At some point, we drifted off, and I wake now to the realization that, in our sleep, we’ve begun to move together again. I kiss him awake, and in a heady fog, we give in to each other, time grinding to a halt, the world fading to black around us.
Afterward, I lay my head on his chest and listen to his blood move through his veins, the current of Charlie, as he plays with my hair. His voice is thick and scratchy when he says, “Maybe we can figure it out.”
Like it’s an answer to a question, like the conversation never stopped. All night, all morning, every touch and kiss, all of it was a back-and-forth, a push and pull, a negotiation or a revision. Like everything is between us. Maybe this could work.
“Maybe,” I whisper in agreement. We’re not looking into each other’s faces, and I can’t help but think that’s purposeful: like if we looked, we couldn’t pretend any longer, and we’re not ready to give up the game.
Charlie threads his fingers through mine and lifts the back of my hand to his lips. “For what it’s worth,” he says, “I doubt I will ever like anyone else in the world as much as I like you.”
I slip my arms around his neck and climb into his lap, kissing his temples, his jaw, his mouth. Love, I think, a tremor in my hands as they move into his hair, as he kisses me.
The last-page ache.
The deep breath in after you’ve set the book aside.
When he walks me to the door sometime later, he takes my face in his hands and says, “You, Nora Stephens, will always be okay.”
33
LIBBY SITS ON the front steps, wrapped in one of Brendan’s old sweatshirts, two cups of coffee steaming on the step beside her.
Neither of us speaks as I close the distance, but I can tell she’s spent the night crying, and I doubt I look any better.
She holds out a mug. “Might be cold by now.”
I take it and, after another strained second, perch on the step, dew seeping into my jeans.
“Should I go first?” she asks.
I shrug. We’ve never been this angry with each other—I don’t know what comes next.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” she says, like she’s trying to shove the words through a too-narrow doorway.
All the way over here, I wondered if laying into her would give me some sense of control. But there’s no outcome to force here. What I want is slippery, uncatchable: those days when there was nothing between us, when we belonged together more than we belonged anywhere else. When it felt like I belonged.
“When did we start keeping things from each other?”
She looks surprised and hurt, almost impossibly small. “You’ve always kept things from me, Nora,” she says. “And I know you were trying to protect me, but it still counts when you pretend things are okay and they’re not. Or when you try to fix things without me knowing.”
“So is that what you’re doing?” I ask. “You kept the fact that you were moving away from me so that—what? It wouldn’t hurt until the last possible second?”
“That’s not what I was doing.” Fresh tears spring into her eyes. She burrows her fists against them, shoulders twitching.
“I’m sorry.” I touch her arm. “I’m not trying to be mean.”
She looks up, wiping her tears away. “I was trying,” she says, through a shuddering breath, “to win you over.”
“Libby, in what universe do you need to win me over? I’m sorry for making you feel incapable. I was trying to help, but I never thought you needed to be fixed. Never.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she says. “I wanted to win you over to . . .” She waves toward the meadow and the sun-dappled footbridges, the flowering bushes swaying in the breeze and the thick piney forest covering the rolling hills.
And then the rest of it clicks. The list wasn’t about Libby trying on her new life, and it wasn’t about saying some spectacular goodbye or making a last-ditch effort to save me from a life of sleeping alone with my laptop.
It was a sales pitch.
“Brendan wanted me to tell you right away,” she goes on. “But I thought that maybe—if you came here, if you saw what it could be like . . . I wanted you to come with us.” Her voice cracks. “And I thought if you realized what life could be here, maybe even met someone, you would want that too. But then you started spending time with Charlie, and—god, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you like that, Nora. I was going to let the whole thing go, but then you said he was staying . . . and it just seemed like . . . like you could want this too. Like I could have all this—and you.”
I feel so empty, wrung out, like I’ve been treading water for weeks only to realize the shore was a mirage.
This is Libby, who never asked for anything until a month ago, admitting what she really wants.
For me to follow her.
And I want to give her what she wants. I always want her to have everything she wants.