"Yeah. I remember."
"Cedar Falls suits me." She turned her gaze to the window, watching the reflection of the kitchen against the dark garden outside. "It took me a while to figure out why. But it does."
I didn't ask why. I almost did—the question was right there, heavy on my tongue—but I caught myself. Whatever answer I was fishing for wasn't one I’d earned yet.
"She would have loved this," Maddie said.
I looked at her.
"Cassie." She gestured vaguely toward the empty table, to the spot where Lily had been holding court. "This whole thing. Lily conning you into dinner, the book, all of it." She paused, a ghost of a laugh catching in her throat. "She'd have been insufferable about it."
I looked at the empty table, too. "Yeah. She would have."
"She always thought she knew best," Maddie said. She didn't sound bitter. It was just the truth, fond and sad in the way of things that were both at once.
"She usually did," I said.
Maddie smiled at that. It was small and real, and it stayed for a moment before fading into something more contemplative. She stared at the spot where Lily had sat for a long time. I didn't rush her. The kitchen just held the silence for us.
"I should have called more," she said finally. "The last few years. I kept meaning to."
"Me too," I said.
She looked at me then. It was a long, level gaze that didn’t ask for anything and didn’t offer any easy outs. We both knew we’d loved the same person, and we both knew we’d done it badly in our own ways. There was no way to fix that, and for once, neither of us tried to.
She picked up her coat from the back of the chair.
"Thank you for dinner," she said. "It was—it was really nice, Jack."
"Yeah," I said. "It was."
I followed her toward the door. We stood in the hallway for a moment with the porch light glowing outside. Lily was asleep upstairs, and Cassie was everywhere in the walls of the house.
"Goodnight," she said.
"Night, Maddie."
She walked to her car. She reached the door, hand on the handle, and stopped. Just for a second, her back was to me, her silhouette sharp against the streetlight.
Then she turned.
"For what it's worth," she said. "I'm glad you're back."
She got in the car before I could say anything. I stood in the doorway and watched the taillights disappear around the corner. Then I went back inside and turned the light off. I sat at the kitchen table in the dark for a while, not thinking about anything in particular.
Which meant thinking about everything.
Chapter Thirty-One
Madison
Igot home at half ten and stood in the middle of my apartment for a moment without turning the lights on.
I went to the bathroom and turned the shower on hot. I stood under the spray for longer than I needed to, trying to think about nothing, which was exactly when the "everything" arrived.
This was stupid.
That was the first thing. The clearest thing. I was a thirty-five-year-old trauma surgeon who had built a life from the ground up. I’d gotten myself off the kitchen floor of a derelict apartment and pushed all the way to Johns Hopkins on nothing but my own two feet. And yet, here I was, standing in a shower on a Friday night thinking about Jack Henley like I was twenty-three again and hadn’t learned a single thing.