She’d started that one with Cassie. I’d spent a night flipping through it, looking at the pages where the colors bled together.Lily’s frantic, scribbled edges meeting Cassie’s steady, careful strokes. Some of the animals had been finished by Cassie in those last weeks, her handwriting naming the colors in the margins. It was a map of a time I’d missed, and I wasn't ready to let it go.
I drank my coffee and stared at nothing. That lasted about ten minutes, and then Maddie was in my head.
The market. The rain.
Her hand.
I’d kept Saturday at a distance. It’s what you do when looking at something directly means you have to deal with it. I’d focused on the routine instead: the garage, Lily, dinner, the bath, the bedtime. I’d maintained the machinery of the life I’d built and kept everything else in the margins. I hadn't turned to face it once.
But now, with no work and no Lily and nothing to put between me and my own head, it was right there.
I’d reached for her, and she’d answered. Just her fingers curling around mine in the dark space between our coats. She hadn’t looked at me, but she’d held on. She’d stayed right there in the rain and let it be true.
I got up and rinsed my mug, the water loud in the empty sink.
What was I doing?
I’d had my chance. I’d had three years of it, and I’d stood in a bar on a Thursday night and traded it for nothing.
I'd spent twelve years telling myself it was for her own good. That she was better off without a man who had his father's voice in his ear and his father's weakness in him.. And maybe I'd believed it at the time. Maybe I'd even been right in the limited, cowardly way of a man who makes the wrong choice and then constructs reasons for it. But she’d gone to Baltimore and become a surgeon and built a life, and none of it had required meto be gone. My absence hadn't been her fuel; it was just a hole I’d left behind.
She'd done all of it in spite of me, not because of me.
And now she was here. I was here. Lily had somehow threaded us back together, and I was standing at the kitchen sink at half-past nine on a Tuesday morning with the phantom weight of her hand still resting in mine.
I didn't know if I had any right to want what I was wanting. I didn't know if a man like me got to have a second chance at a life he’d already walked away from.
Maybe I should pull back. Step away before the momentum carried us somewhere we couldn't come back from. Maddie had a life. She had a career and twelve years of being fine without me, and I had a track record—a long, documented history—of being exactly the kind of man who let her down.
I stood there and let that sink in.
Then I thought about Cassie.
I thought about that phone call. It had been twelve years ago, weeks before I’d stood in that bar and ended things.
Take the ring, Jack. It should be Maddie’s.
She’d said it like she already knew I was drifting. Like she was trying to tie me to the ground before I floated away. Cassie had known me my whole life; she’d never once—not even when I was at my absolute worst—stopped believing I was worth the trouble. She was the one who’d kept Maddie’s number in that green address book all these years, just waiting for me to finally catch up to her.
Cassie wasn't here to tell me to stop being an idiot anymore. I had to do that for myself.
I dried my hands.
The fear was still there. It was always going to be there—the voice that sounded like my father, the low comfortable certainty that the math always came out the same way in the end. I wasn'tgoing to outrun it. I'd spent twelve years trying to outrun it and all I'd managed was a lot of distance and a lot of nothing.
But I was thirty-six years old and I was still standing. Lily was at school, the house was clean, and the list was mostly crossed off. And Maddie Clarke had held my hand in the rain and refused to let go.
Maybe that was enough to go on. Maybe it was the only thing that mattered.
I picked up my phone.
Can we talk? Properly. There's something I should have said a long time ago.
I stared at it. Put the phone down, then picked it up again.
Sent it.
I stood at the counter and waited. A minute. Two.