Now?
I looked at that word.
Are you at the hospital?
Day off. Working from home.
Three dots. Then an address on Cedar Falls, Birchwood Lane. There was a pause, and then:
Door's open.
I put my phone in my pocket and grabbed my jacket from the hook. I stood in the hallway for a moment, the house quiet around me. It was the strange stillness of a Tuesday morning with nowhere to be and only one thing left to do.
My heart was hammering the same frantic, uneven rhythm I’d felt the first time I walked Maddie home from a party more than twelve years ago. The night I’d known I loved her and hadn’t found the words yet. It was that specific feeling of being right on the edge of a cliff, the air turning thin, the whole world narrowing down to a single address on a single street.
I was thirty-six years old and I felt like a kid about to break something.
I locked the door behind me and went.
Chapter Forty-Four
Madison
I'd been trying to read the same paragraph for twenty minutes.
It was a journal article, something I'd been meaning to get to for weeks, open on my laptop on the kitchen table with a cup of coffee going cold beside it. I read the first sentence. Then the second. Then I was thinking about Saturday again and I went back to the first sentence.
I closed the laptop, got up, and went to the window.
I looked at Birchwood Lane, at the Tuesday morning quiet, at the neighbour's cat lazily stretching its back. I'd lived here for two years and I liked it; the light in the mornings, the quiet, the sense of having chosen a place rather than just landed in it. I'd made it mine in the way I made things mine: slowly, without committing too much, always with one eye on the exit.
I went back to the table, opened the laptop, and re-read the first sentence. The words were just shapes on a screen. My brain was stuck on a loop, playing back the conversation from Saturday until the edges were frayed.
What are we doing?
I don’t know yet, he’d said.I just don’t want to stop.
We’d left it there. We’d walked home in the wet afternoon light with Lily between us and our shoulders almost touching. Then I’d gone home and stood in my kitchen for a long time, staring at the countertop until the shadows shifted.
That was Saturday.
Now it was Tuesday. He’d texted, and I’d repliedNow?before I could find a reason not to. I’d sent my address before I could talk myself out of it. And now I was pacing my kitchen, my heart doing something irregular and frantic, like I’d suddenly forgotten how rooms worked.
I went to the window. I came back. I checked the time.
I thought about what it would mean. Actually thought about it, with the same effort I'd used tonotthink about it for months. What it would mean to let this be a real thing, to let Jack Henley back in.
It would mean the conversation. The one about twelve years ago, about that Thursday in March, about what I’d found in that alley. I’d spent a decade treating that night like scar tissue. I was aware of the restriction, I knew where the edges were, but I never pressed on the nerve.
It still hurt. That was the truth of it. Not in the acute way it had hurt at twenty-three, not the kind of hurt that took your legs out from under you… but it was there, a specific tenderness, one that didn't go away so much as it became part of the landscape. I hadn’t forgiven him. I didn't even know if forgiveness was the right metric, or if it mattered less than the simple, persistent question of what I wanted.
What did I want?
I stopped pacing.
What I wanted was the kitchen at four in the morning with the kettle whistling. I wanted his hand under that awning. He’d been so unhurried, like he’d finally found the moment he’d been looking for since he got back to town.
I wanted the way he looked at Lily. It was an unguarded, soft thing that had been building in him since that hospital room in March. And I wanted the way he looked at me when he thought I wasn't looking. Which I always was.