It made sense.
That was the maddening, inconvenient, completely inexcusable truth. Jack made sense in a way very few things in my life ever had. Not because he was an easy solution or because the history had vanished. Not even because the fear had gone away. He was just simply true.
He was true in the way Cedar Falls had started to feel like home. He was true in the way a green address book with my number in it had sat in a drawer for twelve years because Cassie had decided I was hers and never changed her mind.
I wanted him.
I’d wanted him for months. I’d been calling it a dozen other things—gratitude, closure, habit—but I was done lying to myself about it.
My phone buzzed on the table.
Five minutes away. Still okay?
I picked it up.
Yes.
I put the phone down and looked at my house. I looked at the journal article open on the laptop and the cold coffee. I looked at the life I'd built. It was good and real and it was mine.
I thought about the off-ramp I hadn't taken. I thought about Tom's small, sad smile. There is a quality to a decision you've already made before you've admitted it to yourself. It has a weight you can't ignore.
The knock came seven minutes later.
I opened the door.
He was in his jacket, the one I'd come to know. His hair was slightly wind-caught from the walk. He looked at me with thatsame careful holding of himself I'd seen for months. It was a registering, a quiet assessment, and for a second neither of us said anything.
Then he stepped inside. I closed the door and he turned to face me. I could see him gathering himself, finding the words. He had the brace of a man who had decided to say the hard thing and was finally making himself do it.
"Twelve years ago," he said. "I—I fucked up. I fucked up and I?—"
He kept talking. I know he did. I could see his mouth moving, see the effort of it, the way he was making himself say the thing he'd come here to say. I just couldn't hear it properly. My heart was too loud. It had been getting louder since the knock at the door, since I'd opened it and seen him standing there with the wind in his hair and that look on his face, and now it was the only thing in the room.
I watched him talk. I watched his hands. One of them moved slightly, like he was trying to find the shape of what he was saying. I watched the lines of his face and the eyes that had been looking at me for months in a way I’d refused to name. I thought about the market and the rain and his hand finding mine. It had felt like something settling into place.
He was still talking.
I crossed the distance between us and kissed him.
Not because I didn't want to hear it. Not because the conversation wasn't coming. But because I'd been standing on the edge of this for months and he was here, in my apartment, having walked across town to say the thing. And I knew—I already knew—there would be time for all of it, for the words and the history and everything that still needed to be said.
But right now there was just this.
He went still for a second. Then his hands came up and found my face and he kissed me back, and it was nothing likeI remembered and exactly like I remembered. The apartment was very quiet around us. Outside, Birchwood Lane went on doing its Tuesday morning thing, entirely indifferent to the fact that something that had been broken for twelve years had just, quietly, begun to mend.
I pulled back just enough to see his face. He looked at me like I was something he'd been looking for.
"Hi," I said.
Something broke open in his expression.
"Hi," he said.
Chapter Forty-Five
Jack
The light came through the curtains in long, pale strips. It lay across the floorboards and the edge of the mattress and the curve of Maddie’s shoulder.