Begin Again

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Madison

The universe doesn't take turns. It waits until you're not looking, hands you everything you ever wanted, and then breaks you in half.

I know this because of a Thursday in March.

I came home between shifts wearing fryer grease and someone else's cigarette smoke and found an envelope in the mailbox. Cream-colored, thick, expensive paper that had no business sitting in a place like ours.

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine was embossed across the top.

My hands were shaking by the time I got it open. I read it until the words blurred into shapes. Then I did something I hadn't done in years—I laughed until I cried, or cried until I laughed, alone on a kitchen floor that needed replacing.

And somewhere in the middle of that I looked around.

The radiator in the corner had never worked, not once in two years, and we'd stopped calling the landlord about it sometime in the fall when it became clear he wasn't going to do anything and we weren't going anywhere.

Jack had dragged a space heater up from the basement instead.

It sat there now, its orange cord coiled on the floor like a sleeping snake.

Another temporary fix in a life made of duct tape and 'maybe next month. '

The window above the sink had a gap along the frame that let the cold in all winter, and we'd stuffed it with a dish towel and pretended that was fine. Everything in this apartment had a workaround. Everything in this life did.

But in my hands was a letter that said that someday, maybe, I wouldn't have to live like this.

I sat there on that floor for a long time, laughing at nothing, at everything, at the absolute absurdity of my name on that letterhead. Madison Clarke. They'd spelled it right and everything.

I’d written the essay after a double shift, squinting through the spiderweb crack on Jack’s laptop screen because mine had finally given up the ghost last semester.

I'd picked up extra shifts for two weeks to cover the application fee, lived on peanut butter and whatever the kitchen at Rosie's was willing to send home with me.

Part of me had always known I was good enough. The rest of me had spent twenty-three years waiting to be proven wrong. And here was Johns Hopkins, of all places, telling me I'd been right all along.

The first thing I wanted to do was call Jack.

He didn't pick up. He was probably shoulder-deep in an engine block, his phone vibrating against a workbench across the shop. I sent him a quick text instead.

Call me when you get this. I have news!

I thought about adding more, maybe typing out the whole thing in one breathless message, with capital letters and some punctuation that’d leave no room for doubt. I didn't. I wanted to hear his voice when I told him. I wanted the real thing.

So I just sent those nine words and took a long, deep breath.

I had to be back at Rosie's in forty minutes.

I folded the letter carefully, put it on the counter, and went to check the kitchen drawer where we kept loose change.

Quarters mostly, a few dimes, one crumpled dollar bill that had been there so long I'd stopped counting it.

I smoothed it out anyway and added it to the pile.

It was barely enough, but it’d do. There was a liquor store on the way, and I had enough time to stop in and grab something with bubbles—cheap prosecco, or whatever they had on the bottom shelf. A splurge, sure, but what the hell.

I grabbed my jacket and headed out the door.

* * *

By nine o'clock Jack still hadn't called.

I stood outside Rosie's with my phone in my hand and typed out another text.

Hey, heading home. You there?

I watched the screen for a moment before putting it away.

The night was cold. I walked home with both hands shoved in my pockets, half-expecting my phone to buzz the whole way. It didn't, and the apartment was dark when I got home.

I hit the light switch and stood in the doorway for a moment. No boots by the door. No keys on the counter. Everything exactly as I'd left it, including the letter, still folded on the counter where I'd put it that afternoon.

"Jack?" My voice went nowhere.

I put the prosecco in the fridge and tried his phone. Four rings, voicemail. I hung up and tried again. Same thing.

I kept standing there, not quite sure what to do with my hands.

Then I got my phone back out and scrolled through my contacts until I found it.

Hector's Garage. Jack had put the number in there himself, months ago, standing right where I was standing now.

In case I'm ever late and you can't reach me, he'd said.

I'd rolled my eyes, but he'd looked pleased with himself anyway. I'd never used it.

I stared at it for a second before I hit dial.

Hector picked up on the third ring. He sounded gruff, distracted, and there was some game on loud in the background.

"Hi, sorry to bother you. Is Jack there by any chance?"

"Nah, he took off early. Around five." He paused for a moment. "Said he had something to take care of. Everything alright?"

"Yes, fine. Sorry to have bothered you. Thank you."

I hung up and considered Hector’s words. Around five. He'd left early, told Hector he had somewhere to be, and hadn't called me once in the four hours since.

Jack rode a motorcycle. It was the thing I hated most about him and he knew it, and every time he was late I went to the same dark place—some patch of ice, some idiot who hadn't checked his mirror…

But this didn't feel like that. This felt like something else.

I paced until I finally accepted it: I couldn't stay in the apartment.

I told myself I was being ridiculous as I pulled my jacket back on. Jack was fine. He'd lost track of time, or run into someone, or his phone had died and he'd forgotten to charge it at the garage. There was an explanation. There was always an explanation.

I tried him one more time on the way out. Again, voicemail.

I walked to the supermarket first, because it was close and because I needed to believe there was a normal reason for all of this. His bike wasn't in the lot. I stood in the cold feeling faintly stupid, then turned and kept walking.

I checked the stretch of road by the garage, half-expecting to see him pulled over somewhere, crouched over the engine with his phone dead and his hands dirty. Nothing. I looped past the laundromat, the pizza place on the corner, the little park he sometimes cut through when he walked home.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

I turned and started heading home. That was for the best. I'd go home, I'd wait, I'd stop acting like a lunatic. And then I turned onto Calloway Street and saw it.

His bike was parked outside a bar called The Blue Anchor, a dim little place I'd never been inside of, neon sign half-burnt out in the window. I stopped walking, my heart picking up in a way I didn't want to examine too closely.

Jack wasn't much of a drinker. The occasional beer at home, sure, or a round with the guys from the garage maybe once a month. He didn't disappear to bars. It wasn't who he was. Which meant whatever was happening in there… it wasn't nothing.

I pushed open the door and went in.

Stale beer and old smoke clung to the air, thick enough to taste. The place had been dark for so long it had stopped caring. A few guys at the bar looked up. Nobody said anything, but I felt it—wrong door, wrong girl.

The bartender, a barrel chested guy with a trimmed beard, was hauling a keg up from behind the bar. I went straight to him.

"Excuse me. Did a guy come in on a motorcycle? Dark hair, about this tall?"

He straightened up. Something moved across his face, just for a second, before he nodded. "Yeah, sure did. Just stepped out, actually."

I thanked him and pushed back through the door, back out into the cold.

I looked up and down the street. Jack’s bike was still there, but other than that…

nothing. There was a parking lot across the road, a streetlight with a flicker in it, but there was nobody around.

I turned toward the alley running along the side of the building.

It was narrow and dark, the kind of dark that swallows detail.

A scuff of boots against brick made me stop. I took a step forward.

The alley came into focus slowly. Shadows mostly, a dumpster against the wall, and then… there it was.

Two bodies, pressed together, his hands on her waist, her fingers twisted in his hair.

The worn leather of his jacket was unmistakable, even in the shadows. The slant of his shoulders—the same shoulders I’d leaned on this morning—was a silhouette I’d know anywhere.

Jack.

I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough for it to become real, which took longer than it should have.

My brain kept trying to find another explanation, kept reaching for something.

Maybe this was a friend, a cousin, someone I didn't know about, some innocent thing I was misreading in the dark.

But there was nothing innocent about the way his hands moved.

Nothing innocent about the sound she made, low and quiet, when he pressed her further back against the wall.

The cold had stopped registering. I couldn't feel my fingers, couldn't feel the ground under my feet.

I was aware, distantly, that I was still holding my phone.

That the prosecco was sitting in our fridge.

That the letter was still on the counter where I'd left it, folded in thirds, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine embossed across the top.

I thought about that letter for some reason.

I thought about the kitchen floor and the space heater and the dish towel stuffed in the window frame.

I thought about the application fee I'd scraped together shift by shift, and the essay I'd written at midnight on his cracked laptop, and the way I'd laughed alone in that kitchen because I couldn't help it, because it was too big to hold.

The first thing I'd wanted to do was call Jack.

Now all I wanted to do was run.

So I did.