Chapter 33
D rake and Ellie lucked out; Nancy had not eaten the aftermath of the music box mess on the floor. Ellie spotted the remnants after they changed into their pajamas. The dancer had taken the brunt of the fall; she was without an arm and a leg, putting her in a tipsy fifth position.
“What do you mean, you broke it?” Ellie asked when Drake explained what happened. She held the tiny toy arm under the light. The edges were sharp on her fingers.
“I sort of threw it.” Drake shuffled around the rug to make sure he picked up all the other elements of the crime scene. “Not sort of. I definitely threw it.”
“Well, okay.” Ellie nodded. “That adds up.” She flipped the broken box on its back to assess the damage.
The edge of a familiar lavender paper was still sticking out of the small slot in the bottom.
“Ah- ha ,” Ellie said. She thumbed it out, unrolled it on the table, and read the message that Melinda must have written for the next owner. “Find someone who makes you dance.”
Ellie remembered those words. She had read them on her first visit to Drake’s old apartment.
As he gave her a tour, she noticed everything he owned had a function; even his wall art let the viewer know they were near a big city.
The music box was so out of place that it had grabbed her attention.
Ellie picked it up, lifted the lid, and twisted the music key.
The dancer began to spin. How could Drake have known she’d had one just like it when she was a kid?
It was the perfect gift. At least, it had seemed like the perfect gift before she knew its backstory.
“It was kind of a weird gift,” Ellie called out. “Why did you give this to me?”
“I didn’t,” Drake clarified.
Ellie pointed a finger into his chest. “Yes, you did!”
Drake pulled the accusing finger off him.
Ellie was wrong. He never gave her the box; she had found it.
Ellie had arrived early that night and caught him in the middle of trying to stash anything off-putting out of sight.
He’d managed to grab his embarrassing childhood heirlooms, but he’d missed the most important thing to hide.
“I had the box out because I was going to get rid of it,” he explained.
“But you found it first. I agreed it was a gift because you decided it was one.”
Ellie nodded. Everything about that night made more sense— how Drake had avoided eye contact and left the room before she read the purple paper to him.
“There are so many things that could’ve been solved if we’d talked to each other,” she said, leaning back onto her elbows.
Drake shot up off the floor with new determination.
“Speaking of talking,” he said. “I liked your idea to burn the cinema rules.”
Ellie hadn’t meant a literal fire. But minutes later, she found herself following Drake outside and watching him stack wood in the backyard fire pit.
The blaze smoldered and twisted into the dark sky.
Drake dropped the paper with the rules on it above the red waves, and they crinkled to ash.
The cold air made Ellie’s shoulders shiver, despite the pyrotechnics.
As she jogged in place a little, she started to speak.
“In honor of burning the rules,” Ellie said.
She looked at Drake for reassurance. He nodded for her to keep going.
“The worst part of watching your memories was, I could really see you with Melinda.” Drake heaved another log on the fire.
“I know she’s with Jamie, but I could see you happy together.
Even now.” Ellie’s words struggled to come out.
It was like she was tugging on a zipper that kept getting mired in fabric.
Eventually, though, the zipper budged. “I wondered if she would’ve been better for you. You had so much in common—”
“Too much,” Drake blurted. “We had too much in common. With you, there’s friction. I think I need that friction, or I’d never grow. But sometimes, I get this sense …I’m afraid you think I’m boring. I mean, I’m no cowboy.”
“How did we get to cowboys, partner?” Ellie was dodging that she’d been called out.
She knew what Drake meant; Hudson had drawn her in more than anyone she had dated back then.
While Ellie had been busy thinking about how similar she and Melinda were, Drake had been weighing how different he was from what he believed her type to be.
“That guy was so complicated and artsy,” Drake said. “I’m nothing like the cowboy. I’m more like that Lucas guy with the loft. Only Lucas with a less expendable income. Lucas, without glassware.”
Ellie didn’t care about glassware, but she couldn’t get this out before Drake continued his thought.
“You told Jen you didn’t want to end up with someone like him,” Drake explained.
“So, I’m sitting there thinking, that’s me .
She doesn’t want to end up with me. And when I saw the cowboy, I kept coming back to that quote in ‘Yellow Dress.’ Your first love prepares you for your second love, which is the real love.
It scares me that I’m your first love, Ellie. What if I’m the one you leave?”
Ellie nodded. “I get that fear,” she said. “I think mine was the opposite. Like, what if I’m just a replacement for the person you can’t let go of?”
Drake wrapped his arm around her waist. He’d thought he was the only one with that nagging worry of being abandoned, but Ellie had felt it, too.
Drake had been so lost in his private world that he hadn’t done enough to show her there was never a competition.
Melinda was only a chapter in the story that led to him ending up with Ellie.
“You’re not a replacement,” he said. “Not at all. But I get why you would think that, seeing as I repeated pretty much everything in our relationship.”
“Yes.” Ellie nodded. “Thank you.”
Drake shared the breakthrough he had on his trip home.
He was afraid of risks because his parents were afraid of risks.
He repeated parts of his old relationship because those elements were comfortable and familiar.
But in doing that, he’d failed to help them build something new together. They hadn’t gotten a true fresh start.
“I’ve been afraid of risks, too,” Ellie admitted. “Loving someone is scary for me. I don’t want to have to say goodbye to a person I love again. You’re the only person who has been worth that risk.”
They both fell silent. A dog next door howled over the wood fence, the moon beaming bright overhead. The conversation was freeing. And the rules, they both realized without acknowledging it, had turned to ash. The rest came tumbling out quickly.
“I shouldn’t have lied to Hudson.”
“I should’ve told you where that ring came from.”
“I shouldn’t have bought my wedding dress at her store. God, that was dumb.”
“You bought your … I shouldn’t have assumed you saw the ring in those photos. Or brought you back to the cinema—”
“I shouldn’t have forced you there to begin with, Drake.”
“You didn’t force me.”
“Well, I gave you a push in that direction.” Ellie hesitated, about to surface a thought that surprised her.
“For someone who insisted we go there, I’m not sure it was the best thing.
I mean, what if the details of the past are supposed to stay fuzzy for a reason?
Maybe we should trust each other to share what’s important from our history and let everything else fall away. ”
Drake considered this. “Maybe,” he decided eventually. “But I think it’s good we went.”
“It is?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know you mentioned that the cinema shows what haunts us. But I think it shows us what we need to see to move forward. And I want to move forward with you, Ellie. I want to move so far forward that we reach places most people never find—whether it’s a magical cinema or a precipice overlooking the ocean, or—”
“The precipice part sounds a little edgy for you.”
“I guess you’re changing me.”
Ellie nodded. “You should know that I wasn’t alone at the hotel, Drake.”
He resisted the strong urge to press on the statement.
“I got all dressed up earlier before I went to the hospital. I went to the lounge. And you were there. What I mean is, I sat— really sat—with the piece I wrote about Finn’s, the piece that’s actually about you.
I hadn’t read it in a while. Sure, I wrote about the bar, but the reason people love that piece is that it evoked the feeling of new beginnings.
Every word was charged with this excitement.
And I kept thinking how you make my work better.
And you make me better,” she said. “We just need to open up to each other more. I know that now. So let’s keep talking. ”
“Okay,” Drake agreed, putting the fire out. “We can keep talking. But can we do it inside? It’s freezing out here.”
Back in the house, a fog had lifted; everything was more comfortable than it had been earlier that night. They made tea, lit the indoor fireplace, and took both sides of the couch next to Nancy.
“Do you ever think …” Ellie started. The cadence of her words slowed and softened. “Do you think that maybe the most significant moments in life aren’t cinematic at all?”
Drake knew what she meant. The best things in their life together weren’t sweeping, symphonic moments. The comfortable, quiet memories were the ones worth reliving. Watching a fire. Eating takeout. Lying on the couch where they were right then.
He loved their world.
Then, a loud sound interrupted his thoughts. Near the front door, Nancy was pulling a box apart with her teeth. “Nancy!” Ellie clapped without getting up. Nancy made no move to come over. Ellie got up to remove her from the box and peeked at what was inside.
“Are these …”
“Hundreds of Save the Dates,” Drake told her. “Yes.”
Ellie reached to try to pull the box away from Nancy, but it was too heavy to move. “I can’t lift the box,” she said. “Maybe we have too many people? I don’t know if I like this many people.”
Drake agreed. Ellie had pointed out the same thing he felt when he first opened the box and saw the stacks of stationery staring back at him.
“What if,” Ellie posed, “we scrap this plan and rent out a tiny old hotel instead?”
“I’m in,” Drake told her, even though he had a hunch the idea came from wanting to save another old place. Ellie never stopped fighting for what she loved. “We can get married anywhere you like. But I would prefer somewhere not haunted.”
The next morning, the music box was back on the shelf where it belonged. The outside was patched, and the doll’s arm and leg had been reattached with two ribbon casts.
“I sort of thought you’d want to get rid of this,” Drake said when Ellie came behind him with a coffee.
To be fair, Ellie had seriously considered getting rid of the box.
But as she sat with it last night after Drake went to sleep, she acknowledged that she was in no shape to discard something with a past. Instead, she fixed the dancer’s injuries and twirled her inside the box, rediscovering the simple beauty of being able to make her dance.
As she did, Ellie returned to the lavender note for the last time.
Find someone who makes you dance.
The words were never about Drake and Melinda, she knew then. They belonged to the dancer in the box. The ambiguous someone was whoever was lucky enough to spin the key. In this case, Ellie.
Lately, they had been reading into the subtext of every little thing. Even innocent ones.
Drake sat behind her on the couch and cleared his throat. When she turned, he patted the space next to him. “There’s one more thing I need to tell you,” he said.
Ellie accepted the spot. “What’s that?” she asked.
Drake took a sip of his coffee. “We need to finally address what happened that night with Ben. It’s time, Ellie. You need to stop beating yourself up about it.”
“Yeah. Well, that’s a nice idea.”
“I think that what you need is … I think you need to give yourself permission to move on. You don’t have to forget Ben, but it’s time to start loosening your grip. Letting go.”
“I have zero clue how to do that,” Ellie told him.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it, and I have an idea,” Drake said. “If you trust me.”