Chapter 7 Maggie #2
The phone rang at six-thirty, just as I was changing out of my work clothes and into sweats that actually let me breathe.
“I’ll get it!” Diane yelled from the kitchen, and I heard her answer with her usual cheerful “Shaw-Keane residence, Diane speaking.”
“Maggie! It’s for you. It’s a man.”
She said the word like it was written in neon. I grabbed the receiver from her outstretched hand and shooed her away, though she only retreated as far as the kitchen doorway, making no pretense of not eavesdropping.
“Hello?”
“It’s Jack.” His voice was careful, measured. The voice of someone who wasn’t sure of his welcome. “I hope this isn’t a bad time.”
“No. No, it’s fine.” My heart was doing something complicated in my chest. “How are you?”
“Fine. I’m fine.” A pause. “Listen, I was thinking. About what you said. At lunch.”
I held my breath.
“Would you want to get dinner? Tomorrow night?” He cleared his throat. “Somewhere neutral. Not Rosetti’s.”
Rosetti’s. Where we’d had our first real date.
“I’d like that,” I said. “Where were you thinking?”
“There’s a place in the North End. Seafood. It’s called The Anchor. Do you know it?”
I didn’t. I’d have to drive. The North End wasn’t a straight shot on the T from Jamaica Plain, and I’d need the flexibility. Which meant I’d probably get lost at least twice. “I’ll find it.”
“Seven o’clock?”
“Seven works.”
Another pause, longer this time. I could hear him breathing on the other end of the line, could picture him standing in his apartment with the phone cord stretched across the room, the receiver cradled between his ear and shoulder.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Looking forward to it.”
I hung up and turned to find Diane grinning at me from the doorway.
“Dinner with Jack?”
I couldn’t help the grin that spread across my face. “Yep.”
Her grin widened. “You’re welcome for the push.”
“You didn’t push. You eavesdropped.”
“Same thing.” She grabbed her coat from the hook by the door, her Members Only jacket, the red one she’d saved two months to buy. “I’m going to Robbie’s. Don’t wait up. And Maggie?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t screw it up again.”
Jack
She was late. I sat in a booth at The Anchor, nursing a beer and watching the door, trying not to check my watch for the fifth time in ten minutes.
The restaurant was small and unpretentious with wooden tables scarred by decades of use, fishing nets on the walls, a mounted swordfish over the bar with its paint chipping and its glass eye staring at nothing.
The whole place smelled like garlic butter and the brine of a kitchen that had been cooking seafood since before I was born.
Seven-fifteen. Still no Maggie.
The jukebox was playing “The Power of Love”—the one from Back to the Future—and a couple at the bar was singing along badly, beer bottles raised like microphones.
I was starting to think she’d stood me up when the door burst open and Maggie stumbled in, cheeks flushed from the cold, hair windswept and escaping from whatever clip she’d used to pin it back.
She was wearing a green sweater that made her eyes look like sea glass and jeans that actually fit, a far cry from the electric pink thing I’d glimpsed at her office once, and she looked beautiful and frazzled and completely herself.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, sliding into the booth across from me. “I got lost. Twice. No, three times. I wrote the address down wrong, and then I ended up on the wrong side of the Expressway, and then I couldn’t find parking, and—”
“Maggie.”
She stopped, mid-explanation. “What?”
“You’re here now. Breathe.”
She took a breath, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, a nervous gesture I remembered from a year of watching her. “I have a terrible sense of direction.”
“I know. You drove?”
“Yes, and I’m already regretting it. The T would have been smarter, but I thought—” She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. I’m here.”
“You’re here.”
We looked at each other across the scarred wooden table, and something shifted in my chest.
The waitress appeared—Sal, according to her name tag, a pencil stuck in her graying hair—and took our orders without ceremony. Chowder and white wine for Maggie, fish and chips and another Sam Adams for me.
“So,” Maggie said, when Sal had shuffled away.
“So.”
The awkwardness lasted about thirty seconds. Then she asked about the housing authority story, how I’d stumbled onto it, what I was hoping to prove, whether I thought it would make a difference, and suddenly we were talking. Really talking, the way we used to before everything got complicated.
I told her about Thompson, my inside source, and the documents he’d smuggled out.
About the shell companies and the kickbacks, the way public money meant for housing repairs had been siphoned off to line private pockets.
About the families living in buildings with broken heat and crumbling walls while someone got rich off their misery.
She listened. That was the thing I kept noticing.
The old Maggie had always been half-somewhere-else, her attention divided, ready to deflect or joke or change the subject if things got too serious.
This Maggie asked follow-up questions. Leaned in when I described the documents.
Got genuinely angry when I explained how the corruption affected real people.
“That’s important work,” she said, and meant it. “The kind of journalism that actually changes things.”
“That’s the hope.”
“It’s more than hope. It’s why you do this, isn’t it? Not for the byline. For the accountability.”
I stared at her across the table, the candlelight catching the gold flecks in her green eyes.
In a year of whatever we’d been doing—dating, not-dating, circling each other like wary animals—she’d never once talked about my work like this.
Never seemed to understand why I cared about stories that didn’t pay well and kept me up at night.
“Who are you?” The question came out before I could stop it.
She blinked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean—” I searched for the right words. “You’re different. The way you’re talking, the way you’re listening. Something’s changed and I can’t figure out what.”
She was quiet for a moment, twirling her wine glass by the stem. The jukebox had shifted to Whitney Houston now, “How Will I Know,” and a group of college kids at a nearby table was debating whether the Celtics would make the playoffs.
“Maybe I—” She stopped. Something flickered across her face, a tightening around her eyes, her chin lifting slightly in that defensive way I knew too well. For a moment I saw the old Maggie surface, the one who deflected everything real.
“Maybe I finally realized what I was losing,” she said, her voice going bright and casual. “You know, perspective. Distance. All that—”
She stopped again. Closed her eyes for just a second.
When she opened them, something had shifted. The brightness was gone, replaced by something raw. More uncertain.
“I was about to make a joke,” she said quietly. “Turn this into something light so I wouldn’t have to actually answer you.”
I didn’t say anything. Just waited.
“That’s what I do, isn’t it? What I’ve always done.” She set down the wine glass. “You ask me something real, and I deflect. Make it funny. Change the subject.”
She met my eyes, and there was no armor there now, just Maggie, exposed and uncomfortable and not running, at least not yet.
“I’m trying not to do that anymore. It’s... harder than I thought it would be.”
The admission hung in the air between us. I’d expected deflection. I’d expected jokes. This raw honesty about her own patterns was new.
“So what’s the real answer?” I asked.
She took a breath. “The real answer is that I’ve been a coward. For a long time. I’ve been so scared of being left, of caring too much, of letting someone actually matter... that I’ve pushed away everyone who tried to get close.”
She paused.
“I spent a long time not paying attention. To a lot of things. I’m trying to do better.”
“In three months?”
“It can happen fast. When you finally see what you’re about to lose.”
I wanted to believe her. God, I wanted to believe her.
The food came, chowder thick with clams and potatoes, fish and chips golden and crisp, and we kept talking while we ate. She told me about the manuscripts she was reading, the Morrison novel that had caught Richard’s eye. About turning down a conference in New York.
“That sounds like an opportunity,” I said.
“It was.” She dipped a piece of bread into her chowder, not quite meeting my eyes. “But I had something more important this week.”
She didn’t elaborate.
We talked about books after that—whether Hemingway was overrated (she thought yes, I thought it was complicated), what we’d read lately, what we wanted to read next.
She’d just finished Beloved and couldn’t stop talking about it, her hands moving as she described Toni Morrison’s prose like it was a physical thing she could touch.
“You should read it,” she said. “It’ll break your heart, but in a good way. The kind of breaking that puts you back together differently.”
“That sounds painful.”
“The best books are.”
I ordered another beer. She ordered coffee.
Sal refilled our waters without asking and left the check on the table, but neither of us reached for it.
The restaurant had emptied out around us, the college kids gone, the couple at the bar paying their tab.
Even Huey Lewis had given way to something slower, softer—Phil Collins, maybe, or Peter Gabriel.
When we finally did pay—I grabbed the check before she could argue, and she let me without the usual fight—it was nearly ten o’clock. The night outside was cold and clear, stars visible between the buildings, our breath making clouds as we walked.
“Where are you parked?” I asked.
“Around the corner, I think. Maybe the next block?” She laughed, embarrassed. “I kind of just abandoned the car wherever I could find a spot.”
We found her Honda Civic three blocks away, wedged between a delivery van and a Buick that looked like it hadn’t been moved since the Carter administration. The streetlight overhead buzzed and flickered, casting orange shadows across her face as she dug in her purse for her keys.
“I had a good time,” she said, looking up at me.
“Me too.”
We stood there, close enough that I could smell her perfume. Scoundrel, that spicy, dangerous scent she always wore, the one that had driven me crazy for a year.
Her face was tilted up toward mine, lips slightly parted, and everything in me wanted to close the distance between us.
I wanted to kiss her. The urge was almost overwhelming, a physical pull that made my hands ache to reach for her.
But this was Maggie. The woman who’d spent a year running from anything real. If I kissed her now, moved too fast, gave her an excuse to bolt—
“Goodnight, Maggie.” I stepped back
Something flickered across her face, disappointment, maybe, or understanding. Or both. “Goodnight, Jack.”
She unlocked her car, that familiar fumbling with the key that I remembered from a dozen other goodbyes, and slid into the driver’s seat.
The engine turned over on the second try, and she gave me a small wave through the window before pulling out of the spot with the concentration of someone who didn’t quite trust their own navigation.
I watched until her taillights disappeared around the corner, then stood there for a while longer, hands shoved in my pockets, cold seeping through my jacket.
Three months ago, I’d been certain she would never change.
Now I wasn’t sure. I’d watched her start to deflect tonight, watched the old Maggie surface for just a moment, and then I’d watched her stop herself.
The old Maggie would never have caught herself mid-sentence.
Would never have admitted she was doing the very thing I’d spent a year watching her do.
I started walking toward the T station, the cold biting at my ears but my chest warm with something that felt dangerously like hope.
I was starting to think I might not need the letter after all.