Chapter 20 #2
“Don’t.” She shakes her head firmly. “I didn’t tell you so you’d feel guilty.
I told you because there’s something I need you to hear.
” She hesitates. “There’s somewhere I could be instead of this.
Somewhere that isn’t a chair or a dream mall or this horrible in-between.
Somewhere I could actually…” she stops, starts again, her tone now softer, “… somewhere I could be happy.”
“5D,” I say quietly.
Her eyes widen. “How do you—”
“Ridge tried to explain it to me.”
Somewhere in the mall, a shop light flickers again. Just one, halfway down the left corridor, blinking once. I don’t turn to look, but I feel it, the way you feel someone step into a room before you see them. I don’t know why, but I know it’s Ridge without looking.
Tessa’s eyes don’t move from mine, but there’s a flash of awareness, there and gone.
She knows he’s here too.
“You can’t explain it.” She exhales. “You can only experience it.”
Tessa’s gaze is steady, but her hands tighten around mine.
He’s listening. We both know it.
“The man from your journal, is he the reason you want to be in 5D?”
She doesn’t answer right away, and that’s answer enough. “Everything I’ve ever wanted is there. Lenny, it’s… I can’t even describe it. It’s more real than this. More real than waking up.”
“You say that like waking up is something you’ve given up on.”
“I want you to come with me.”
“What?”
“You have nothing left holding you in 3D, Lenny. Your mom is gone. Your house is gone. Spencer is gone. You drove three thousand miles to a town where you knew nobody because—”
“Because of you.”
“Exactly.” She looks at me steadily. “You love me as much as I love you. We are each other’s tether, and if you let go of everything else, life doesn’t have to be empty anymore.
You could have everything. Everything you’ve lost, everything you’ve missed…
” she pauses, and something in her eyes goes very soft, “… everyone.”
The word lands differently from the others. Not hope exactly, it’s more of an ache of a door you convinced yourself was sealed forever, suddenly showing a crack of light underneath it.
I stare at her. “What do you mean, everyone?”
She doesn’t answer, but holds my gaze, and the fountain behind us is suddenly very loud.
“Tessa.” My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. “Are you saying my mom is—”
“I’m saying there’s more there than you can imagine.” She squeezes my hands again. “I’m saying you don’t have to be alone anymore. Neither of us does. We could be together, the way we always said we would be. The restaurant, remember? Our stupid little notebook with all the plans?”
“I remember.”
I remember the notebook. I have it. It’s in the storage unit in Boston in a cardboard box with the rest of my broken dreams. Inside it, there are at least thirty pages of plans for a restaurant we designed in the margins of our coursework during the worst semester we had.
Floor plan sketches in the back of her notes on sauce reduction.
Menu written on the inside cover of my pastry textbook.
We called it Maes & Vaughn and then Vaughn & Maes, depending on who was holding the pen.
She’s offering me Maes & Vaughn.
She’s offering me my mother.
“We could have that.” Her voice drops. “We could have all of it.”
She’s offering me everything that is gone, and I am sitting here in a dream mall holding her hands, and I want it so badly it makes my teeth hurt.
For one terrible second, I feel it. The pull of it. My mother’s voice, the smell of her kitchen, the weight of her hand in mine. Tessa across a prep counter, laughing, alive, present, and mine again. Every door that closed is swinging open.
One full second where I almost say yes.
But then I remember who is missing her just as much as I’m missing my people.
“What about Nora?” I ask.
“What?” Tessa frowns.
“Your mom. She’s still alive, Tess. She misses you so much. She walks me up to your room and holds my hand in the hallway.” I watch her face carefully. “What happens to her if you just… never wake up again?”
“She’d be okay. It’s not like it would change anything for her.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Lenny—”
“And Derek?” The name comes out before I’ve decided to say it. “I met him, he’s my landlord now, actually. He’s very nice, and he has a cute little daughter…” I trail off when Tessa goes very still.
Shit.
“Tess?”
“He chose this,” she says, and there’s an edge in her voice I’ve never heard before. “He let me go. He made that decision, and I’ve been paying for it ever since.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
“You don’t know what it’s been like.” The words come out fast, the first real crack in the careful surface. “Years, Lenny. Years of being…”
She stops.
The pain is real. Whatever else is happening here, whatever shape this conversation is being pushed into, the pain underneath it is Tessa’s. Her real pain. Derek-shaped, over a decade deep, and still bleeding.
I watch her close her eyes, one slow breath in through her nose, and when she opens them again, the crack is gone.
The Tessa I know is composing herself like she always did before exams, service, or walking into rooms she didn’t want to be in—chin up, breathe out, move forward.
It’s so completely her that it hurts.
“Come with me,” she says, steady again. “Please. I need you to let go.”
The fountain stutters.
“You need me to let go,” I repeat slowly.
“Of everything that’s keeping you in 3D. The grief, the new job, the—”
“The people,” I cut her off. “You mean the people.”
She doesn’t answer.
I look at her for a long moment, at the face I know better than almost anyone’s, and the green eyes that have been staring at me in dreams while I was on the other side of a country, telling myself there was nothing I could do for her.
This is Tessa. This is my best friend.
But the Tessa I knew would rather have died than ask someone to give up their life for her.
“I’m going to wake you up,” I promise after a long pause. “That’s what I came here for. That’s what I’m going to do.”
The mall flickers once, the lights dipping and rushing back.
“Practice being lucid,” Tessa says instead of answering. “Think about what you could have if you let yourself go. If you stopped holding on so tight—”
“Stop.”
She goes quiet.
“That’s not you talking,” I say. “I don’t know who it is, but I know it’s not you.”
The Tessa I know would have told me to go live my life.
Would have been furious at the idea of me giving anything up for her, let alone everything.
She told me once, in our second year, when I was joking about dropping a class because she was having a hard month, that if I ever made my life smaller for her, she would never forgive me. She meant it.
This is her voice, her face. The Derek pain was hers.
But this… invitation to let go, this is someone else speaking through her.
A hairline fracture shifts in the expression I know better than my own, like a mask settling a millimeter wrong. Then she smiles softly, sadly, and so completely her that my chest seizes.
“I never left, Lenny.”
The fountain makes a weird crunching sound, and then, between one breath and the next, she’s gone.
The bench beside me is empty, the second milkshake sitting there, still cold and sweating in the mall air.
I sit there for a moment in the ringing quiet.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell the empty mall. “And neither are you.”