Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
Mara
Mila is at ballet, which means I suddenly have ninety minutes to myself—a dangerous amount of time when you’ve been operating on juice box refills and emotional landmines.
The penthouse is too quiet. Suspiciously quiet.
The silence creeps in, curling around my ankles like it knows I won’t know what to do with it.
I tie my hair up, roll my sleeves, and decide I’ll just “clean a little.” Just enough to feel productive, not enough to fall into grief or regret.
There won’t be letters involved, no vinyl discussions.
Definitely no wondering where Alec is or why it’s been almost two days since I’ve seen him.
Definitely no thinking about how I keep glancing at the door like he might show up anyway, mumbling some excuse about tea or boxes or Mila needing frog-related reassurance.
He doesn’t want to be here. Message received.
Good. Great, actually.
He’s not ours.
Definitely not mine.
Alec Hovarth is just a neighbor who wandered too close and decided to retreat before the air got too real.
People leave when it gets hard. That’s a truth I learned early—when my aunt left without a goodbye, when my dad forgot birthdays like they were optional, and when my husband perfected the art of being physically present yet, emotionally vacant.
Absence is familiar. It fits like an old coat I hate but still keep in the closet.
I start with the shelves Alec helped me build. His fingerprints probably still live here, hidden beneath records and the scent of dust and pine. I wipe each surface slowly, but I’m done too soon.
I open another box, expecting more of the same: albums, slips of paper, nostalgia pressed into plastic. Instead, a dull thud catches my attention—small, barely audible, but it stirs my chest in a way that makes my hand freeze midair.
There, tucked between Freeze Frame and Heaven on Earth, is a journal. It’s thin, its spine bent like someone cracked it open a hundred times. The purple cover has faded into a bruised lilac, and the corners are curling in like petals after too much sun.
It doesn’t belong with the others. This one looks like it was hidden, not just stored. I stare at it. A smarter version of me would close the box and pretend she never saw it.
But that version no longer lives here.
I slide it out carefully, sitting on the floor like the carpet might anchor me to this moment. My fingers brush the edge, and I swear it hums—like whatever’s inside has been waiting. Like I’m supposed to find this now, not before, not later. Now.
“I shouldn’t open this,” I whisper.
And then, of course, I do.
Because not opening it would mean keeping my distance. And we both know I’ve never been good at that—not with people I care about, not with feelings I don’t want, and definitely not with journals that feel like secrets left behind on purpose.
June 2, 1967
He kissed me today at the riverbank, even though we swore we wouldn’t. Even though we said we should wait for the right moment, the right time, the right everything.
But time doesn’t listen. And neither did he. He looked at me like he knew a secret about us I hadn’t learned yet.
My hands won’t stop shaking. I’m afraid my sisters will notice. I’m afraid the whole world will notice. I’m afraid no one ever will.
He’ll turn eighteen soon and leave without me. And I keep thinking—what if this moment has to last us a lifetime?
My throat goes tight.
This isn’t the same as the letters. This is Lina before the world grew around her. Before she became the aunt who made lentil soup from scratch and insisted microwaves “steal flavor.”
Before decades of silence settled over this part of her life. This is a girl terrified of a love she wasn’t supposed to have. A girl already losing something she didn’t know she was allowed to keep.
I turn a few pages with careful fingers.
September 6, 1967
I keep thinking: what if he never comes back? What if all I ever get of him are these afternoons by the river and the memory of his hands?
He says he’ll write. I believe him. I don’t know if that makes me brave or foolish.
My vision blurs.
No.
Not today. Not again.
Crying was yesterday’s breakdown—okay, fine, it was three days ago. Or five. Possibly every day this week if we’re counting teary sniffles over coffee as a full event. Whatever. Today was supposed to be uneventful. A tidy episode of “Mara Has Her Shit Together.”
Clearly, we’re off-script.
September 10, 1967
Tommy said today that he wants a future with me. He says it like he’s already seen it—like he’s memorized the house and our life inside it.
And I believe him. I feel it too.
I know it sounds impossible, but I think some loves come pre-written.
That line slices through me—not with sharpness, but with something worse: the quiet ache of recognition.
It doesn’t just hurt, but lingers too long. It presses into the places I’ve kept sealed off, places I didn’t know were waiting for her words to slip beneath my skin.
She believed in something enough to hide it.
And now I’m here, decades later, trying to understand a girl I only knew in pieces, reading her confessions in the margins of records and the spine of a worn purple journal.
What else did she bury under politeness?
Under smiles and Sunday dinners? What dreams were locked away so quietly no one even knew they existed?
What am I supposed to do with this?
With her truths, her heartbreaks, her ghost pressed between vinyl sleeves and loose paper?
My breath stutters.
Tears hit too fast, too hot. I don’t try to stop them.
I just press the heel of my hand to my forehead like that’ll hold me together long enough to finish grieving whoever she was—this girl who wrote about Thomas like he’d hung the stars, who believed a mixtape could hold a future, who thought love might actually be enough.
And maybe it was.
Maybe it was, and the world swallowed it before she had a chance to live it. That thought undoes me.
I call Ari, because if I don’t, I’ll spiral right into another box and find another letter and not know how to come back from it.
She picks up on the first ring.
“Please tell me you kissed the guy next door,” she says by way of greeting, like she’s been waiting for drama all day and has just sensed her moment.
“No,” I say, dragging my sleeve over my cheek. “I didn’t.”
“You’re crying,” she says instantly, her tone flipping from mischievous to mom-friend in under a second.
“I’m not.”
“You have the crumble-voice, Mara. Don’t lie. Did Alec disappear? Did he freak out? Did Mila guilt him into playing dolls and he ran for the hills?”
“No,” I whisper. “It’s not Alec. I found one of Lina’s journals. It’s horrible.”
A pause. Then, gently, “Worse than the letters?”
I shake my head, forgetting she can’t see me. “It’s not worse. It’s just . . . different. Raw. Younger. She sounds so fucking young in this one, Ari. Like she thought the world would rearrange itself if she just loved hard enough.”
And I don’t know what breaks me more—that she believed that, or that part of me still wants to.
“You want me to come up?” Ari offers, voice soft now. “I can cancel the gala, bring wine, chocolate—whatever survival kit we need for this week.”
“No,” I say too fast. “I’m okay. I just needed to hear someone who doesn’t live in this penthouse and make my pulse skip like I’m a teenager again.”
Another pause. Then she exhales. “You’re allowed to fall apart.”
I nod even though I don’t want to admit it. “I know.”
But I don’t know. Not really. Not when falling apart makes me feel like I’m unraveling into a version of myself I can’t recognize. The girl who cried at a journal. Who missed a man who probably wasn’t even hers to begin with.
After we hang up, I step onto the balcony to breathe air that doesn’t smell like dust and memories.
The city stretches wide, familiar and indifferent. This view reminds me how small I am.
The door slides open behind me, and I know it’s him before he speaks.
“You know,” Alec says, voice low, “if you were going to dig through Lina’s journals, you could’ve come to me.”
I don’t look back.
I can’t.
Maybe I should even tell him that he’s trespassing and start locking my door—even when it drives me crazy to be locked away.
I don’t want him here. He’s too much in moments like this. Not because he tries to fix anything, but because he doesn’t. He just stands there and lets me feel like I’m not alone. But he’s going to leave, and I hate that feeling. The feeling of loss.
“She cried on me last night,” I murmur, even though I didn’t mean to say anything at all. “Not Lina. Mila. She had a nightmare. Came looking for her frog—and asked for you.”
Alec doesn’t speak, but I feel the air shift slightly behind me, like he’s bracing for something I haven’t said yet.
“This morning, she knocked on your door first,” I add quietly. “She wanted to see what you two were going to fix for breakfast.”
I finally turn around, eyes locking with his. “And you didn’t answer.”
His jaw tenses, but he doesn’t defend himself. Doesn’t offer a reason.
Just lets the guilt sit there between us, silent and undeniable.
“It’s better this way,” I say, even though my chest aches from the effort of pretending I believe it. “She’s a kid. I’m her mom. We don’t need anyone else orbiting our lives just to disappear later.”
“I wasn’t trying to disappear.”
“Then what were you doing?”
He breathes in through his nose, like he’s trying to find the words that won’t make everything worse. “Trying not to make a mistake.”
The longing between us stretches taut. My throat tightens.
“You think showing up is a mistake?” I ask. “Because it didn’t feel like one when she hugged you like you were already family. Or when you made her French toast and let her pick songs like you actually cared.”
“I do care,” he says, voice suddenly raw. “I fucking care so much and . . . that’s the problem.”
The air between us stills.