Chapter 36
Carter
I’m in the back of a car to the airport with a notebook in my lap I have never once opened, deciding to be brave about two years too late.
The driver has a sports station on low and I make myself not hear it, because they’re talking about us — the faces, the collapse, the phrase quietly concluded said in the voice people use for things that turned out not to matter — and the city slides past the window in the wet gray of a Tuesday that has no idea it’s the most important day of my life.
The notebook’s in my lap. Not the kit bag.
For two years it’s lived zipped into the inside pocket where the boots can’t crush it, and this morning I took it out and held it in my actual hands, in the actual light, and it turns out it’s just a notebook. Cheap. Cracked spine. Two years of the only handwriting I’ve never let anyone read.
I couldn’t reach her. I called until calling started to be the thing making it worse, and then I did the only thing left that isn’t a phone: had Earl book me on the next flight to New York, packed a bag, and put the notebook in it instead of the kit bag for the first time since I started carrying it.
If I’m going to do this I’m going to do it with the whole thing in my hands.
I can’t fix the campaign. Priya built a cathedral, Marcus built a trap, and I built the part where I told her the real thing was safe and let her stop guarding it. None of that un-happens on a flight.
But there’s one true thing I promised her in a parking lot, and I’m done being the man who keeps it in a bag.
***
Dani calls when I’m at the gate. She always knows.
“You’re going to her.” Not a question.
“How do you do that.”
“You booked a flight and didn’t post about it, which for you is basically a flare.” A breath. “Carter. Are you finally going to open it?”
I look at the bag between my feet. “I’m going to tell her about him. Out loud. The whole thing.”
“About Diego.”
She says his name the way she always says it, like it still belongs in a sentence.
And the thing happens in my chest that’s happened every time for two years — a flinch with no movement in it, the muscle that learned to brace around two syllables I can’t make myself form. Today I notice it instead of flying past it.
“Yeah.”
The line goes quiet, and when she speaks again her voice has the thing in it she only gets when she isn’t performing okay either.
“You’ve never said his name. Not once, not to anyone. I say it. You just let me.”
“I know.”
“And you’re going to say it to her.” A wet laugh. “Took you two years and a woman from the enemy club. But okay.” Then, softer, the truest thing my sister owns: “He’d have liked her. He liked the sharp ones. He’d have told you to stop being a coward about a year ago.”
“I’m boarding,” I say, which is me not crying in an airport.
“Go tell her,” Dani says. “Then call me and tell me you did.”
***
They call my group and I don’t move for a second.
Deciding to be brave doesn’t feel like courage. It feels like walking toward the one door in the house you’ve kept locked for two years.
My hands have gone cold around the strap of the bag.
Two seats down a kid is losing his entire mind with joy over a window seat.
Across the aisle a woman is doing a crossword in pen — Sloane does the crossword in pen — and the gate is full of people who get to fly somewhere today without it meaning anything.
I’ve run the same play my whole career. Be the bright one. Carry it where nobody can see.
It worked beautifully, right up until a woman who reads people for a living looked at me on a rooftop and saw the bag I’ve been carrying — and didn’t reach for it.
That’s the whole of it. Everybody reaches. They reach to fix it or name it or feel useful against it, and the reaching is one more performance you have to run. I’m okay, don’t worry, look how okay.
She never reached. She made room, and it was the first time in two years I got to set the thing down without anyone watching me do it.
Then I made her carry the weight of me and never told her there was any.
I pick up the bag. I get in line.
***
My phone buzzes as I’m handing over the boarding pass.
Her name on the screen. The first time it’s lit up in two days, after four calls of mine that went nowhere.
Something in my chest does the opposite of brace. It opens — stupid and hopeful — because she called, she finally called, and I have the whole true thing ready in a bag and now I get to start giving it to her.
I step out of the river of people boarding, into the dead pocket where the gate meets the window and the tarmac sits gray and enormous beyond the glass.
The notebook’s right there against my shin. Two years of it, finally ready.
I put the phone to my ear.
“Sloane—”