Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Peter
A part of me hoped I wouldn’t like Charlotte. That I would come down here and feel like the city is too big or the office is too corporate.
But I’ve found the exact opposite. The thriving city nestled into the foothills of North Carolina is bustling and busy and beautiful, and it only takes a couple of days for me to imagine myself living here.
The team at IronKey is smart and interesting and fully engaged in their work—work that impresses and inspires me. The work environment is relaxed and comfortable, and Valeria, who will, should I accept the position, be my direct supervisor, is warm and kind but also exacting in a way that works for my brain. I can already tell I would enjoy working for her—with her—and leading a team of scientists I’ve already grown to respect would be incredible.
By the time I’m back at the hotel on Thursday evening, it’s hard to imagine not taking the job.
The only trouble is, it’s equally difficult to imagine living without Sophie in my life. It’s taken all my willpower not to call her the last few days. We’ve texted a few times, but we haven’t spoken. And the distance feels unnatural. I’ve been keeping a list of all the things I’d like to tell her when we speak again, everything from the serious and important—Valeria told me point blank that I’m the brightest talent in data science she’s seen since she started with the company ten years ago—to the completely random—they sell this soda in North Carolina called Cheerwine that Sophie would definitely love, even though it’s too sweet for me.
The past few nights, right before falling asleep, I’ve let myself indulge in the idea that maybe I could have the best of both worlds. I could take this job, build a life in Charlotte, and Sophie could live here with me.
I would never ask her to make such a sacrifice. Serendipity Springs is her home, and she’s always loved it there. She has her mom, her friendship with Willa, her job, the rooftop garden. But all those logical thoughts aren’t doing a very good job of convincing my heart to stop wishing for it anyway. To stop wishing for her.
But then, all the wishing in the world won’t matter if she decides to be with David.
I tug at my tie, loosening the knot before pulling it free and tossing it onto the bed. Those thoughts have also been dogging me all week, doing their best to squelch my optimism and hope and replace it with a sort of melancholy acceptance.
The flower hasn’t lied to Sophie so far.
Why would it be wrong this time?
One more day in the office, then I’ll fly back to Serendipity Springs on Saturday morning, and I’ll have to face Sophie and find out the truth. I just don’t know what my half of the truth will be.
Will I take the job? Or will I stay in Serendipity Springs for her? For us?
Maybe I won’t be able to make a choice until she makes hers.
I toe off my shoes, then unbutton my dress shirt, but then the hotel room phone lets out a jolting ring, and I pause—I didn’t even realize hotels still have room phones—leaving the shirt on as I cross to the desk to answer it.
“Hello?” I say into the receiver.
“Good evening. This is Joni from the front desk. You have a visitor here to see you. Are you expecting anyone this evening?”
“Uh, no, not that I know of.”
“Very good, sir,” Joni says in a very professional tone. “Your privacy is our utmost concern, so I’ll let the visitor know.”
“Wait,” I say. “Can you tell me who it is?”
Joni sniffs. “One moment.” A brief pause passes before Joni returns and says, “She says her name is Sophie Stewart.”
My heart starts hammering in my chest. Sophie is here? In Charlotte?
“Please send her up,” I say. “Right away.”
“All right,” Joni says. “Room five forty-two,” she says, presumably to Sophie, then back to me, she adds, “She’s on her way.”
I make fast work of stripping off my dress shirt and pulling a t-shirt over my head. I think about changing out of my dress pants, but I’m too anxious to see Sophie, so I forget about my mismatched outfit and grab my room key before heading into the hallway and hurrying toward the elevators.
It takes about ten seconds for the elevator to stop on my floor with a ding that makes my heart climb into my throat. I don’t know why Sophie is here, but right now, in this moment, there’s nothing that I want more than to see her.
When the elevator doors slide open and Sophie sees me, her expression brightens before she offers me a sheepish smile. “Hi, Peter.”
I shake my head, blinking once, twice, because I have to be dreaming. Sophie looks beautiful enough to make my chest ache just from looking at her. She’s more dressed up than I usually see her, wearing black pants and heels and a white blazer over a shimmery green top. She looks polished and professional and not like she just got off an airplane. Her hair is down, curls framing her face, and I know, with sudden clarity, that if I have the opportunity to spend the rest of my life with this woman, I’ll take it no matter where I have to live to do it.
I stand there staring, unmoving, long enough that the elevator doors start to close, pausing my racing thoughts and jolting me back into the moment. I lunge forward, sticking my arm into the doors to keep them from closing and gesture her off the elevator.
“You’re here,” I say, once we’re both on the same side of the doors. “How are you here?”
She shrugs. “I needed to see you.”
It’s all I can do not to pull her into a hug, but the look on her face keeps me from doing it. She looks nervous, a little trepidatious, like she has to say something really important and she doesn’t know where to start.
“Can we hug?” she asks, like she’s reading my thoughts. “I really want to hug.”
I let out a little chuckle, opening my arms as she steps into my embrace, her arms wrapping around my waist. She sighs as she presses her cheek to my chest.
I lean down, nose to her hair, and breathe in a lungful of Sophie-scented air.
“I missed you,” she says, her voice soft.
“Yeah, I missed you too.” It feels so good to hold her like this, and I soak it in, trying not to stress too much about why she’s here or what she’s going to tell me. Because there must be something if she came all this way. “How did you find me?”
“An educated guess,” she says. “IronKey is right next door. I figured they’d put you up somewhere close. Though I wasn’t sure Joni was going to cave,” she says, arms tightening around my waist. “She did not want to tell me your room number.”
“Come on,” I say, reaching for her suitcase. “It’s not far to my room.”
She follows behind me as we cover the short distance down the hall. I pull the key out of my pocket and unlock the door, then hold it open for her as she makes her way inside.
I leave her suitcase by the wall, and she shrugs out of the bag she’s wearing on her back, setting it down on top of the dresser. Then we just stare at each other, the silence heavy between us.
I want to ask so many questions—and she probably has questions too, but it’s hard to know where to start.
“Do you want to sit?” I finally ask, motioning toward the king-sized bed.
“Sure,” she says. She sits on one corner of the bed, while I sit on the other. I spend too long wondering if I should have taken the chair by the window, avoided the awkwardness of us both sitting on the bed.
It’s a stupid thought though because it wasn’t that long ago that we slept in the same bed, the night Reggie scared Sophie into needing my company.
Finally, Sophie closes her eyes, face scrunched. “Peter, why does this feel so awkward?” she asks, squinting one eye open and looking at me.
“Should I have taken the chair?” I say, quickly standing. “I can?—”
She grabs my arm as I move past her, stopping my progress. “You don’t need to sit in the chair,” she says with a chuckle. “It’s just me.” She tugs me down on the bed so I’m sitting directly beside her. “I think I’m just nervous,” she says. She threads her fingers through mine, giving my hands a squeeze. “I spent the entire flight rehearsing what I was going to say and how I was going to say it, and now everything is gone. All my words.” She lifts her free hand and makes an exploding gesture with her fist, opening it and spreading her fingers wide. “Poof,” she says. “Just like that.”
“Take your time,” I say. “I don’t have anywhere I need to be.”
She finally looks over and smiles at me, her eyes so full of warmth, of love, I feel a sudden, driving need to kiss her. I won’t though. Not until I know why she’s here. Until I know she wants me to.
“How has it been this week?” she asks.
I almost deflect the question. I don’t want to talk about work. I want to talk about us. But I only want honesty between us, so I swallow and tell her the truth. “It’s been amazing. I really like the team.”
She squeezes my hand. “That’s good. Really good. I had a feeling you would. And you like the city?”
“I do. The NASCAR Hall of Fame is nearby. That sounds exciting.”
She wrinkles her brow. “You do not want to go to the NASCAR Hall of Fame.”
“No,” I say, smiling. “I don’t. But I did get a pretty thorough tour of the city on Tuesday afternoon. It’s nice. A lot of great parks. Nice museums. Oh! And a Chinese place I think you’d love. Best kung pao chicken I’ve ever eaten.”
“I can’t wait to try it,” Sophie says. She drops my hand while she shifts on the bed, kicking off her shoes before pulling her legs up so they’re crossed under her and she’s facing me. She reaches forward and takes both of my hands in hers. “So, I have a small confession.”
I swallow against the nerves clawing at my throat. “Okay.”
“I actually arrived in Charlotte early this morning,” she says.
“I wondered,” I admit. “You’re pretty dressed up just for a flight.”
“I had a business meeting,” she says, holding my gaze, but that doesn’t make any sense.
“In Charlotte?” I ask, and she nods.
“It’s a pretty crazy story, actually,” she says. “Yesterday, I called my grad school mentor, Dr. Finley, over at UMass. It’s always nice to check in and say hello, but this time, I had a very specific question.” She licks her lips, and I notice a slight tremble in her exhale.
I give her hands an encouraging squeeze, and she smiles softly before continuing.
“Dr. Finley is really well-connected all up and down the East Coast. From guest lecturing to publishing to all the students she’s mentored, I thought it might be worth asking her if she knows anyone in the Charlotte area.”
I furrow my brow, still not fully grasping what she’s trying to tell me.
“Unsurprisingly, she has a former colleague who recently left academia and is opening his own firm here in Charlotte. It feels incredibly hard to believe, because everything happened so quickly, but she made a phone call to him, he suggested we meet, I mentioned I was going to be in the city the following day, then I booked a flight for the literal crack of dawn the next morning, jumped on a plane eight hours later, and met with him today. He’s still a few months out from hiring, but we had a great lunch today—we really vibed and hit it off—and then he took me over to his new office building, which is still under construction, and I met his wife and his twin daughters, and I just like him so much, and he says if I’m interested, he’d love to bring me on as a junior designer.”
My breath catches in my throat. “Sophie, what are you—are you saying you would work here ? In Charlotte?”
She bites her lip and nods. “Probably not until late summer. August or September, maybe. Which isn’t ideal. But I’m really excited about the way Gregory talked about design. It’s so much more in line with my own principles. So much more than what I’ve been doing with Trowbridge. I really think it will be a great fit for me.”
“In Charlotte,” I repeat, almost afraid to let myself get excited. Does this mean what I think it means? That she would move here—for me?
“Peter, I’m in love with you,” she says. “And I feel like that’s a really important distinction because I’ve loved you for years. But this is more than that. Which, I realize it’s a little wild to say that because it happened so fast, but when we kissed, something shifted and suddenly all that love I already had for you just—it morphed into something else.” She lifts her shoulders in a shrug. “Meeting with Gregory today was just a bonus. What I really flew down here to do was tell you that I want us to be together. And I’m ready to move to Charlotte to make it happen.”
Heat floods my chest, and I lean forward, taking her face in my hands as I press a kiss to her lips. “Are you serious right now?” I kiss her again. “Is this for real? Are you for real?”
She laughs in between kisses. “I’m absolutely for real, and I’m absolutely serious.”
I pause, another question popping into my brain. “But what about your flower? What about David?”
She shrugs her shoulders dismissively. “Someone really smart once told me he doesn’t need a flower to tell him how he feels, so I decided I don’t either.”
I can’t stop the grin that spreads over my face at her words. “I don’t even know what to say.”
She presses a kiss to the tip of my nose. “You could start with I love you too,” she says playfully.
“I do,” I say, hating that I needed her prompting to say it when it’s been pulsing in my mind and heart for weeks, months—even years. “I love you so much.” I pull her against me, breathing her in, hoping she senses how much she means to me. “I’ve loved you for so long, Soph.”
This time, when we yield our words to kisses, we don’t stop for a long time. There are so many things I still want to know. Questions I want to ask. Logistical things my brain is already sorting through. But all those things can wait.
Right now, I just want her to know how much I love her. I love the softness of her lips, the wildness of her curly hair, the shape of her body. I love her exuberance and her cheerful nature and the joy she brings to everyone she meets. I love her eye for color and design. I love that she’s so good at growing things and making spaces beautiful. I love that she’s never given up on me. Even when I’m anti-social. When I’m too boring or too logical or too scientific. She still sees the good in me. And she reminds me of that good like it's second nature. Like my worth is so obvious, she shouldn’t even need to say it out loud. But she says it out loud anyway because that’s Sophie’s way. To lift and encourage and make people feel good.
Eventually, as our kisses slow, I whisper all of this to her, as we touch and taste and explore this new aspect of our relationship, I tell her all the things I’ve held back, that I’ve been too afraid to say for fear of scaring her away. And she whispers right back. Promises of love, but also admissions of the fear she wrestled to get here.
“You know what’s funny?” she eventually says. We’re sitting against the headboard, side by side, Sophie’s head resting on my shoulder. “It was a conversation with my mom that finally nudged me into accepting how I feel.”
“Your mom? Really?”
She yawns and snuggles a little closer. “Yeah. I was in the parking lot at this Thai place where I was supposed to have dinner with David, and she called. We talked about my dad a little, and I just—I don’t know. I think I had some things wrong in how I viewed their relationship—ways that impacted both how I view my mom and how I view myself. Also, she told me she always thought we were secretly in love with each other when we were in high school. So, there’s that.”
“I was in love with you in high school,” I say.
“I was so clueless, wasn’t I?” She tilts her head up and looks at me. “It makes me a little sad to think about all the time we lost.”
I lean down and press a kiss to her forehead. “Don’t think about it like that. We were still friends. Maybe we both had some growing up we needed to do.”
“But the kissing, Peter,” Sophie says. She lifts a hand to my cheek and guides my lips to hers. “We could have been doing so much kissing.”
I chuckle against her mouth. “Okay, true. We definitely missed out in that regard.”
“I’m hungry,” Sophie says when she finally breaks the kiss. “Think it’s too late for kung pao chicken?”
I glance at my watch. It’s just past eight, and I’ve already had dinner once, but I’ll eat again if it means eating with Sophie. “It’s never too late for kung pao chicken. You want to order in or go out? We could walk to the place from here, so either way, it’s pretty easy.”
She scoots to the edge of the bed and stands. “Order in, please. I’m exhausted and really want to put on pajamas and crash.”
I make quick work of ordering takeout while Sophie wheels her suitcase into the bathroom, presumably to change clothes, then I do my own lightning-fast change, swapping my dress pants for a pair of soft gray joggers.
Sophie emerges a few minutes later with her hair up and her face washed, dressed in leggings and the MIT hoodie I love to see her wearing.
“Sooo, I realize I didn’t exactly ask,” she says, “but if I promise to behave, are you okay with me staying with you tonight? Because I gotta tell you, this hotel is very expensive, and if I’m moving in a few months, I need to save every penny I possibly can.”
“What does behaving look like?” I ask as I reach a hand toward her. I’m sitting on the edge of the bed now, and she steps into the space between my knees, letting me wrap my arms around her.
“You know. Basic roommate stuff,” she says. “Keeping my clothes in one place. Not getting toothpaste on the bathroom counter. Pretending not to notice if you fart in your sleep.” She looks around the suite. “I’m happy to sleep on the couch.”
“I wasn’t sure until that last one,” I say. “But now I’m okay with it. You can absolutely stay.” She lifts her hands to my hair, fingers scratching gently against my scalp as I marvel for the millionth time that she’s actually here. That this woman is willing to move for me.
“Hey, Soph?”
“Hmm?” Her hands still, and I tilt my face up to look at her.
“It’s important to me that you understand something.”
“Okay,” she says expectantly.
“If you want to stay in Serendipity Springs, I’ll stay with you. I’ve got a good job there. We could be happy there. I don’t want you to feel like the only way for us to be together is for you to give up your home.”
She holds my gaze for a long moment, her hands sliding down to my shoulders. “Here’s the thing, though. You’re my home. I’ll love living in Charlotte because we’ll be together. Besides, your job here is better—it’s your dream job. If we stay in Massachusetts, you’re giving up a lot more than I’m losing by moving. You’ve met Leonard Trowbridge, Peter. I do not have my dream job, but I think working with Gregory might become just that. This move is a win for us both.”
“You’re sure?”
She leans down and kisses me. “Absolutely sure.”
Over the next hour, we eat our kung pao chicken and talk our way through the basics of what the next few months might look like. A long-distance relationship won’t be fun, but it’s easier to wrap our heads around it knowing it will be temporary. Plus, so much of Sophie’s work is remote, she’ll be able to spend a good bit of time in Charlotte until her lease is up at The Serendipity and a job has fully materialized down here. And Valeria already mentioned the possibility of limited remote work for me, at least at first, so I’m sure she’ll be flexible as long as I’m in the office more than I’m not.
Together, we google the cheapest direct flights between Serendipity Springs and Charlotte. We search neighborhoods and price apartments and start lists of restaurants we’re excited to try together. When Sophie adds a Thai place to the list, I remember a comment from earlier that I meant to ask her about but didn’t.
“Hey, did you end up having dinner with David? At the Thai place?” I ask.
She quickly shakes her head. “Nah. I cancelled on him last minute. Which, I hated to do it, but I’d finally admitted to myself I was in love with you. I would have been a terrible date. Which is what I told him, actually. That I’d finally acknowledged my feelings and needed to go home and pack so I could come to see you and tell you as much.”
“You told him all that, huh? How did he take it?”
“He said he appreciated the honesty, but he wasn’t surprised. Not after he saw us together after the storm.”
I think back to that afternoon, to how worried I was when I found Sophie at the top of the stairs, shivering and soaked to the skin. “I maybe came on a little too strong that day,” I say.
“You didn’t,” Sophie says. “It was sweet, the way you were worried about me.” She stabs her chopsticks into the half-eaten kung pao chicken and sets the container to the side. “Okay, I’m going to tell you something, but I don’t want you to think it’s the reason I’m here.”
“Keep talking,” I say, reaching for her discarded food. I can’t quite reach, so she grabs it and hands it over.
“The flower never bloomed for me and David,” she says, and I freeze, mouth open, the bite of chicken I just picked up falling back into the container with a plop.
“It didn’t?”
She shakes her head no. “But it’s important to me that you know I decided to come here before I learned the truth about what happened. You aren’t my backup plan, Peter. You’re my main plan. My only plan.”
“But you did see the flower bloom, right? So…I don’t understand. If not for you and David, then…?”
“For Willa and Archer,” she says. “They were on the roof at the same time. I didn’t see them because they were making out behind the rose trellis, but they were definitely there. Willa remembered specifically because of the storm.”
I breathe out a chuckle. “And to think how much trouble they caused,” I say.
“That’s what I said!” Sophie says. “But also, it was the nudge I needed, so maybe I’m not so mad about it.”
I’m not sure I’ll ever be mad at anything again as long as Sophie is beside me. Not even when, right before I drift off to sleep, she whispers into the darkness, “Just for the record, we definitely are going to the NASCAR Hall of Fame before we fly home on Saturday. Whether you like it or not.”