Chapter Twenty
Keeley
I can’t sleep again.
But this time, it has nothing to do with the footsteps upstairs, which are loud as ever. I can’t bring myself to care about Andrew and Lisa in the slightest right now.
I also can’t blame my AC for my insomnia—it’s miraculously working, even though I still haven’t gotten Craig to come look at it. Or, as Steve the building manager haughtily informed me, “There was nothing wrong to begin with.”
Which is false, but he wasn’t accepting that for a moment.
No… tonight, I’m tossing and turning in my (blessedly cool) bed as I think about Gramps and Noeleen.
On the way home from the library earlier, Becks told me his Gran often talked about a boy she once loved—a love story that, in the end, wasn’t written in the stars. He thought it was a fairy tale when he was growing up, a story she made up to entertain him and his siblings.
Now, he thinks that boy in the story might have been my Gramps.
I think he might be right.
I wish we could have gone to visit him right after we left the library. It would be so helpful to have a firsthand account of what actually happened between him and Noeleen.
But I’m not sure what I’d say, exactly. Not sure how much he’d even be able to tell me.
The last thing I want to do is upset him or confuse him further.
I’m surprised Sissy didn’t know why they broke up when she and Noeleen were so close. And, apparently, Estelle and Margot won’t be much help either—Estelle passed away a few years ago, and Margot now lives in Australia.
So for now, Beckett and I are going to gather up all the crumbs we can find and see what we can piece together.
Because now that we know that Noeleen and Gramps were once in love, all I want to know is more. Why did they break up? Why did she leave ?
I shift in bed a few more times, maneuvering my pillows around.
But I eventually give up, climb out of bed, and head for the living room.
Ever since the Korean-face-masked-banshee-incident I’ve been playing my late-night fire escape trips super safe.
For one, I keep my button-down pjs on.
For two, when I open my window, I grab two books from my desk—one, a notebook I slide under my arm to work in while I’m outside, and the second a thick novel to carefully position on the ledge so the window can’t close and lock me out here again.
Never let it be said that I don’t learn from my mistakes.
Once I’m on the fire escape, I take a seat and loll my head back against the cool brick wall behind me. It’s cloudy tonight, and the stars in the sky aren’t visible. You can’t even see the moon.
The distant flicker of streetlights below don’t cast enough light for me to work—on fuller moon nights, I’ve been jotting down ideas for my article in my notebook—so instead, I wrap my arms around my legs and draw them to my chest, taking a moment to enjoy the dark quiet of the night.
And when I say “moment,” I literally mean it because…
“Evening.”
Beckett’s lilting voice cuts through the night, and for some reason, I’m not surprised in the least when I turn to see him—or rather, see his shadowy outline—standing next to me on the escape, his living room window open behind him.
I nod my head toward it. “If I were you, I’d prop that open. Things seem to have a bad habit of locking themselves around here.”
In the darkness, I see his white teeth flash as he smiles.
“Ah, I don’t know about that,” he says easily as he folds his body to a seated position. He’s wearing a soft sweatshirt that grazes my arm as he sits down right next to me. “I know of worse habits than that.”
“Like?”
“Smoking. Biting your nails. Chewing with your mouth open.” Another flash of teeth. “Drinking so much coffee to get through prolonged jet lag that you end up becoming as nocturnal as your neighbor.”
“That’s a real bad one,” I say solemnly. “How much coffee does one need to achieve that?”
He faces me, leaning the side of his head against the wall. We’re only inches away from each other like this, face to face, and I can make out his features in the darkness. “Honestly? I think it has less to do with the coffee and more to do with what we learned today that’s keeping me awake. How about you? Andrew’s footsteps bothering you again?”
“The man has the tread of an elephant, I swear.”
“Did you guys date for long?”
“A few years. He was my first real relationship.”
“Those can be tough to get over.” Beckett’s eyes move to mine, and his lips pull into a small smile. “But if you want my two cents, he’s an eejit for letting you go.”
His words are sweet, but they don’t quite hit the truth.
“No, I actually don’t think he is,” I say slowly, the creeping realization that’s been niggling at me lately finally coming into words. “I’m beginning to think we never were right for each other.”
Picking at the chipped polish on my nails, I pause. Realize how true these words are.
I had a lot of love for Andrew, at one point, and we got along just fine, for the most part. But I feel like we were stuck in a routine together. I was letting my circumstances dictate what my heart wanted, instead of vice versa, like Gramps once told me to do.
Some hindsight makes me see that clearly now.
In a way, I can understand why Andrew moved on to someone like Lisa. The two of them are friends in a way that me and Andrew never were. She makes him happy like I never did.
I think that, by the end, I was hanging on by a thread—the thought of being left motivating me to try for a relationship that was maybe already in the dust.
“Honestly,” I say, “a part of me wondered if the two of them might make a good match. But maybe I chose to ignore that doubt, and in the end, it came back to bite me. The breakup caught me so off guard that my first reaction was to be more annoyed with myself for not seeing it coming than annoyed at Andrew for actually breaking up with me. Isn’t that messed up?”
Beckett thinks about this for a moment, then shakes his head. “No. I don’t think so. I think it’s possible to feel a lot of complicated things at once, but to focus on one of them as a way of coping with a situation.” He looks down at the ground. “Or focus on none of them at all.”
“That makes sense.” I nod. “I guess I haven’t been able to admit to myself that the sting of sudden rejection may have hurt more than losing the relationship itself. My parents had a really messy divorce when I was a kid, and my dad left my mom for someone else. I was totally blindsided, didn’t see it coming at all. I thought they were happy.”
At the time, it felt like my dad thought my mom wasn’t good enough for him, and I was angry with him for hurting her.
But after that, when my mom in turn left me and Ezra, I was angry with both of my parents—Mom for leaving, Dad for driving her away.
But more than all of that, seven-year-old Keeley was angry with herself that she hadn’t been enough to make her own mother stay.
I swallow thickly, pushing away my ugliest, most painful, memories.
“I guess I felt some of those emotions again when Andrew blindsided me,” I conclude. Because that much of the truth I can speak—Andrew leaving me for Lisa scratched at an old wound that’s buried deep in me but smarted the second it was prodded again.
“I understand that feeling,” Becks says quietly.
“Have you ever been in love?”
He’s silent for a long beat, and I’m about to apologize for overstepping when he lets out a sigh.
“I thought I was in love, once,” he says quietly. “But what Sissy was talking about earlier? How Noeleen and Douglas loved each other so fiercely that it broke their hearts when they went their separate ways? Well, I’ve never been in love like that.”
“Me neither,” I say softly.
“I was with my ex for a few years, but when we split up last year, I almost felt relieved because then she could find someone who was better for her,” Beckett confesses, his eyes fluttering closed for a second. “Someone cut out to be a good partner.”
“What makes you think you weren’t a good partner?” I ask, surprised.
“A lot of things,” is the response I get, and when I glance at him, there’s a distant look in his eyes as he stares through the darkness.
I want to reach for his hand. Thread my fingers through his. Instead, I place my hands in my lap and entwine my own fingers. Change the subject so I don’t push him farther than he wants to go in this conversation. “It’s weird our grandparents were once in love, isn’t it? Like, what if they’d stayed together? Gotten married and had kids?”
Beckett snorts a laugh. “I guess we wouldn’t exist to even be having this conversation in the first place. Kind of crazy, when you think about it, that one breakup can rewrite generations of people.”
“Trippy,” I say, considering this. “And on top of that, what are the chances that her grandson and his granddaughter would end up being next door neighbors?”
“Slim, at best.” He moves a little, like he’s shifting to get comfortable. His movement is casual, nonchalant, but when he stills again, the small space between us has been eliminated. My shoulder is resting against his arm, and our thighs are pressed together as we sit here in the darkness, side by side. “But here we are.”
“Here we are,” I echo.
There’s electricity everywhere we’re connected. An exciting, zippy kind of spark that makes me want to lean in and see what happens next. Which would be crazy… but the pull between us currently feels that strong.
“Maybe the universe wanted us to meet,” I find myself saying, my voice a little throaty.
It’s strange to think of something outside of ourselves operating on a bigger scale than what we’re used to in our everyday lives. I’m not sure I like the idea of the universe having a hand in our decisions, of fate determining the course of our lives… but then again, maybe there’s some comfort in that.
“If not the universe, then it has to be this crazy building that keeps locking us in confined spaces together,” he jokes. At least, I think he’s joking.
I crane my neck to look over at my windowsill, half expecting the book to be gone and the window to be firmly shut.
But it’s propped open, just like I left it.
“We’re not locked together now.” I turn to face him again, and just looking at him makes my heart beat double-time. I’ve never felt chemistry like this, a draw to someone that feels like it could overtake all logic.
All reason.
We’re only inches apart, and his hazel-green eyes appear black in the darkness as they hold mine captive. “We’re not,” he says, his voice low in a way that makes a shiver wrap itself around my spine.
He’s close, oh so close, his warm thigh still pressing into mine, his minty breath skimming my cheeks in the cover of darkness.
Is he leaning closer? Am I? All I know is that my eyelashes are fluttering closed, and I’m surrounded by his clean, woodsy smell, reminiscent of babbling brooks and fields of four-leafed clovers and golden sunsets over heather-clad moors and?—
Far below, on the street, a car alarm sounds, snapping me out of my reverie.
His head jerks back in surprise, and the second I lose his closeness, my cheeks burn hot. My breath comes shakily, and I’m mortified by the stunning realization that I think I might’ve just tried to kiss him.
Did I imagine him leaning in? Am I so behind on sleep that I’m losing my marbles?
“So, what are you going to do for the rest of the summer?” I blurt the first question that comes to mind, trying to force my voice to sound somewhat normal.
“Aside from hanging out with you on fire escapes and playing at Indie Music Nights, you mean?” he says teasingly, but I’m gratified to hear the hitch in his breathing. Like he’s affected, too.
I try to match his jokey tone, play it as cool as he is. “Speaking of Indie Music Night, I’m not sure where to put my giant leprechaun and shamrock decorations for your performance…”
“You’d better be kidding, Roberts.” He pokes me right under my ribs, perfectly hitting that sensitive spot that makes me giggle and squirm.
“Kidding!” I hold up my hands, and his fingertips graze over my side again as he pulls his hand back.
“Good.” His eyes dance in the fractured moonlight. “And as for what I’m doing, I’ve signed up to give some guitar lessons at Ezra’s shop… and then I also intend to find out exactly why our grandparents broke up, because now I’m hooked on this story like it’s a serial soap opera or something.”
“Our very own cross-continental family drama to unpack.” I smile, happy he is on the same trail of thought as me. “I was wondering if I could go see Gramps to ask him about Noeleen… I’m not too sure how to approach the subject with him.”
“We wouldn’t want to upset him,” Beckett agrees, and I’m grateful for his sensitivity.
I get the sense that this is important for Beckett, that being here and connecting with a part of his grandmother’s life he didn’t know about until recently means a lot to him.
Now that I know him a little better, I also get the feeling that his looking into her time here in Serendipity Springs is potentially a form of delayed grieving for him, and that if and when he gets the answers he’s looking for, he’ll be able to come more to terms with the loss.
“Agreed,” I say. “But it really would be nice to know what happened. If anything, it’s a lot more interesting to learn about my grandfather’s long-lost love than to write an article about my own failed love life—which I’m beginning to think I’m going to have to do, because apparently this building is full of happily-ever-after love stories.”
The Hathaways are super in love, Cash and Nori met here, and heck, even Andrew seems to have found the right person for him…
“Gosh, even our grandparents fell in love when one of them was living in this building.”
Becks tilts his head at me. “Wait, what if you wrote your piece about Noeleen and Douglas? You could write about how she lived here in the building, but their love didn’t last, so the legend is flawed, at best. You could even tie it to us, if you like. How Douglas’s granddaughter now lives in the building too, and it also brought her no luck in love… and Noeleen’s grandson is the biggest single sad sack to ever walk the planet.”
“Is that a direct quote I can use?” I ask, laughing. But my heart is picking up speed.
“I think the alliteration has a real ring to it.”
“But seriously, Becks, all joking aside, are you sure you’re okay with me using your—and your grandmother’s—story for something like this?”
Because while I was feeling entirely opposed to writing about love before, I don’t really feel that way anymore. Throughout the course of this conversation, I realized that I’ve made my peace with my ex, and I’m no longer writing this article to escape my situation, but rather for the sole purpose of furthering my career. Of shaping my life the way I want it to look—living and working in Boston, while still remaining close with my family here and visiting them often.
He shrugs. “Sure. She loved being the center of attention, this would totally have given her a kick, knowing you’re researching and writing her story for publication.”
“I’ll have to talk to Gramps first,” I say, still mulling it over. “I’m not sure how much he will comprehend, but I’d feel like I was going behind his back by not asking him about it.”
Beckett smiles. “Maybe he’ll surprise you and have more answers than you think.”
“And even if we don’t get answers on why it ended, it still makes for a great story.” It’s whimsical, like Freya wanted, and though it might not be a fun, sexy story of stars aligning, instead one of star-crossed lovers that tugs on the heartstrings, I think she’ll love the unique angle and how it’s personal to me. This feels like a much more genuine story for me to tell.
And it’s also a great reason to spend more time with Beckett.
Who, as it turns out, I like spending time with.
A lot more than I’d care to admit.