Chapter Thirty-Five
Time is a funny thing. For a long time, Landon had been suspended in thick stasis while everyone around him moved forward. Then, for a short time, he’d vacationed somewhere strange, in a land that was neither past, present, nor future. Once he pressed play on his life, he positively hurtled.
He stayed in Edinburgh only long enough to tie up loose ends.
He put Conor on a plane. He made sure Dave had really internalized the rules of Texas hold’em.
He even patched things up with Graham, who had been so ashamed of his actions he ended up doing the bulk of the apologizing.
Landon was surprised by how quickly and painlessly Graham had moved on from Rose’s decision.
“It’s her life,” he said with a shrug. “Things will fall into place. They always do.” Was that optimism or detachment?
Landon wondered. It seemed to be an effect of the pill that no one talked about, but one that Landon found just as signature to the experience as the hope everyone touted.
Once you’ve started over once, you know that you can start over again.
People become expendable—replaceable. It was a sobering thought.
In the taxi to the airport, Christmas music blared from the patchy radio.
Landon thought of the last Christmas he and Rose had shared, when she was still so newly pregnant that they had only told their family and closest friends.
They’d sipped hot cider on the floor beside the Christmas tree and she’d read aloud from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which Landon had gamely pretended to enjoy.
It was a memory that should have had him begging the driver to change the station, or even pull the car over so he could walk the final miles.
Today, it wasn’t. Today, it warmed him to think of Rose in the first months of pregnancy, her stomach barely round, her cheekbones accentuated by the colorful twinkle lights.
He placed a hand on his heart and felt, for the first time, that he might actually be able to keep those memories.
He’d lingered too long over breakfast at the hostel and knew he would be cutting it close, especially if the screening lines were anything longer than standard.
The thought of running through the airport felt almost as dramatic as running through a hospital, but he didn’t want to miss his flight.
Not this close to a major holiday, and not when he had this kind of momentum.
He had just paid the cab driver and slung his backpack over his shoulder when he saw the sign, bearing his name in capital letters:
LANDON CALLOWAY.
“You hopeless idiot,” Poppy said, then let the sign fall.
Landon shifted uncomfortably. That was one loose end he’d meant to tie up—he really had.
But every time he’d gone to call her number, his hand froze.
Eventually, he’d convinced himself it was cleaner to let the chips fall.
Poppy was Rose’s, and Rose was Poppy’s. Poppy would keep caring for Rose when he couldn’t. “I should have called,” he conceded.
“It’s okay,” Poppy said, and she sounded like she meant it. “It’s all okay.”
Landon fought the urge to look at his watch. “That means a lot.”
“You’re doing the right thing,” she said, serious as he’d ever seen her. “This wasn’t fair to her.”
Poppy wasn’t one for understatement. He filled in what she would usually make abundantly clear. “I nearly killed her.”
Her shoulders tensed. “But you didn’t.”
Landon cleared his throat and slung his backpack a little higher. “Well, I really appreciate you coming all the way out here to say that. And what you did for Rose—I mean, what I assume you did. Getting her another pill. She deserves to be happy.”
Poppy didn’t respond right away, hands fiddling with the sign now draped across her front.
“That’s not what I came here to say.” She took a long, steadying breath.
“I know I’ve been a pain in the ass to you.
There’s always been a part of me that thinks no one will ever be good enough for Rose.
Always has been, since basically the day I met her.
” She smiled faintly. “But in between yelling at you to leave her the fuck alone, I should’ve told you something else.
When you two were good, you were really good.
Like, movie good. Unreal.” She rolled her eyes, as if to counter her own sentimentality.
“It made me a little sick, to be honest. Still kind of does, if I think about it too hard.” Her eyes bore into him then.
“And all that good? It helps me forgive the bad.”
Landon found he couldn’t move.
“I wanted to tell you that I forgive you, Landon. For breaking her heart. For not being what she needed when you were broken, too. I forgive you.” Then, she did something so out of character he actually guffawed: She lifted him off the ground in an enormous, rib-cracking hug.
When she deposited him on the ground she pulled a piece of folded paper from her pocket. “Rose wanted you to have this.”
He took it, chest pounding. “A letter?”
“The letter she wrote herself this time,” Poppy said, eyes heavy. “The one where she doesn’t forget you.”
Landon hadn’t had the space to consider the enormity of Poppy’s loss, or the selflessness of it all—how she had served as Rose’s doula to her new life, twice now. He had lost his life partner, but so had she.
“You are the best friend in the cosmos,” Landon said, an echo of a phrase he had heard so much over the years at the tail end of Rose and Poppy’s endless phone calls. “You know that, right?”
Poppy laughed, but the tears welling in her eyes gave her away.
“We were the loves of her life,” she said.
“You, me, and Cordelia.” She surprised him once again by slipping into his arms, wrapping herself around his waist. “You remember what I told you, at the end of that aisle, the day you two got married? I’m on your team, Landon.
Forever. I’ll remember her with you anytime you want. Just call me.”
His heart clanged at the offer, the simplicity and depth of it. “I might take you up on that.”
“You should.” She pulled back, shook her head, and swept her hair back into a loose bun. “Now go, this is getting sloppy, and you know I hate a scene.”
Landon smiled, the Poppy he knew never far from the surface. “I’m going,” he said. “I’m gone.”
Cinque Terre. It was another place he and Rose had never been, which was as much part of the appeal as the fact that in the off-season, he would be one of few tourists willing to brave the cooler temperatures on the usually overrun Italian coast. He wasn’t ready to go back to their empty home—he didn’t have it in him to put up a tree, and it wasn’t time to tell his family what he’d done and seen these last weeks.
Though he knew that someday, soon, it would be.
Instead, he sat in the middle of a lemon grove, lingering fruit still clinging to the trees, a cool December sun on his face.
A little cat darted out from the brush and sat on the beaten path.
It looked up at him, blinked slowly, then stuck its tongue out.
“Charmed,” Landon said, hoping his voice wouldn’t scare the cat away.
As if to reassure him, the cat stuck its tongue out again.
Landon had chosen the spot early that morning, underneath a crooked tree, heavy with late-season lemons.
He’d set out to do what Rose had asked of him and tell their story faithfully.
At first, he’d thought he would start right where he left off, and then merge the two versions when he got home and could pull up the original draft on his computer.
But the blank page was too tempting and his memories too loud.
He’d started again, at the beginning. There was so much he’d missed, he realized.
He hadn’t thought to write down that day he’d found Rose crying in the laundry room after she’d accidentally shrunk one of Poppy’s sweaters, and their mad dash to the dry cleaners to see if anything could be done to salvage it.
He’d completely forgotten about the time she laughed too hard at a joke he made in a quiet movie theater, and they were shushed out so fast she spilled a whole box of peanut M&Ms in the aisle.
He’d neglected to record the first time she got truly angry at him, for forgetting to ask how she was doing on the anniversary of her father’s death.
There was the night she fell asleep on his shoulder at a party, and he stayed there until two in the morning, the weight of her head slumped over him ten thousand times better than any night’s sleep he’d ever had.
The morning she couldn’t find her keys and accused him of hiding them, only to discover she’d baked them into a loaf of pumpkin bread.
The time she got quiet on a drive home from visiting her mother, and he didn’t know what to say, so he just turned the music down and held her hand until she squeezed it once, without looking at him.
There were hundreds of thousands of small moments like that. Moments he’d never written down, moments they’d never talked about, that had shaped their lives.
He could almost feel her with him in that lemon grove.
If he closed his eyes, she was there, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and yellow dress, trying and failing to blend in with the trees.
He could almost see her reading over the scene he’d just finished, the crease in her brow that only appeared when she was thinking deeply coming into focus.
He could almost hear her melodic voice whispering, That’s not quite how it happened. Do you remember…
His Rose was gone. He knew that, now. And knew well enough not to wish for her return.
But he was starting to understand what she’d meant about tearing the fabric of the universe.
Rose was gone, but she would always be here, if he could just find the right words to describe her.
If he could just keep writing this book, tinkering with words, combing through lines, adding scenes from countless long-forgotten memories, she would never be gone.
Not really. If he never wrote THE END, they would always be out there, somewhere, beginning.