Chapter 33
THIRTY-THREE
The next six weeks move by in a haze.
Not long after Emma finds out about Jesse and me, Mr. King installs a greenhouse for Mrs. King, and Emma and I help her plant hundreds of flower seedlings over the course of a week.
At the end of March, I watch Emma during spring break, while Jesse, Madden, and Mr. King rip up an entire field over three days to make Mrs. King’s pick-your-own flower field.
Each night, Jesse comes home and grumbles about it, and I smile.
Still, when I offhandedly mention that a little garden would be fun for Emma and me at dinner, the guys spend the fourth day building raised beds complete with a fence and trellis to keep Jane Doe out.
Despite the fact that I’m rarely at my house, I keep the feed that I leave for her stocked, as well as adding a second salt block to Jesse’s place, and in early April, Emma meets my deer friend for the first time.
“What’s her name?” she asks, holding out a piece of celery. Even though Jesse isn’t a fan, so we rarely cook with it, I make sure both houses always have a bundle of celery on hand, and when I spotted Jane while we were out in the garden thinning the carrot seedlings, I was glad I did.
“Jane Doe,” I tell her.
“She looks like a Jane,” Emma says simply, further proving that we just get each other.
“How’d you meet her?” Unlike her dad, Emma doesn’t question my quirks or show any fear when the deer approaches us; instead, she takes my instructions to get the celery quickly and eagerly offers some to my friend.
“I saw her back in January. Deer this young usually stick with their moms, so when I spotted her alone, I kind of made it my mission to find her.” I turn to smile at her. “Your dad was not pleased that I was wandering out in the woods alone.”
Emma laughs, then nods as Jane accepts the stalk, pulling it gently from her hands.
“She doesn’t have a mom?” I shrug.
“If she does, she’s not around.”
Emma pauses, not even looking at me as she reaches for another piece of celery.
“She’ll be okay. We’ll look out for her.”
I don’t know if Emma meant the, just like we look out for each other, that I insert in my mind, but when she looks at me, giving me a soft smile that looks so much like her dad, I hear it all the same.
And more and more, I’m realizing that’s the truth.
We have each other, so we’ll always be okay.
brEAK TK
By late April, I spend barely any time at my place. When I do, it’s alarmingly quiet, and I almost always find an excuse to leave, to go to the main house or to Wren’s or Madden’s or just wait at Jesse’s until he or Emma comes home.
“You know, you should just move in, Hallie,” Emma says offhandedly during dinner one night, and my fork freezes halfway to my mouth.
“What?” Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Jesse is smirking wide, probably because for about a month he’s been saying the same thing. I repeatedly tell him I don’t think it’s fair to force that on Emma, but now I think I’m about to lose the argument.
“You’re here, like, all the time now. Why bother with a whole other house? I mean, most of your things are here as it is. Just another place for you to have to clean.”
“I’ve been telling her that, too,” Jesse adds, his smirk moving to a full-blown grin at this point, and I glare at him.
“Did your dad put you up for this?” I ask, and when genuine confusion crosses her face, I know the answer.
“No. I just think it’s kind of stupid for you to be split between two places. At this point, your house is just overflow storage.”
I spear a baby carrot on my fork and try to play it as casually as humanly possible.
“Would you be okay with that? If I moved in?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” she asks, her face filled with genuine confusion.
“Well, it’s just that it’s always been you and your dad here. I would be another person in your space.”
Now she looks at me like I’m the one losing it.
“Aren’t you going to move in eventually anyway?” I hesitate, then nod, and Emma nods like it’s common sense. “Then there’s no need to put it off.”
I set my fork down and look to Emma, assessing her face and trying to read any hidden feelings she might be hiding. I’ve learned to read her pretty well over the past few months, but right now, there’s nothing but genuineness, and just like that, one last barrier is gone.
“Okay, well…then, I guess I’ll move in.”
Emma shrugs like it’s no big deal to her. “I can help you start packing up the rest of your stuff after school.”
I nod, then look to Jesse. He’s grinning wide, eyes shining, joy emanating from him, and I know I just made the right decision.
brEAK TK
Over the next few days, Emma helps me box up my things, and the Thursday before Wren’s spring festival, knowing we have a busy weekend of helping her out ahead of us, Jesse helps us bring the last of my things to his house.
“What are these?” Emma asks, lifting a familiar pink box. I catch Jesse’s eyes across the room, and an entertained look spreads over his face, but I no longer feel the need to hide them away.
Hell, he already knows all of my secrets, after all.
“Those are all of my vision boards since Wren and I started making them.”
Emma’s eyes go wide with excitement, and she sits on the edge of my bed before removing the lid and taking out the stack of papers. Carefully, she starts to flip through them, each a time capsule of sorts for a year in my life.
“How many of these have you done?” she asks, looking at me.
I shrug, sifting through the pages. Some of them have handwritten lists of the items I wanted to do that year on the back, and I scan them.
“I did that,” I say, pointing to the one from last year that said to get three more clients.
“And I guess you’ve almost done that,” she says with a laugh, showing me one that says Mrs. King.
Just like last time, a deep blush burns on my cheeks.
“I always had a crush on your dad, even when I was totally invisible to him.”
“And let’s be grateful for that, yeah? When you made that, you were, what? Fourteen? That would have made me nineteen. Pretty happy I didn’t notice you then.”
I let out a laugh and shake my head, but nod all the same.
He lifts some and sifts through them, the same as Emma is doing.
I’ve never shared these with anyone other than Wren and Nat, and whenever someone has tried to dig through them, an acute sense of panic and a need to hide them has washed over me.
But now, I don’t feel that. Instead, they feel more like an artifact from my childhood, a bit of nostalgia I’m happy to share with these two.
“Learn to surf?” he asks, looking at me with a raised eyebrow.
“Wren and I watched that movie Blue Crush and thought it sounded so fun.”
“Go to the Bahamas, go to Paris, go to London, go to Rome,” Jesse reads on the back of one, and I laugh, grabbing it from his hands and flipping it over.
It’s one of the very first vision boards I made with Wren, and the front is mostly cut-out photos of movie covers of all of the Mary-Kate and Ashley movies we watched and loved.
“You really wanted to do a lot and go everywhere, didn’t you?” he asks, voice soft.
I smile up at him and shrug.
“There was a long time when I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere.
If you don’t have a place you belong, I think inherently, you want to wander to try and find it, even if you don’t realize that’s why.
” He continues to flip through vision boards where travels and career goals, and personal desires are all laid out.
All of my hopes and dreams were glued to 8.
5 x 11 pieces of cardstock. I reach out my hand, grab his, and his head lifts to look at me. “I found that place, finally.”
His eyes warm, and his smile softens as his hand squeezes mine, and we sit like that for long moments before Emma breaks into our bubble.
“I love the ooey gooey, but I’m also starving,” she says, and I snap my head to her to see that while I was distracted, she stacked up all of my vision boards and slid them back into the box.
The only one left is the one in Jesse’s hands.
He stares at it one last time before handing it to Emma and standing.
“Well, that sounds like my cue to get these in the truck so I can get my girls fed.”
“Prima?” Emma asks, placing the lid on the box and standing. Jesse agrees, then lifts the boxes and heads out the door.
Later that night, when the three of us are sitting on the couch watching Holiday in the Sun, which is arguably one of the best of the Mary-Kate and Ashley films, it clicks that for the first time in my life, I feel settled.
I spent so much of my life trying to think of things to fill a void in my soul. New hobbies, picking up odd jobs, and visions of travel and far-off accomplishments, but even when I did manage to cross things off, it didn’t fix it, didn’t fill that spot inside of me, never made me feel settled.
But here on the couch, watching a nostalgic movie and listening to Jesse and Emma jokingly tear apart its admitted plot holes, I feel whole.