Chapter Twenty-Six #2
She was laughing now—a real laugh-out-loud, holding-her-stomach chuckle, and had to sit down on the bed before she fell over.
“Oh my God. We should play a game sometime where I cover the title of a book and have you guess what it might be. There’s a bookstagrammer that does that with her husband, and it’s hilarious. ”
I placed both books in the small pile Delaney had created next to the box. “These are fascinating. You may need to point out specific ones for me to read so I can better understand all of these tropes.”
Delaney grinned and grabbed a few books from the box. “She had excellent taste in books. I bet we can find a few you’d enjoy.” She sifted through the ones in her hand until a soft, “Huh.”
She’d gone still again.
This was different than before. This time her hands stopped moving, the book hovering in her grip. Her mouth parted—just slightly—like she’d forgotten what she’d been about to say.
“What is it?” I asked.
She turned it over before holding it up to show me. The cover was worn, the edges and spine soft from being read. The title was No Rings Attached. “She was finishing this one the last time I was here. I’d planned to grab it next. I’d completely forgotten—”
She opened the front page, and her mouth dropped open before snapping shut.
Concerned, I ran a hand up and down her back, waiting for her to tell me.
Instead of speaking, she tilted the book so I could see the first page. The handwriting was looped and confident, the pen pressed firmly, like someone wrote with intention.
Hello sweetheart,
Well, I think the cat is out of the bag. I’ve known for years you were stealing my romance novels when you visited. You thought you were subtle. So I decided to do something a little different before it inevitably went missing, and maybe we can talk about my little notes the next time you’re here.
Read it when you need reminding that love doesn’t always look the way you expect it to. Sometimes it shows up messy and chaotic, and in ways that you don’t recognize until you’re already in the middle of things.
I love you to the moon and back. And don’t laugh too hard at what I wrote. I did my best.
Aunt Jem
The date underneath was late July. Two weeks before she died.
She’d written it thinking Delaney would find it at her next visit. Thinking if she left it with the rest of her books, her niece would steal it and find the notes inside.
I read the inscription twice. The second time I felt something I didn’t think Jem had intended for me specifically, but that landed that way regardless.
I looked at Delaney and remembered our argument in front of Town Hall that I couldn’t fully reconstruct anymore because somewhere along the way, I’d replaced that memory with everything that came after.
Messy and chaotic, Jem had written. That tracked.
“I didn’t know. I was coming back for Thanksgiving, but then she …” Delaney sat on the bed with the book in her hands. The tears came quietly, not the broken kind from earlier tonight, something slower and deeper.
I put my arm around her and she leaned into me. We sat there on the edge of the bed staring at her aunt’s handwriting. Eventually, Delaney flipped it open to a random page almost at the end of the book. Jem’s handwriting stared back at us next to two paragraphs she’d highlighted.
Delaney read it out loud, her voice soft, “The little girl who’d stood at the edge of every room waiting to be picked, waiting to matter, tried so hard to stand tall. Tried to figure out a way to make this work, to contort myself into whatever shape would fit into the margins of his life.
“But the woman I’d slowly grown into over the past two weeks laid a steady hand on her shoulder and said, ‘No, we’re done accepting small doses of attention and pretending it’s okay.’”
Beside it in the margin, in Jem’s handwriting:
FINALLY she puts herself first. This poor girl deserved so much more from day one and that rotten family of hers. I wish I could throat punch them all.
Delaney laughed and wiped at her tears with the back of her hand. “That’s so her.”
“I can hear it,” I said.
She turned more pages. More notes—a skeptical “hmm” next to a plot development, a small star next to a scene that had clearly made an impression, an underlined passage, and then Delaney flipped back to the end after the epilogue and Jem had a final note.
This book was sooo good. I hope you loved it as much as I did.
While there are so many parts of the story to highlight, and so many things I love about the hero and heroine, what sticks with me is her finally understanding that home and the people she loved weren’t where she’d come from.
It was the place she finally landed. With people who genuinely loved and respected her.
Delaney stared at it for a moment. I watched her reread it again. Watched her understand something, or recognize something, or find something she’d been looking for without knowing it.
I gazed at the woman sitting next to me on the edge of her aunt’s bed, in a room she hadn’t been able to enter until tonight, with her clothes finally hanging in the closet after all this time.
Jem had written about a fictional character.
Yet I wasn’t so sure it was about a fictional character—more her wish for her niece.
Delaney put the box on the floor, scooched up to the headboard, and held out the book. “Will you read it to me?” she asked.
“The whole thing?”
“From wherever you want to start. Just … read it.”
I took the book and settled myself beside her.
Our shoulders touched, and eventually her head leaned against my arm.
I began reading the first sentence in the stillness of her aunt’s bedroom, in my regular voice, reading the notations along with the words, while Delaney laughed at the right parts and went still at others as the night slowly grew late around us.
“I’m so tired—” A yawn caught her mid-sentence, and she pressed her fingers to her mouth like she could take it back. “I feel like I just need a shower or something, but I don’t know if I have the energy for it.”
She’d barely finished her thought before I was already moving.
“Let me handle it. I’ll be right back.”
The bathroom was the kind of old that had been well-kept—original hex tile and a clawfoot tub that took up most of the room and made no apologies about it.
I turned the taps until the water ran hot and stayed there.
Then I found scented oils lined up on the shelf above the towel— the same floral scents that lived in the rest of the apartment—tipped a measure or two into the water, and lit candles around the room.
Steam and candlelight filled the space.
“Bath’s ready,” I let her know.
She looked up. The exhaustion on her face was apparent—she wasn’t just tired, she had that particular hollowness that came with doing something emotionally significant and coming out the other side of it.
She stood and swayed.
My hands found her before I’d decided to move. “Hey.”
“I’m okay,” she said, which was not entirely convincing from someone I was currently preventing from toppling over.
She reached for the hem of her shirt with fingers that had stopped cooperating, and I stepped in without a comment. She let me. Didn’t protest, didn’t deflect with humor—just let me, which told me more about how wrung out she was than anything else could have.
I carried her to the bathroom. She tucked her face against my neck and didn’t say anything. I didn’t either.
The tub was deep, and the water had stayed hot. I lowered her in slowly, and she sank into it with complete surrender. Her eyes closed before she fully settled. The tension in her face released by degrees—her jaw first, then her shoulders, and then around her eyes.
I sat on the edge of the tub and watched it happen.
“Get in with me?” she asked.
I looked at the tub. She looked at me. It was a one-person tub with a little extra room.“Sure. I need to grab a change of clothes from my car.”
“Okay.”
I placed a gentle kiss on her forehead before I left, taking a slight detour to change the sheets and blanket on Jem’s bed first.
The cool night air was a small shock after the heat of the bathroom.
I grabbed the bag I kept in my trunk out of habit—for calls that came in after hours and required more than a basic examination.
For a moment, I stood there in the dark parking lot behind Sacred Serenity, not moving.
Above me, light fell from Delaney’s apartment window in a soft rectangle onto the pavement below.
She’d asked me to stay.
Once I returned to the bathroom, I quickly shed my clothes and climbed into the tub. She settled against my chest and let out a soft sigh. “This is better.”
The bathroom was still warm with steam, and the candles threw off soft shadows on the wall. She sank into the water, her eyes closed before she was fully settled, and the muscles in her face relaxed.
I didn’t speak. I washed her hair, working the shampoo through it slowly with my fingers until she made a small, involuntary sound that wasn’t quite a word. I worked the facecloth across her shoulders and felt the last of the tension go out of them under my hands.
She didn’t speak, either.
When the water had cooled past comfortable, I reached around her and pulled the drain. She gave a half-hearted protest.
“Come on,” I coaxed.
I dried her off with the large, bright pink, fluffy towel that had clearly been Jem’s—there was no version of events in which that towel belonged to anyone who didn’t have extremely strong opinions about joy.
Delaney made a token effort to take it from me before giving up and letting someone else carry the burden for once.
I pulled a soft sleepshirt over her head. She emerged from it blinking, soft-eyed, and so tired her face was pale.
“Where do you want to sleep?”
She was silent. Her eyes moved to the hallway, to the bedroom door still standing open, and to the dark beyond it.
“In there. I think I can do it tonight.” She looked up at me. “I just can’t do it alone.”
We made our way into the bedroom, and I pulled back the covers to let her slide in first before I got in beside her. “Thank you for tonight,” she whispered. “For all of it.”
“Of course,” I said, drawing her tightly into my embrace.
Her eyes fluttered shut, and she was asleep in minutes.
I lay in the dark and listened to her breathing.
Light filtered through the blinds, creating a pattern on the ceiling.
I thought about the inscription. About the date underneath it—July, two weeks before she died—and the Thanksgiving visit Jem had been expecting but never came.
I thought about Delaney walking into this room tonight like she was afraid the grief would capture her if she slowed down.
Maybe Jem had known. She’d had that quality, by all accounts—the kind of perception that didn’t require an explanation, that simply saw things that others didn’t.
Maybe she’d written that note for a visit that was always going to be this one, even if she didn’t quite know it.
Or maybe in her otherworldly wisdom, she had figured it all out ahead of time.
We’d probably never know.
I looked at the woman sleeping against my chest, and I wondered if somehow we were destined to be together all along.