Chapter 5
Maggie
The offices of Harrison & Webb Publishing occupied the third floor of a brick building on Newbury Street, and walking through the doors Monday morning felt like stepping into a time capsule of my own life.
I’d spent my entire career in publishing.
Worked my way up from editorial assistant to associate editor to senior editor to, as of three days ago in a timeline that no longer existed, Editorial Director.
I knew this industry inside and out, knew the rhythms of acquisition meetings and the politics of imprint rivalries, and the exhaustion of shepherding a difficult author through their third round of revisions.
The surrealism of it hit me in waves.
The office was almost unrecognizable from the sleek, open-plan space I’d left behind.
No computers—well, one computer, a hulking IBM PC with its beige plastic casing and tiny green-text monitor, sitting in the corner like a mysterious artifact that no one quite trusted.
Instead, typewriters dominated every desk, the clatter of keys creating a constant percussion that I’d forgotten was the soundtrack of my early career.
The IBM Selectric on my desk hummed when I turned it on, that electric whine that had once meant possibility and now just meant I’d be retyping anything with more than two errors.
There was paper everywhere. Manuscripts stacked in towers that threatened to topple.
Carbon copies with their smudged purple ink.
Memos typed on cream-colored company letterhead, routed through actual physical inboxes that sat on the corner of every desk.
The mail cart came through twice a day, pushed by a kid named Dennis who was working his way through BU and always had ink stains on his fingers.
And the smoke. God, the smoke.
Harold Finch, one of the senior editors, sat three desks away with a cigarette perpetually burning in the ashtray beside his coffee cup.
The smoke curled up toward the water-stained ceiling tiles, joining the general haze that hung over the office.
In 2014, you couldn’t smoke within fifty feet of a building entrance without someone calling security.
In 1987, Harold ashed into his coffee cup and nobody blinked.
My eyes watered. My clothes would smell like an ashtray by noon.
I’d forgotten this part, how we’d all just marinated in secondhand smoke like it was normal, because it was.
The phones were rotary, heavy black things that sat on every desk and rang with an actual bell, not a digital chirp.
When someone was on a call, you could hear the coiled cord stretching as they paced, tethered to their desk like a dog on a leash.
No voicemail, just pink message slips that accumulated in a spike on the corner of your desk, each one a tiny paper record of someone trying to reach you.
“Maggie!” My supervisor, a harried woman named Patricia with a severe bob and reading glasses perpetually pushed up on her head, appeared at my elbow with another stack of manuscripts. She smelled like Shalimar perfume and the breath mints she used to cover her coffee habit.
“These came in over the weekend. Log them, send the rejections, flag anything that doesn’t make you want to gouge your eyes out.”
“Got it.”
She was already gone, clicking away on sensible pumps toward some crisis I couldn’t see.
I looked at the stack she’d left, easily forty submissions, each one a manila envelope stuffed with someone’s hopes and dreams and months of work, and tried to remember how I’d felt about this job the first time around.
Excited, probably. Eager to prove myself. Certain that if I just worked hard enough, I’d climb the ladder and end up exactly where I belonged.
I had climbed the ladder. I had ended up exactly where I belonged. And then I’d wished myself back to the bottom rung because of a man I’d wondered ‘what if’ about.
A thought snagged me, sharp and unexpected.
Emma’s face on my phone screen, three days ago—or twenty-seven years from now, depending on how you counted.
Aunt Mags! I got into Harvard! That voice, bright and breathless and so full of the future it made my chest ache.
Emma at five, gap-toothed and fearless, reading Goodnight Moon to me instead of the other way around because she’d decided I was doing the voices wrong.
Emma surviving the cancer that had nearly killed her, coming out the other side fierce and funny and determined to save every other sick kid she met.
Emma, who didn’t yet exist. Who might never exist, if I stayed here long enough to change the life that led to her.
I shoved the thought down hard and picked up the next manuscript.
The morning passed in a blur of paperwork, phone calls, and the tedium of entry-level work.
I logged manuscripts into the leather-bound ledger we used for tracking.
No database, no spreadsheet, just my handwriting in blue ink joining decades of other handwriting before it.
I typed rejection letters on the Selectric, fighting with the correction ribbon every time I made a typo, the white-out tape leaving ghostly shadows over my mistakes.
The carriage return dinged at the end of every line, a sound I’d forgotten I knew.
At eleven-thirty, I grabbed my coat, the camel wool one with the oversized shoulders that 1987 me had saved three paychecks to buy, and told Patricia I was taking an early lunch.
Mike’s on Dorchester Ave. I’d written the address on a Post-it note, then transferred it to an index card when the Post-it fell off my bag, then finally just memorized it after getting lost twice.
The restaurant was a small diner wedged between a laundromat and a hardware store, the kind of place with a hand-lettered sign in the window advertising the daily special and a bell over the door that jangled when you entered.
Jack was already there, sitting in a booth by the window. He stood when he saw me, and something in my chest did a complicated flip.
“You found it,” he said.
“Eventually.” I slid into the booth across from him, the vinyl squeaking under my wool skirt. “I may have made a few wrong turns.”
“A few?”
“Several. Okay, a lot.” I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, a nervous habit I’d never managed to break. “I have a terrible sense of direction.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile, but close. “I remember.”
Jack
She looked different.
Not physically. There was the same chestnut hair falling past her shoulders in those soft layers she always wore, same green eyes with the gold flecks that caught the light, same heart-shaped face that had kept me up more nights than I wanted to admit.
She was wearing something professional, a cream-colored blouse with a bow at the collar and a burgundy skirt, the kind of outfit that said I’m serious about my career while still managing to look like Maggie.
But something underneath had shifted. The way she held herself, maybe. The way she met my eyes instead of glancing away. Almost as if she’d gained a lot of confidence in the past few months.
The waitress came by, a tired-looking woman in her fifties with a pencil stuck in her graying hair and a name tag that said DORIS.
“What can I get you?”
“Coffee and a turkey club for me, thanks.” Maggie shook her head when Doris looked at her expectantly.
“Just the coffee.”
Doris shrugged and shuffled away, her orthopedic shoes squeaking on the linoleum.
The diner smelled like burnt coffee and bacon grease and the staleness of places that never closed.
A Formica counter ran along one wall, stools with cracked red vinyl seats lined up in front of it.
Behind the counter, a cook worked the griddle, the sizzle of frying eggs competing with Bon Jovi on the radio—“Livin’ on a Prayer,” tinny through the small speakers mounted near the ceiling.
“So,” I said, because someone had to start.
“So.” She wrapped her hands around her coffee cup like she needed something to anchor her. Her nails were unpainted, I noticed. Short and practical. That was new. The old Maggie had always kept them polished, part of the armor she wore against the world.
“Thank you for meeting me. I know this is...” She paused, and I watched her search for the right word. “I know things ended badly.”
“They ended.” I kept my voice neutral. “I’m not sure ‘badly’ is the word I’d use.”
“What word would you use?”
I thought about it. “Predictably.”
She flinched. Just slightly, just enough that I noticed the small tightening around her eyes, the fractional drop of her shoulders.
“That’s fair.”
We sat in silence for a moment. Outside the window, a city bus rumbled past, belching exhaust, its brakes squealing as it stopped at the corner. A woman in a puffy coat and earmuffs hurried past, head down against the wind. February in Boston. Everyone looked cold and miserable.
“I owe you an apology,” Maggie said. “A real one. Not the kind where I make a joke and change the subject.”
I didn’t say anything. Just waited, watching her face, trying to read whatever was happening behind those green eyes.
She took a breath, the kind of breath people take before they jump off something high.
“My mother left when I was twelve. Just... walked out one day. No warning, no real explanation. She sent birthday cards for a few years, and then nothing.”
She stared at her coffee, not at me. Her fingers traced the rim of the cup, around and around. “My dad never recovered. He just... crumbled. Stopped being a person, really. Went through the motions until his heart gave out when I was nineteen.”
I knew some of this. Fragments she’d let slip over the year we’d been dancing around each other, pieces I’d had to assemble myself because she’d never told the whole story at once.
But she’d never laid it out like this. Straight, unguarded, without the protective layer of sarcasm she usually wrapped around anything real.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s—”
“It did a number on me.” She cut me off, and I understood, she needed to get it all out before she lost her nerve.
“Watching someone love that hard and then just... shatter when it was gone. I decided somewhere along the way that I’d never let anyone matter that much. That if I kept one foot out the door, I’d be the one leaving instead of the one left behind.”
She finally looked up at me. Her eyes were bright, not quite wet but close. I’d never seen Maggie this close to tears over anything that wasn’t a book.
“I’ve been unfair to you. I pushed you away every time things got real because I was terrified of what would happen if I let you in. And that’s not—” She swallowed, her throat moving visibly. “That’s not your fault. It’s mine.”
I didn’t know what to say. In a year of pushing and pulling, of canceled plans and unanswered calls, Maggie had never once admitted she was scared. Never once taken responsibility for the distance between us without immediately deflecting into a joke.
“I know you’re seeing Rebecca,” she said.
The shift caught me off guard. “It’s not serious,” I heard myself say. “We’re just... It’s casual. She’s easy to be with.”
The words hung between us. I watched Maggie absorb them, watched her understand exactly what I wasn’t saying. Easy. Uncomplicated. Not like you.
She nodded slowly, looking down at her coffee again. “Not like me.”
“Maggie—”
“No, it’s okay. I earned that.” She looked up again, and there was something steady in her expression now, like she’d found solid ground. “I’m not asking you to break up with her. I’m just asking for a chance. A real one. To show you I’ve changed.”
I stared at her across the table, this woman I’d spent a year wanting and three months trying to forget.
This wasn’t the Maggie I knew. The woman I knew would never ask for something this directly, would never make herself this vulnerable, would never sit in a diner booth and admit she was scared and ask for another chance like it was simple.
“What changed?” The question came out before I could stop it.
She was quiet for a long moment. I watched her weigh something—options, words, truths she couldn’t tell me. Her fingers had stopped tracing the cup. She sat very still.
“I woke up,” she said finally. “I just... woke up.”
She stood, leaving a few dollars on the table for her untouched coffee.
“I’m not asking for an answer right now. I just wanted you to know.” She pulled on her coat, fingers fumbling slightly with the buttons, that camel wool thing with the shoulder pads that made her look like she was ready to take on the world.
“I’m not running this time, Jack. For once in my life, I’m done running.”
And then she was gone, the bell over the door jangling as it swung shut behind her, cold air rushing in to fill the space where she’d been.
I sat there for a long time, watching Doris refill coffee cups down the counter, listening to the radio shift from Bon Jovi to The Cure, my turkey club growing cold on its plate.
I woke up.
What the hell did that mean?
For three months, I’d been certain. Certain that she was never going to let me in, certain that I deserved better than someone who treated love like a threat.
Now I wasn’t certain of anything.
I still loved her. That was the thing I couldn’t get around, no matter how many times I told myself otherwise.
I’d never stopped, even when I’d convinced myself I had.
Even when I’d started seeing Rebecca, even when I’d written that damn goodbye letter, some stubborn part of me had been waiting. Hoping. Hating myself for hoping.
But love wasn’t enough. I’d learned that from my parents, from watching them tear each other apart for thirty years in the name of passion.
I didn’t want someone who’d push me away every time things got too close, too real, too frightening.
Didn’t want to spend my life chasing someone who was always halfway out the door.
Except Maggie had just said she wasn’t running. Had looked me in the eye and admitted she’d been scared and asked for a chance.
And for the first time since I’d decided I was done with her, I believed she might actually mean it.
Doris appeared with the coffee pot. “Refill, hon?”
“Sure.” I pushed my cup toward her. “Thanks.”
She filled it without comment, then shuffled away to the next table. I wrapped my hands around the warm ceramic and stared out the window at the street where Maggie had disappeared into the crowd.