Chapter 9 Maggie
Maggie
The Public Garden was a study in gray and silver, bare branches against a pewter sky, the frozen pond reflecting the light like hammered metal. Boston without its postcard prettiness, stripped down to bones and cold air and the quiet of a city holding its breath against winter.
Jack met me at the Arlington Street gate, coffee in hand, collar turned up against the wind.
“You’re early,” he said.
“You’re earlier.”
“I was eager.” He said it simply, without embarrassment, and something warm spread through my chest despite the cold.
The old Jack, the guy I remembered from the first timeline had been careful about admitting things like eagerness.
This version seemed less guarded. Or maybe I was just paying better attention.
We walked without any destination in mind, following the paths that wound through the landscape.
A few joggers passed us, breath visible in the cold air.
An older man sat on a bench feeding pigeons from a paper bag, the birds clustering around his feet like supplicants.
The willows along the water’s edge trailed bare branches into the gray, beautiful in their starkness.
“I used to come here with my brother,” Jack said. “Before.”
I knew what before meant. Before Vietnam. Before the telegram. Before Danny became a photograph on a bookshelf instead of a person who threw a kid in the air and taught him to catch a ball.
“What did you do?”
“Fed the ducks, mostly. He’d buy stale bread from the bakery on Charles Street. They sold it cheap, day-old stuff, and we’d throw chunks until the whole flock came running.”
Jack smiled, and it was the kind of smile that had history behind it. “He told me once that the secret was to throw the small pieces first. Get their attention. Make them want more.”
“Good advice.”
“Danny had a lot of good advice. I didn’t understand most of it until he was gone.”
We walked in silence for a while after that, and he seemed to understand that sometimes the best response to grief was simply to stand beside it.
By the time we reached the café on Newbury Street, my fingers were numb and my nose was running, and I’d never been happier to see a door with a fogged-up window and the promise of warmth inside.
The café was small and cluttered, the kind of place that would be called “artisanal” in 2014 and charged triple. Now it was just a coffee shop with good hot chocolate and a radiator that worked overtime.
Jack ordered two hot chocolates while I claimed a table by the window, the glass thick with condensation, the street outside reduced to impressionist blurs.
“So,” he said, settling into the chair across from me. “Tell me something.”
“Something like what?”
“Something I don’t know. Something surprising.”
I thought about it. There were a lot of things he didn’t know.
A whole lifetime he couldn’t even imagine, and most of them I couldn’t tell him.
The rules of the magic, if you could call them rules, seemed to prohibit the obvious cheats.
No lottery numbers, no stock tips, no dire warnings about the future that would make me sound insane.
But there were other things. True things. Things I’d never told anyone because the old me had been too scared.
“My mother left when I was twelve,” I said. “Just... disappeared one day. No warning, no explanation. She sent birthday cards for a few years and then stopped. I haven’t heard from her since I was sixteen.”
Jack’s face didn’t change, but something shifted in his eyes. Recognition, maybe. The understanding of someone who knew what it meant to lose people.
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.” Except it wasn’t, not really. The wound had scabbed over decades ago, but underneath, it was still raw. Still bleeding whenever I poked it.
“The thing is, I think I’ve spent my whole life expecting everyone to leave the way she did. Like it’s inevitable. Like love is just a countdown to abandonment.”
“Is that why you kept pulling away?”
I looked at him, really looked, past the journalist’s careful neutrality, past the guarded edges, and saw someone who was asking because he actually wanted to understand. Not to judge or to use it against me later. Just to know.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s why.”
“And now?”
The hot chocolate was warm in my hands. The café hummed with conversation and the hiss of the espresso machine. Outside, Boston moved through its Friday afternoon rhythm, everyone hurrying somewhere, everyone with somewhere to be.
“Now I’m trying to stay,” I said. “Even when it scares me.”
Jack reached across the table and covered my hand with his. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
Jack
The bookstore was called Wordsworth, and it had been my favorite place in Cambridge since I’d discovered it my sophomore year at BU.
Three floors of used books, floor to ceiling, arranged in categories that made sense only to the owner, a man named Winston who claimed to have read every book in the store and might actually have been telling the truth.
The smell hit you the moment you walked in.
Old paper, dust, and the must of stories that had been loved and passed on and loved again.
I’d spent entire weekends here, browsing, discovering, losing myself in the stacks.
I wanted Maggie to see it.
She walked through the door and stopped, and I watched the change happen in real time. Her shoulders dropped. Her face softened. She took a breath, deep, like she was inhaling something essential, and turned to look at me with an expression I’d never seen before.
“You brought me to paradise.” She smiled up at me.
“I thought you might like it.”
“Like it.” She was already moving toward the nearest shelf, fingers trailing along spines.
“This is my church. This is my happy place. This is—”
She pulled a book from the shelf, checked the spine, made a small sound of approval. “First edition. Do you know how rare this is?”
I didn’t, but I liked watching her know.
This was Maggie in her element, not the guarded woman who deflected with humor, not the careful professional navigating office politics, but the reader underneath.
The person who loved stories the way some people loved music or art or the particular light at golden hour.
“Take your time,” I said. “I’ll be in the history section.”
She barely heard me. She was already gone, absorbed into the shelves.
I found her forty minutes later in the fiction section, sitting cross-legged on the floor between two shelves, a stack of books beside her and another open in her lap.
“Having fun?”
“I found a first edition Hemingway. It’s three dollars. Three dollars.”
She held up the book like it was holy scripture. “Do you know how much this would cost—”
She stopped. Blinked. Something flickered across her face—confusion, maybe, or fear—before she smoothed it away.
“Would cost what?”
“You know, as time goes by. These things appreciate in value.” She set the Hemingway carefully on her pile. “Did you find anything good?”
I had, actually. A biography of Lincoln I’d been hunting for months, plus a collection of journalism essays from the thirties that looked promising. But I was more interested in whatever had just happened on her face.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine.” She stood, brushing dust from her jeans. “Let me grab one more thing. There’s a Clancy I’ve been wanting to reread.”
She moved toward the thriller section, and I followed at a distance, watching. Something was wrong. I’d spent enough time interviewing people to recognize the signs, the slight tension in her shoulders, the way her movements had become just a fraction too deliberate. She was hiding something.
But she was also here, in my favorite bookstore, building a stack of books to buy. She was staying. Whatever she was hiding, she wasn’t running.
I decided to let it go. For now.
Maggie
The Clancy was on the third shelf, right where I somehow knew it would be. Patriot Games. I remembered devouring this in... what year? The details blurred together, past and present tangling like yarn in a cat’s paws.
I added it to my pile and we made our way to the register, Jack’s hand warm at the small of my back.
The cashier, a college kid with a Smiths t-shirt and a bored expression, rang up my books one by one. Eight dollars and seventy-three cents. I reached into my purse for my wallet, digging past the compact and the ChapStick and the crumpled receipts.
My fingers touched something smooth. Glossy.
I pulled it out without thinking.
The Polaroid. The old kind with the white border, the kind that developed while you watched and faded if you left it in the sun too long.
Three women at Fenway Park. Hot dogs in hand, the Green Monster visible behind them, sunshine and summer and joy radiating from every pixel. I recognized myself immediately, the Maggie who had lived the life I’d left behind.
And beside me was Sarah. Except Sarah’s face was softer now, like someone had smeared Vaseline across the lens. Her features were there, technically, but the details had gone fuzzy. The exact shade of her eyes. The shape of her smile. The way her hair curled at her temples.
Emma was worse. Emma was barely there at all.
I could see the shape of her, young, bright, grinning at the camera with the intensity of a girl who knows she’s being photographed, but the rest of her was fading.
Dissolving. Like an overexposed print left too long in sunlight, like a memory bleaching out at the edges.
My hands were shaking.
“Miss? That’ll be eight seventy-three.”
The cashier’s voice came from somewhere far away. I shoved the Polaroid back into my purse, fumbled bills onto the counter with trembling fingers. Too much, a ten and a five, but I couldn’t make my hands count properly.
“Keep the change,” I managed.