Chapter 11 Maggie #2
Afterward, we walked home as Diane linked her arm through mine.
“You want to talk about it?”
“About what?”
“Whatever’s making you look like that.”
I considered lying. It would have been easy—I’d spent so many years perfecting the art of deflection, of surface answers that sounded like honesty. But Diane knew me. She’d always known me.
“I’m scared,” I said. “I finally have something I want, and I’m terrified I’m going to lose it.”
“Jack?”
“Jack. And… other things.” Things I couldn’t explain.
“I feel like I’m standing at a crossroads, and every choice I make is closing a door somewhere else. And I can’t see which doors I’m closing until they’re already gone.”
Diane was quiet for a moment. “That’s called being alive. That’s what everyone feels.”
“I know.” But it wasn’t the same. It couldn’t be the same, because I knew things she didn’t know—knew that doors were closing right now, this very moment, futures disappearing like smoke.
We walked the rest of the way home, and when we got there, Diane hugged me and said, “It’s going to be okay. Whatever it is. You’re going to be okay.”
I wanted to believe her.
That night, I lay in bed with the radio playing softly. The station was doing an eighties countdown—“The Way It Is” fading into “Livin’ on a Prayer”—and I let the familiar songs wash over me while the ceiling stared back, unchanged.
I tried to remember my ex-husband’s name.
I knew I’d been married. The knowledge was there, solid and certain.
Eight years, divorced amicably, he’d remarried someone named…
Susan? No. Sandra? That wasn’t right either.
A woman with an S name, someone he’d been happier with than he’d ever been with me, and I’d been genuinely glad for him when I’d heard.
But his name was gone. The man I’d shared a home with, a bed with, a life with. Eight years of mornings and evenings and ordinary domestic moments, and I couldn’t remember what to call him. The shape of him was still there. Kind, steady, a little boring. Safe. I’d married him because he was safe.
Not like Jack. Jack had never been safe.
I pulled the Polaroid from my nightstand drawer. Held it up to the dim light from the window.
Shapes in the fog.
That’s all that was left of Emma and Sarah—vague outlines, suggestions of people who might once have existed. The Fenway backdrop was still clear, the Green Monster visible, the summer sunshine preserved. But the women standing in front of it had become ghosts.
What am I doing?
The question echoed in the dark. I was staying—I’d chosen to stay—but what would staying cost?
Every moment I spent here, building this life, was erasing something somewhere else.
People I’d loved. Memories I’d treasured.
A whole future dissolving like morning mist because I’d decided it wasn’t the future I wanted.
Was that fair? Was I allowed to make that choice for everyone? For Sarah, Emma, for the husband whose name I couldn’t remember?
The music changed. Something slower, sadder. A love song about loss and longing and the distance between what we want and what we have.
I got up. The bathroom was cold, the tile floor like ice under my bare feet. I turned on the shower—not to get in, just to fill the small space with steam and white noise—and sat down on the floor with my back against the tub.
And I cried. Not the quiet tears I could hide.
Not the grief I could package and put away.
This was ugly, gasping crying, the kind that comes from somewhere deep inside and doesn’t care about dignity or self-control.
I pressed my face into my knees and sobbed until my whole body shook, until I couldn’t breathe, until the shower steam mixed with the salt on my face and I couldn’t tell anymore what was water and what was loss.
Emma.
I was erasing Emma. Did it mean she would be a totally different person? Would Sarah even have her or might she have a different child?
Every day I stayed here, every moment I invested in this new life, was a moment I wasn’t living the life where I met Sarah at that party.
Where I introduced her to David. Where I watched her daughter grow up, and read her Charlotte’s Web when she was sick, cheered at her Harvard acceptance and cried at the news that she’d decided on pediatric oncology.
A pediatric oncologist. A doctor who would spend her life saving children.
And I was choosing Jack over that. Choosing a love story—my love story, my second chance—over a child who would grow up to save other children’s lives.
What kind of person did that?
You’re being selfish.
The thought hit like a physical blow. Because I was, wasn’t I?
The voice had said there would be a cost, and I’d nodded along like I understood, like I’d calculated the price and found it acceptable.
But I hadn’t understood. I’d thought the cost would be abstract—a career I’d miss, an apartment I’d lose, a version of myself I’d never become.
I hadn’t understood that the cost might be Emma.
The shower ran. The steam thickened. I sat on the bathroom floor and let myself grieve a woman I hadn’t met yet and a girl who might never be born. Or might grow up to be a totally different person.
I’m sorry, I thought, not knowing if Emma could hear me across whatever barrier separated timelines. I’m sorry I’m not strong enough to go back. I’m sorry I’m sorry—
The words circled like water down a drain, meaningless and necessary, the only prayer I knew how to pray.
I thought about going back. Really thought about it, for the first time since the voice had given me the choice.
I could let the deadline pass. I could wake up on February 15th back in my 2014 body, fifty years old and alone, with the doubled grief of losing Jack twice.
But Emma would exist. Sarah would meet David.
Wasn’t that worth more than my happiness?
But even as I thought it, I knew I couldn’t do it.
Couldn’t watch Jack walk away from me again, couldn’t return to that empty apartment and that successful career and that life that looked perfect from the outside and felt like a prison from within.
I’d spent a lifetime being careful, being safe, being the version of myself who never risked anything real.
I couldn’t do it anymore. I’d rather be selfish, rather carry the guilt.
And that made me a terrible person. I understood that now, sitting on a bathroom floor at 2 AM, steam curling around me like judgement. I was choosing love. Romance over responsibility. What I wanted over what was right.
Some choices cost you. You make them anyway. And then you have to become someone who can carry the weight.
Eventually, the tears slowed. The shaking stopped. I turned off the shower and sat there in the silence, hollowed out and exhausted.
The Polaroid was still in my hand. I’d carried it to the bathroom without realizing. I looked at it now—the fading shapes, the almost-blank spaces where Sarah and Emma used to be—and did something I hadn’t been able to do before.
I kissed the white space where Emma’s face used to be.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
Then I got up. Went back to bed. Lay there in the dark until the radio’s soft music finally lulled me into something that wasn’t quite sleep.
I dreamed about the corner office.
Not clearly, dreams never are, but I knew the shape of it.
The big window overlooking the street, morning light slanting across the manuscript pages spread on my desk.
In the dream, I was sitting in my chair, reading something important.
A contract, maybe. An acquisition offer.
The words blurred when I tried to focus on them, but I knew they mattered.
Knew this was the thing I’d spent my whole career building toward.
Then my phone buzzed. Not the rotary on Diane’s wall, my real phone, the one with the glass screen and the camera and the whole world inside it.
Emma, the screen said. FaceTime.
I tried to answer. But my hand passed through the phone like it wasn’t there, like I was the ghost in my own life, and Emma’s face flickered on the screen—bright and laughing and alive—before dissolving into static.
I woke up gasping, the clock radio playing something I didn’t recognize, reaching for a phone that didn’t exist.
For a long moment, I couldn’t remember where I was. When I was.
Then the radiator clanked, and I heard Diane singing off-key in the kitchen, and 1987 settled back around me like a coat I was still learning to wear.
The dream faded. But all morning, I kept reaching into my pocket for something that wasn’t there.