Chapter 14 Maggie
Maggie
The last dream was the worst.
I was at Fenway Park. Summer. The crack of a bat, the roar of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs and spilled beer and sun-warmed concrete.
I knew this day. I’d lived this day—Red Sox against the Yankees, a game that didn’t matter except that Emma was there and we were sharing nachos in the bleachers and she was telling me about medical school.
“I keep thinking about that study,” she was saying. “The one about pediatric pain management. What if we’re approaching it all wrong? What if kids need—”
But her voice was fading. Getting further away, even though she was sitting right next to me.
“Emma?” I reached for her hand. My fingers passed through hers like smoke.
She turned to look at me, and her face was blank. Not gone—not yet—but featureless. Like a mannequin. Like a placeholder for a person who might never exist.
“You chose,” she said, in a voice that wasn’t hers. “This is what choosing costs.”
I woke up crying.
The Polaroid was in my hand, I must have fallen asleep holding it. But when I looked at it in the gray February dawn, there was nothing left. Just white. Just empty space where three women had once stood in the summer sun.
I set it on the nightstand and made myself breathe.
This is the cost, I thought. You knew there would be a cost.
But knowing and feeling were different things. And feeling this—the grief, the guilt, the terrible certainty that I was building my happiness on the foundation of someone else’s erasure—felt like something I might never learn to live with.
I got up anyway. Made coffee. Got dressed.
Because that’s what you do when you’ve made impossible choices. You keep going.
Work was brutal.
Patricia had me retyping the same letter four times because of comma placement. Then the phone rang every five minutes with authors panicking about deadlines and agents demanding callbacks and the chaos of a publishing house when everyone was trying to close deals before the end of the month.
By noon, my fingers ached from the Selectric. By three, my head was pounding. By five, I wanted nothing more than to go home, pour a glass of wine, and not think about anything more complicated than what to eat for dinner.
But Jack was home. He’d called, said he was going in to work for a few hours, then picking up groceries, so I should let myself in to the apartment and he’d meet me there. The key was under the mat.
At 5:30, I grabbed my coat and headed for the T.
At home, I changed into something nicer than my work clothes, grabbed my overnight bag, and headed for South Boston.
Jack’s apartment was dark when I arrived.
The key was exactly where he’d said—under the mat with the faded shamrock, the kind of hiding spot that was obvious enough to be almost sweet.
I let myself in and stood in the doorway, breathing in the smell of his space.
Th old books, coffee grounds, and something that might have been aftershave.
The apartment was neat, as always. I moved through the space slowly, touching things. The spine of a book, the edge of the record player, the lamp on his desk that cast warm light across scattered papers.
I was setting my bag down in the living room when my foot caught on the corner of the rug.
I stumbled, flailing for balance, and my hip knocked into the trash can by his desk. It tipped, scattering crumpled papers across the floor—receipts, coffee-stained napkins, junk mail.
And a ball of yellow legal paper with my name visible at the top.
I went still. I shouldn’t read it. I knew I shouldn’t read it. This was Jack’s private correspondence, crumpled and discarded, clearly not meant for my eyes.
But my name was right there. And I was already reaching for it, already smoothing the creased paper, already reading words that made my heart stop.
Dear Maggie—
I’ve started this letter a dozen times. I keep hoping I won’t have to send it.
I love you. I’ve loved you since the night we argued about Hemingway and you called me a “tragically literal thinker.”
But I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep being the one who shows up while you decide whether I’m worth the risk.
I deserve someone who’s sure. Someone who chooses me.
You’re not that person.
—Jack
It was dated October 15th. I’d been certain I was the one doing the leaving on Valentine’s day, but he was already gone. He’d already decided, written his goodbye, given up on me before I could give up on him.
I was still sitting on the floor, holding the letter when I heard his key in the lock.
He saw my face first. Then the letter in my hands.
“Maggie—”
“When were you going to tell me?”
The question came out sharper than I intended. Jack closed the door behind him, set down the groceries, and looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read.
“I wasn’t,” he said. “It’s in the trash. I threw it away.”
“After you met Rebecca.”
“After you came back.” He moved toward me slowly, like I was a wild animal that might bolt. “After you apologized. And you started being… this. Whoever this is.”
I looked down at the letter. The words blurred and refocused.
I deserve someone who’s sure. Someone who chooses me. You’re not that person.
“You were done with me,” I said. “You’d already given up.”
“Yes.” He didn’t flinch, didn’t make excuses. “Three times, Maggie. Three times in our year and two months together, you let me in, then pushed me away. I decided I was done waiting. That letter was my goodbye.”
“But you never sent it.”
Something shifted in his face—a hardening I recognized. The Jack I’d been learning to read all year, the one who went quiet and still when he was deciding whether to let you in or shut you out.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t.”
The silence stretched. I could hear the radiator, the rain against the window, and my own pulse hammering in my ears.
I wanted to say something clever. Something cutting.
Something that would take this awful, vulnerable moment and turn it into a joke we could both laugh about, because that’s what I did—that’s what all those years of emotional cowardice had taught me to do when someone got too close to the truth.
“Well.” My voice went bright and sharp, the way it used to when I was about to make everything worse.
“I guess we were both cowards, then. Both running in opposite directions. Very poetic. Very us.”
I laughed, and it came out brittle, defensive, the sound of someone building walls.
“At least now I know I wasn’t the only villain in this story. That’s something, right? That’s—”
Don’t do this. Don’t you dare do this.
I caught myself mid-sentence, mid-deflection, mid-retreat. My jaw tightened. My eyes squeezed shut for just a moment, and I wrestled it down—the instinct to flee into sarcasm, to make this a competition about who hurt whom first.
When I opened my eyes again, the brittleness was gone. In its place was something rawer. Harder to say.
“No,” I said quietly. “I’m not doing that. That’s not who I want to be anymore.”
I took a breath. Then another.
“I’m sorry.” The words came out rough.
“I was about to make this into a fight so I didn’t have to feel how much this actually hurts.”
I pressed my hand to my forehead. The old me would have been halfway out the door by now. The old me would have turned this into a three-act play where she got to be the wronged party and he got to be the one who apologized.
“It hurts. Reading this. Knowing you were ready to give up on me. That hurts, and I don’t know what to do with it except tell you it hurts, instead of pretending it doesn’t.”