Chapter 15 Jack
Jack
Something cracked in my chest. Not broken—cracked open. Like a window letting in cold air.
I’d watched it happen, actually watched her catch herself mid-retreat, mid-deflection. Her jaw had tightened. Her eyes had squeezed shut. And then she’d come back. Opened them and said the hardest thing instead of the easiest one.
That was new. But I couldn’t let myself soften. Not yet. Not when every other time I’d softened, she’d disappeared.
“Three times,” I said, because she deserved the whole truth. “You let me in, then pushed me away. After that weekend in the fall when we were supposed to go away—after you canceled the night before, after you stopped returning my calls for a week, I decided I was done. That letter was my goodbye.”
The admission hung in the air between us. She was shaking slightly, I could see it in her hands, still clutching the letter.
And still, somewhere underneath the hope, the old hurt stirred. The accumulation of a year’s worth of almost.
“You don’t get to do this,” I heard myself say.
Maggie went still. “What?”
“You don’t get to show up after months of keeping me at arm’s length and decide I’m worth staying for.”
The words came out harder than I meant them to, sharp-edged with something I hadn’t let myself feel until now.
“You don’t get to wake up one morning and become a different person and expect me to just—trust that. As if I haven’t already learned to live without you. As if I didn’t spend three months teaching myself not to hope.”
The silence that followed was absolute.
Maggie’s face had gone pale, like she was seeing me clearly for the first time.
“Jack—”
“I loved you.” Past tense. I hadn’t meant past tense, but there it was, hanging between us like an accusation.
“I loved you, and you made me feel like that was a problem you were trying to solve. Like I was something you couldn’t decide whether to keep.”
My voice cracked on the last word. I turned away, gripping the edge of the counter, not wanting her to see whatever was on my face.
“I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I have it in me to believe you one more time and then watch you walk away again.”
For a long moment, there was only the sound of the radiator and the rain against the window and my own stupid heart, beating too fast in my chest.
She touched my shoulder.
“Turn around,” she said. “Please.”
I didn’t want to. Turning around meant letting her see everything I’d just said written on my face. But her voice was gentle in a way I’d never heard before. Tender. Like she understood exactly what it cost me to say those things, and she wasn’t going to make me regret it.
I turned.
Her eyes were bright with tears she wasn’t letting fall.
“You’re right,” she said. “About all of it. I did treat you like a problem to solve. I did keep you at arm’s length. I did make you feel like loving me was some kind of burden I hadn’t agreed to carry.”
“Maggie—”
“No. Let me say this.” She took a breath, steadying herself.
“I can’t undo the back and forth of our time together.
I can’t go back and be the person I should have been.
But I can tell you this, I’m not asking you to trust me because I say I’ve changed.
I’m asking you to let me show you. Every day. For as long as it takes.”
She reached up and touched my face, her fingertips against my jaw. Like I was something precious.
“I know I hurt you,” she said. “I know you learned to live without me, and I know asking you to unlearn that isn’t fair. But I’m asking. Because I love you, and I want to spend the rest of my life proving that I mean it.”
She’d said it.
I love you.
Three words I’d waited a year to hear. Three words that changed everything and nothing and might not be enough, but might, also, be exactly enough.
“And if I take the Times job?” My voice came out quieter than I expected. “If I move to New York?”
She met my eyes. Didn’t flinch, didn’t look away, didn’t do any of the things she’d done a dozen times before when the conversation got too real.
“Then I guess we’ll find out if I meant it.”
The silence stretched between us. This was the moment. This was where I either took the risk or didn’t.
“I’m cooking chicken,” I said.