Chapter 17 Jack
Jack
I woke up and the bed was cold as I reached across the sheets, and found it empty. No warmth. No weight against my ribs. Just the rumpled evidence that someone had been there and wasn’t anymore.
The old feelings came flooding back. The familiar, practiced dread that I thought I’d put away. She ran. She said she loved you and then she ran. You fell for it again, you stupid—
Then I heard the clink of a mug from the kitchen. The faint hiss of water boiling. A soft, off-key humming that might have been Bryan Adams.
I closed my eyes. She was still here. And I realized, lying there with my heart still hammering from three seconds of thinking I’d lost her, that this was what trust felt like when it was new.
Not the absence of fear. The decision to stay in the bed and listen for her voice instead of assuming the worst.
I got up. Walked to the kitchen doorway. She was standing at the counter in my T-shirt, pouring water into the French press with the concentration of someone defusing a bomb. Her hair was a disaster. Her feet were bare on the cold tile. She hadn’t heard me yet.
I watched her for a moment. Just watched.
This woman who’d spent a year running from me. Who’d built walls so high I’d thought I’d never scale them. Who’d somehow become someone new in the space of two weeks.
Or maybe not someone new. Maybe just someone finally willing to be seen.
She turned and saw me in the doorway. Her face did something complicated. A look of surprise, then softness, then a smile that started slow and kept going.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“You look like you just had a heart attack.”
“I woke up and you weren’t in bed.” I leaned against the doorframe, going for casual, probably failing. “Old habits.”
Her face changed. She set down the kettle and crossed the kitchen to me, bare feet on cold tile, and put her hands on either side of my face.
“I’m here,” she said. “I just wanted to make you coffee.”
“I know.”
“I couldn’t sleep and the bodega on the corner opens at six and I thought—” She stopped. Read my face more carefully. “Jack. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I know.” I covered her hands with mine. “I know that. I just—it takes a minute. To believe it.”
“Take all the minutes you need.” She kissed me. “I’ll keep showing up until you run out of doubt.”
I pulled her close. Held on.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” she said against my chest.
“Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“I should warn you I’m making breakfast. It’s going to be terrible.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
We made breakfast together in the tiny kitchen, bumping hips and elbows, ruining eggs and burning toast in what was becoming our signature style.
She pressed her cold feet against my shins under the table and I yelped, and she laughed, really laughed, the kind that crinkled her whole face, and I pulled her chair closer to mine because I could.
“I should go home,” she said eventually. “Shower. Change. Let Diane interrogate me about where I’ve been all night.”
“Will you survive the interrogation?”
“Barely.” She stood, and I caught her hand before she could move away.
“Maggie.”
She looked at me. Waited.
“Thank you for being here when I woke up.”
Something shifted in her face, understanding. She knew what it had cost me, those minutes of an empty bed. Knew what it meant that I’d said it out loud instead of hiding it.
“Every morning,” she said. “That’s the plan.”
She kissed me one more time, got dressed, and left. I stood in the kitchen listening to the sound of her footsteps in the stairwell. The woman I loved, walking away. The woman I loved, coming back.
While she was gone, I sat at my desk and wrote.
Not the follow-up piece I owed the Globe. Not the notes I should have been making for the Times. I pulled a sheet of yellow legal paper from the drawer—the same pad I’d used for the goodbye letter, the one she’d found crumpled in my trash, and I wrote her a different kind of letter.
The words came slowly. I crossed things out. Started over. Crossed out more. The pen left dents in the paper where I pressed too hard, trying to get it right.
I wasn’t good at this. I could write a thousand words about city council corruption without breaking a sweat, but trying to tell one woman what she meant to me reduced me to a stuttering mess on yellow paper. I kept writing.
When I finished, I folded the letter and put it in my jacket pocket. For later. For when she came back and the night was quiet and I could say the things I’d spent all morning trying to get right.