Epilogue
Twenty-Eight Years Later
Maggie
The gala was at The Pierre. One of those charity events where the tickets cost more than some people’s monthly rent and the champagne was actually worth drinking.
I stood near the bar in a black dress that cost too much and heels that were already killing my feet, watching the room and thinking that Maggie Shaw from Jamaica Plain would never have believed she’d end up here.
Maggie Cavanaugh, though. Fifty-one years old and still not entirely used to the name after twenty-eight years. She’d figured it out.
The ballroom glittered with the particular excess of New York philanthropy.
Crystal chandeliers cast warm light across women in designer gowns and men in tuxedos, everyone holding glasses of champagne and making conversation about stock portfolios and summer houses and which private school had the best lacrosse program.
A string quartet played something classical in the corner, barely audible over the hum of networking disguised as small talk.
I’d attended a hundred events like this over the years.
First as Jack’s plus-one, then as an editor building my own reputation, then as someone who actually belonged in these rooms. I’d never quite gotten used to it, the ease with which these people moved through the world, the casual assumption that everything would work out because it always had.
But I’d learned to fake it well enough that most people couldn’t tell the difference.
Jack appeared at my elbow with two glasses of something that sparkled. “You’re making your judgy face.”
“I’m making my ‘these shoes were a mistake’ face.”
“Same thing.” He handed me a glass. His hair was gray at the temples now, distinguished in a way that irritated me because my own gray required monthly appointments with a colorist. But his eyes were the same, blue and sharp and looking at me like I was still the most interesting person in the room. “To us.”
We clinked glasses. Drank.
Twenty-eight years since a snowy Valentine’s Day in Boston. Of building a life I’d never imagined, in a city I’d learned to love, with a man who still made me laugh and still drove me crazy and still, after all this time, looked at me like I was worth choosing.
My career at Calloway & Marsh, and then Random House, and then back to Calloway when Jonathan offered me the editorial director position, had exceeded everything I’d dreamed of.
I’d started that conversation in April of ’87, sitting across from Jonathan Calloway in his office on West 18th Street, and had never looked back.
I’d championed books that became bestsellers and a few that became classics.
By the time I’d retired three years ago, I’d been Executive Editor with the corner office, the industry respect, and the career I’d spent my whole life building.
Different from the life I’d left behind, but no less successful.
Maybe more, because this time I’d done it without the fear.
Without the walls. Without spending every day wondering if I was missing something essential.
Our apartment was in the Village now, the second one, bigger than the first, with built-in bookshelves lining every wall and a view of Washington Square Park that I never got tired of watching.
Jack’s Pulitzer sat in his study, next to a photo from our wedding day and a framed letter on yellow legal paper, the one he’d written me that Valentine’s Day, read aloud on a secondhand couch while Coltrane played.
I’d made good on my threat to frame it. He’d pretended to be embarrassed, but I’d caught him looking at it sometimes, when he thought I wasn’t watching.
“You’re thinking too loud,” Jack said, pulling me back to the present. “I can hear you from here.”
“I’m thinking about us. Is that allowed?”
“On our anniversary? I’ll permit it.” He clinked his glass against mine again. “What specifically about us?”
“How lucky we got.” I looked around the ballroom at all these people in their expensive clothes, living their expensive lives, probably convinced that they’d earned everything they had. “How easily it could have gone differently.”
“It didn’t, though.”
“No.” I leaned into him, feeling the solid warmth of his shoulder against mine. “It didn’t.”
Diane found me near the hors d’oeuvres. She was wearing something silver and architectural that only Diane could pull off, the kind of dress that looked like it had been designed by someone who thought fabric should have opinions.
Her hair was shorter now, a sleek bob she’d adopted the year she turned forty-five and declared she was done apologizing for anything, including her hair.
“There you are.” Diane grabbed a stuffed mushroom and examined it with suspicion. “I’ve been looking for you for twenty minutes. This place is a maze.”
“You’ve been here before.”
“Not sober.” She took a bite of the mushroom and nodded approvingly. “Not bad. Jack?”
“Getting me more champagne.”
“Of course he is. Twenty-eight years and the man still waits on you hand and foot.” Diane shook her head with the exasperation of a best friend who has opinions about your husband. “It’s disgusting.”
“You love him.”
“I tolerate him. There’s a difference.” But she was smiling, the same smile she’d had in that Jamaica Plain kitchen, the one that said I see through your bullshit and I still love you.
We’d kept our promise to each other with Wednesday phone calls, visits every two months that had eventually become monthly once Diane moved to Connecticut with Tom, twenty-eight years of refusing to let distance or life pull us apart.
“Did you see the display case by the entrance?” Diane asked, reaching for another mushroom.
“No. Why?”
“They’ve got a little exhibition. Books and literacy, that’s what the charity’s for, right? Literacy programs?” Diane waved vaguely. “Anyway, they’ve got a whole case of books that have raised the most money for their foundation over the years. And guess whose book is front and center?”
My heart did something complicated.
“You’re kidding.”
“Front and center, Mags. Gold nameplate. The display says something like ‘Most impactful literary donation, author proceeds have funded the construction of fourteen community libraries nationwide.’” Diane grinned. “Your old librarian and his cat.”
I excused myself. Walked through the ballroom, past the string quartet and the champagne tower and the clusters of well-dressed philanthropists, until I reached the entrance hall.
The display case was there, elegant and understated, lit from within. And in the center, on a small pedestal, was a book I hadn’t held in twenty-eight years.
The List of Nine (and Louie) by Hazel Winterbrook
The cover was beautiful, simple, literary, a watercolor of a cat sitting on a piece of paper, its expression one of supreme indifference.
The same edition I’d read in Patricia’s office all those years ago, except this one had a gold National Book Award sticker on the front and a quote from the New York Times that called it “one of the most profound and quietly devastating novels of its generation.”
I stood in front of the case, reading the small placard beside it.
The List of Nine (and Louie) by Hazel Winterbrook was first published in 1988 by Calloway & Marsh, championed by a young editorial assistant who recognized its genius in the slush pile.
The novel went on to win the National Book Award, sell over three million copies worldwide, and inspire the establishment of the Winterbrook Foundation, which has built fourteen community libraries in underserved areas.
Hazel Winterbrook dedicated the book “to the young woman who believed in Chester and Louie before anyone else did.”
My vision blurred.
I remembered. Not the old life, not the timeline I’d left behind, those memories were gone, had been gone for twenty-eight years, faded like an overexposed photograph.
But I remembered this. The manuscript in the slush pile.
The rubber band and the prayer. Louie’s voice first—the cat watching the man on the third floor from behind the dumpster, patient and knowing.
Then Chester’s, dry and precise and devastating, a librarian trying to shelve his grief and failing.
I remembered standing in Patricia’s office, hands shaking, telling my boss that safe didn’t win National Book Awards.
I’d been right.
“There you are.” Jack appeared at my side, champagne in hand. He followed my gaze to the display case and smiled. “Your book.”
“Not my book.”
“You found it. You fought for it. Patricia told you it was a waste of time and you stood your ground.” He put his arm around my shoulders. “It’s your book, Mags.”
I leaned into him, looking at the watercolor cat on the cover. Louie, sitting on Chester’s list with the supreme confidence of a creature who understood that sometimes the best things in life were the ones that showed up uninvited.
“Fourteen libraries,” I said softly. “Hazel built fourteen libraries.”
“Because you read page one and didn’t stop.”
“Come on,” Jack said, guiding me back toward the ballroom. “Diane’s probably eaten all the mushrooms by now.”
Across the ballroom, a woman caught my eye.
Mid-forties, elegant, with dark hair pinned up in a style that suggested she’d had professional help.
She was laughing with a younger woman, maybe nineteen or twenty, bright-eyed, gesturing animatedly about something that clearly mattered to her.
Mother and daughter, I assumed. They had the same nose, the same way of tilting their heads when they listened.
Something about them made me pause.
A tug of recognition I couldn’t explain. A feeling like déjà vu, except deeper—not just I’ve been here before but I’ve known you before. The sensation was strong enough that I set down my champagne glass, strong enough that I took a step toward them without meaning to.