43. Salem
SALEM
Rowan didn’t answer my first call or my second. By the third, I stopped pretending I was going to do this the easy way, grabbed my keys, and drove.
I sat outside our apartment for a moment before going in. No movement in the windows. No signs of anyone throwing my belongings into the street, which I chose to read as a positive indicator.
The walk to the door felt longer than ever. I had walked up these steps approximately ten thousand times, and none of them had felt like this.
When I entered, Rowan was sitting at the kitchen counter with her robe on, hair up, coffee in front of her, not looking at me when I came through the door. That was fine. I would wait.
Behind her on the counter, to the left of the fruit bowl, sat the flowers I’d left outside her door.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
I set my keys down on the table by the door—the table we’d picked out at a garage sale three years ago for twelve dollars, the one with the wobbly leg we had never fixed.
Where was I supposed to start?
“I should have told you about the shop,” I said. “I knew that. I just kept putting it off.”
Finally, she looked up. “Why?”
“Because I was scared of saying it out loud. Because if I said it out loud, it was real, and if it was real, then everything we had planned together was different, and I didn’t know how to hand you that and also keep it.
That’s not an excuse. That’s just what was happening. I should have told you anyway.”
“How long?”
“Months.”
She was quiet for a second.
Then, I said, “I made you cookies.”
“I saw. They’re good.”
“Rowan—”
“I’m not saying the cookies fix it.” She held up one hand. “I’m just saying they’re good, and it’s annoying that I can’t even be properly furious about it because they’re that good. I ate four. That’s where we are.”
Something cracked open in my chest.
“I’ll make you cookies whenever you want. For the rest of our lives.”
“You’re going to be baking a lot then.”
“I know.”
“You shut me out.” Her voice was even, but I could hear the thing underneath it. The real thing. “I am supposed to be the person you tell things to. Not the one who finds out from Chuckles.”
“You’re right. You are that person. You have always been that person, and I treated you like someone I had to protect from my life. That was wrong. You didn’t need protecting. You needed to know.
“I didn’t think I could tell you until I was sure, and by the time I was sure, I had waited so long that telling you felt like confessing something instead of sharing something. I kept waiting for the right moment. The right moment was every moment, and I chose none of them.”
Her arms uncrossed. “I don’t like feeling like I’m outside your life.”
“You’re not. You are my life. You are the person I call and the person I show up for. You are not outside anything. I was just handling something badly. I made you feel that way, and I am so sorry.”
Her jaw worked. “I’m still mad.”
“That’s fair.”
“I’m going to be mad for a little while longer.”
“Also fair.”
“And you have to tell me things,” she said.
“I will. I promise.”
She exhaled—long and slow—and her shoulders dropped about three inches. “You better not do that again.”
“I won’t. Scouts honor”
She shook her head once, opened her arms, and I crossed the room and walked straight into them.
She held on tight. It was the kind of hug that didn’t need words, the kind that said ‘we’re okay,’ ‘I missed you,’ and ‘don’t do that again’ all at once. I pressed my face into her shoulder and sagged with relief. Her forgiveness was the only thing that mattered.
“Your hair smells weird,” she said into my shoulder.
“I haven’t washed it in three days.”
“Salem.”
“I’ve been going through something.”
She laughed and squeezed me harder, stepping back and looking at me with the expression she reserved for moments when I was being genuinely pathetic, and she loved me anyway.
“What else is going on?”
I exhaled. “I messed something else up.”
“Ethan?”
“Yeah.” I looked at her. “I bail after a genuinely mind-blowing night over what I did to you. I assumed and left and didn’t give him a chance to explain anything, living by omissions and walking out the door over someone else’s.
” I shook my head. “The irony is suffocating. I only put it together forty-five minutes ago over lunch with Alba, which tells you everything about the state of my brain this week.”
“It took you this long?”
“Apparently.”
“You don’t get to be mad at him for something you just did.”
“I know.”
“So, what are you going to do about it?”
I looked at her. At the flowers in the glass on the counter. At the apartment that was still ours even when we were in the middle of something hard. “I’m going to go find him.”
“Good.”
“I’m terrified.”
“Also good. That means it matters.”
I laughed—short and slightly shaky—and she squeezed my arm.
“Go,” she said.
With her blessing, I went.