Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
MEGAN: THE PAST
The thing about Harvard in December was that it tried very hard to be beautiful and mostly succeeded.
The cold came in from the Charles River with a particular bite that Savannah had never prepared me for, and the campus took on the quality of a postcard—bare trees, old brick, the kind of gray sky that sat low and close, making the lit windows of every building look warm by contrast. I’d spent the first December resenting it.
By the second, I’d begun to understand why people who grew up with real winters talked about them the way they did.
There was something clarifying about cold this complete. It made the world very simple. You were warm, or you weren’t. You were inside, or you weren’t. Everything else was a detail.
I was outside, which was Wyatt’s fault.
He’d texted at seven, asking if I wanted to walk, which was the kind of request that shouldn’t have worked on a December night, with the temperature at twenty-two degrees and a reading list that wasn’t going to finish itself.
I’d said yes before I’d even finished reading the message, which told me everything I needed to know about the current state of my better judgment and nothing I didn’t already know.
I changed out of my study clothes before I went, telling myself it was practical.
I’d been in them since seven that morning, and they needed washing anyway.
I pulled on dark jeans and the gray sweater Christine had declared the exact right color for my complexion, then ran a brush through my hair until the long blonde waves—threaded with the natural browns other women paid salons to imitate—looked more intentional than accidental.
I looked at myself in the narrow mirror on the back of my dorm room door.
I was tall—nearly eye level with most of the boys in my program, which had always made me feel either conspicuous or useful, depending on the situation.
My mother said I had my grandmother’s height and my father’s stubbornness, and that both would serve me well.
I’d spent most of my life believing her about the stubbornness and learning to accept her words about the height.
I was not, I told myself firmly, changing clothes and brushing my hair because of Wyatt Aldridge.
I picked up my bag and went to meet him anyway.
We’d been doing this for three months. The coffees, the walks, the library’s silences.
The first kiss in the October rain and the careful, unhurried way things had moved since then—neither of us rushing, neither of us naming it beyond what it was in the moment, both of us apparently content to let it be exactly what it was and to trust that was enough.
It was enough. That was the thing I kept coming back to, in the small hours when I was honest with myself.
It was more than enough. It was more than I’d let myself have in a long time and more than I’d expected to find here, in a city I’d come to specifically to be alone with my plan and my purpose and the clean, forward momentum of becoming someone no one could overlook.
Wyatt Aldridge had not been in the plan.
He was very much part of the plan now, which was its own category of terrifying that I’d mostly stopped trying to manage and had started simply living with.
We were walking the long way around the quad, as we always did when neither of us wanted to arrive anywhere, our breath making small clouds in the dark and our arms close enough that our coat sleeves brushed every few steps.
The campus was quiet, as it was between finals and the holiday break—half empty, the students who remained moving through it with the distracted purposefulness of people who had somewhere to be and were taking the long way there anyway.
“You’re leaving Thursday,” I said. It wasn’t a question. He’d mentioned it twice, each time with the careful neutrality of someone stating a fact without revealing how they felt about it.
“Thursday morning.” He glanced at me. “You’re staying through the weekend?”
“The library doesn’t close for the break until Saturday.” I tucked my hands deeper into my coat pockets. “I have two papers due in January, and the quiet is helpful.”
He nodded. We walked a few more steps in the comfortable silence that had become its own kind of language between us—the one that didn’t need filling and meant something different from absence.
“I got you something,” he said.
I looked at him. He was staring straight ahead, as he did when he’d decided to say something and was going to say it no matter how it landed. “Wyatt—”
“It’s small.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, dark green velvet pouch, the kind that closed with a simple drawstring. He held it out without ceremony. “Don’t open it yet.”
I took it. Felt the slight weight of something inside—small and cool through the fabric. “Why not now?”
“Because I want you to open it when you’re alone.” He looked at me then, directly, wearing the expression I’d come to recognize as the one he wore when he meant something completely. “I wrote something on the card inside. I’d rather you read it without me standing there watching you read it.”
I turned the pouch over in my fingers. “That’s either very romantic or very alarming.”
“Hopefully the first one.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Probably a little of both.”
We had reached the steps of my building.
The lit entrance cast a warm rectangle across the cold stone, and I stood at the bottom of the steps, looking at him, feeling the thing I’d been feeling for three months in its fullest and most inconvenient form—the one that had no clean category, that refused to be filed or managed, or approached with the systematic logic I applied to everything else.
I loved him.
I’d known it for weeks. I hadn’t said it, hadn’t planned to say it, and had, in fact, been operating on the working assumption that if I didn’t say it out loud, it would remain a private fact with limited consequences.
Standing in the December cold, a velvet pouch in my hand, with Wyatt Aldridge looking at me like I was the only fixed point in a moving world, the working assumption felt increasingly insufficient.
“Safe travels,” I said instead. “Tell your family—” I stopped, because I had nothing to say about his family that I could say out loud on these steps without it landing badly.
He laughed quietly. “Yeah.” He stepped forward and kissed me—brief, warm, his hand cupping my jaw for a moment against the cold. “Open it tonight. Call me afterward if you want.”
He stepped back.
I went inside.
I opened it alone, sitting cross-legged on my bed while my roommate was away for the break.
The room was quiet enough that I could hear the radiator knocking in the wall.
The drawstring was stiff from the cold it had been sitting in, and I worked it loose carefully, the way you handle things you already know will matter.
The arrow was silver, thin as a finger, with a small loop at the top for a chain. Elegant. Simple. The kind of thing built to last rather than to impress.
The card was folded twice and written in Wyatt’s handwriting—the angular, slightly cramped print of someone who had been trained for legibility and kept drifting toward speed.
An arrow always knows where it’s going. I figured you’d appreciate something that doesn’t second-guess itself.
Merry Christmas, Megan.
—W
I read it twice. Then I sat with the arrow in my palm and felt the weight of it, which was barely anything in physical terms and considerable in every other sense, and I did the thing I’d been refusing to do for three months.
I let myself have it.
All of it. The Thursday coffees and the library silences and the October rain, and the careful, unhurried way he’d looked at me every single time as if he’d made a decision and wasn’t reconsidering.
His honesty, which had been the first thing to disarm me and remained the most dangerous.
The way he’d said mine too to every observation I’d ever made about myself, as if the answer were simple, as if it had always been simple, as if all I’d ever had to do was say a thing out loud, and he would tell me he already knew.
I held the arrow and thought about direction. About what it meant to always know where you were going—not blindly, not stubbornly, but with the kind of orientation that held through crosswinds and distance, and through the accumulated interference of everything that tried to knock you off course.
True north, I thought. That’s what he is.
The thought arrived with the quiet certainty of something that had been true for a long time and was only now being named.
I set the arrow on my nightstand where I could see it.
I did not call him that night. I needed to sit with the feeling a little longer before I handed it to someone else, even him. Especially him.
He called me.
Ten in the morning, Savannah time, which meant he’d been up for hours doing whatever Wyatt did during family Christmases in a house that ran on appearances and expectations and the weight of a name.
His voice when I answered was the careful version—the one he used when he was in a space where he couldn’t say everything he wanted to say.
“Did you open it?” he asked.
“Yes, I opened it last night.”
“And?”
I looked at the arrow on my nightstand. At the thin silver line of it, simple and certain. “It’s perfect,” I said. “How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“That an arrow was the right thing.”
He was quiet for a moment. Not the processing silence—the deciding one.
“Because you never second-guess where you’re going,” he said.
“You might not always say it out loud, but you always know. I’ve never met anyone who knew it the way you do.
” Silence stretched across the line. “I wanted you to have something that would remind you of that when I couldn’t. ”
My throat did something inconvenient.
“It’s your true north,” I said. My voice came out softer than I’d meant.
“That’s what it is. The thing that tells you where to go when everything else is interference.
” I stopped, looked at the arrow, then said the rest of it because the December quiet, the distance, and the honesty that had always existed between us made it impossible not to.
“My heart will always point to you, Wyatt.”
The line was very quiet.
When he spoke, his voice had changed—not the careful version anymore, but something beneath it, the real one, the one he used in the library and in the rain, and in the café when he said things he meant completely. “Mine too,” he said. “It always has.”
I pressed my fingers against my eyes.
Don’t cry, I told myself. You are not the kind of person who cries on the phone.
“Merry Christmas,” I said instead.
“Merry Christmas, Megan.”
I held on to the call for a few more minutes, talking about nothing in particular, both of us running out the clock until he had to go back to whatever the Aldridge Christmas required of him.
After he hung up, I sat in the quiet of my room for a long time with the arrow in my hand and the winter light coming gray through the window and the feeling I’d been carefully managing for three months loose in my chest with nowhere left to put it.
I put the arrow back in the velvet pouch, then placed the pouch in the bottom drawer of my desk.
Not to hide it. Just to keep it safe.
That was the first time I put it there.