Chapter 41
This is Where You’ll Find Me
There’s a knock, then Gavin’s front door opens without waiting.
Kiki walks in first, already in full command, hair up, sleeves rolled, jaw set. She’s carrying packing tape and a latte the size of a vase. “Okay,” she says. “You don’t have to say anything. We’re doing this.”
Behind her is Melissa, with moving blankets and the severe competence of someone who has never once in her life dropped a box labeled FRAGILE. Right behind her is Sara, arms full of Tupperware, produce bags, and moral support. We are apparently doing this as a unit.
“Is this a rescue or an intervention?” I ask.
“Yes,” Sara says, and pulls me into a hug that lasts just slightly longer than I would have let it if I wasn’t this tired. “We’re mad on your behalf, but we’ll save that for when you’re not still in yesterday’s sweatsuit.”
“We brought labels,” Melissa says, like this is triage. “And snacks. And ibuprofen. Also, Tara’s already at the new place.”
“She is?”
“She closed the Barnacle for an hour,” Kiki says. “She said, and I quote, ‘no one relocates after a romantic crisis without a cocktail.’ She’s breaking in your kitchen.”
“My kitchen,” I echo, like I’m trying on the shape of the words.
I’ve decided on six more months. Of the island. The garden. Hungry Love. Which means, for now, I’m saying yes to the apartment from Gavin—for me and Kiki.
We kick into motion, falling into roles without saying a word. Kiki starts boxing up my cookbooks, muttering that I’m not allowed to buy another unless I get rid of two. Melissa breaks down my bar cart like she’s deactivating a bomb. Sara wraps the Ayame Bullock bowls I’ve been collecting in dish towels, sighing over each one like it’s a rescued duckling. I go through the pantry, then my room.
I’m weirdly stunned by how much there is to box—my shoes by the door, my spices in his cabinet, my sweater on the chair in his bedroom—like somewhere along the way I stopped “staying here” and actually moved in without noticing.
On the third trip out, we line the cars along the driveway: Gavin’s Defender on loan, Melissa’s Wagoneer, Sara’s sprinter van with the back full of plants. We pull out one after the other, a slow little caravan that looks suspiciously like a funeral procession—if funerals involved bubble wrap and an irresponsible number of throw pillows.
It’s only two miles to the apartment, but the drive feels longer, like I’ve crossed some quiet border between the version of my life where Gavin and I were inevitable and the one where we very much aren’t.
The key turns easily in the lock, and I swing open the door. I haven’t had the time or the heart to see the apartment before this.
This isn’t some so-so extra space. It’s beautiful. Way too beautiful.
High ceilings. Light everywhere, most of it natural. Wide-plank floors refinished to the color of honey.
The living space is big, open, and soft. There’s a deep, brand-new sofa. A reading chair. Actual rugs. The master bedroom is off to the left with a queen bed, linen duvet, and the window angled so you can see both the water and the garden from where your head would rest on the pillow. The bathroom has a clawfoot copper tub like the one I just left at Gavin’s.
It’s more than a place to crash. It feels like he built me a landing.
My jaw drops when I see the kitchen. A long window over the sink that frames the ocean like it’s art. There are granite countertops, a butcher block island, and open shelving. And he’s stocked it. Of course, he got the kitchen linens I was coveting from Material Wit. He always notices the details I don’t say out loud. My favorite cookbook—the one that got destroyed in the bacon fire—is already on the counter. And, my mother’s pan. I thought I left it in the café kitchen, but he must have moved it here when I wasn’t looking. The thought is a fist and a balm at the same time.
“Oh,” Sara says softly.
“Yeah,” Melissa agrees.
Tara is already in the kitchen, sleeves rolled, shaking something in a steel shaker. The air smells like citrus and gin.
“You’re late,” she says without turning. “I started without you.”
“What are we drinking?” Kiki asks, instantly revived.
“French 75s,” Tara says. “Modified. Day appropriate. And I used Girl Meets Dirt pear shrub instead of simple syrup, because we’re soothing and fortifying at the same time.” She pours pale gold into little coupe glasses she must have brought.
“They’re not too sweet,” she adds, pouring. “You do not need sweet right now.”
Sara sips and groans. “God, I love you.”
“And,” Tara adds, “Martha brought art.”
Martha is there, stepping down from a small ladder in the dining room, to finish the last adjustment on an oil painting that’s centered on the main wall. She wipes her hands on her jeans and looks at me. “It brings out the light in this room,” she says simply.
It’s one of hers. Sea layered into rock, then sky, with softer streaks of pale light underneath like something is surfacing.
My throat does an awful, grateful thing.
She gestures to the big corner window. “It’s a reflection, and an abstraction of the view out your window.”
I walk to the window.
From up here, I can see Eastsound Bay, restless with whitecaps, a dusting of fresh snow blurring the edges of the tiny island just offshore. A Great Blue Heron stands in the shallows, still and solitary, like he’s waiting out the cold because leaving wasn’t an option. To my left, the garden. The beds we carved out. The trellises we built. The lavender Kiki and I tucked in after dark with phone flashlights. The irrigation Duke and Batu wrestled into working. The little corner where Isabel swore nothing would grow, and then thyme exploded out of pure spite. My garden. And I am somewhere between the two, unsettled, but staying.
Sara sets another box down on the island and exhales. “This is gorgeous.”
“I told you,” Kiki says. “Our girl is not moving into some sad interim crash pad. She is ascending.”
Kiki walks down the short hall, peeks into the bedroom that will be hers, then turns toward the window. She stares for a moment, like she’s surprised to see the garden right there, impossibly close. “I’ve always dreamed of a commute I could count in footsteps,” she says. “Bonus points for edible landscaping.”
Melissa rearranges my spices by cuisine. Kiki plugs her charger in her room and leaves a toothbrush in the bathroom like a cat marking territory. Tara writes HYDRATE on a Post-it and slaps it on the fridge. Sara puts lemons in a bowl like a magazine spread. Martha moves the living room rug two inches to the left and says, “There.”
Tara hands me a cup. “To first nights,” she says.
Sara clinks. “To gorgeous rent-free situations.”
Melissa clinks. “To that novelist who was undressing you with his eyes, because we need bench depth.”
Kiki clinks. “To my new commute, Hungry Love, and whatever the hell comes next.”
By early afternoon, Martha’s painting catches golden-hour light, and it looks like someone lives here. It looks like I live here.
“Call if you need us,” Melissa says as they head out.
“I will,” I say, and mean it.
When everyone finally leaves, it’s just Kiki and me, for a moment, before she heads to the monthly Ukulele Jam on the interisland ferry.
“Emoji me a raccoon and a wine glass if you need me,” she says.
“Deal.”
She hugs me and goes.
The apartment goes quiet. Not empty. Quiet.
For a second, I can’t breathe. Because it hits me all at once: I’ve built this. With help. With love. With mine-ness. I’m not just the girl who followed a man here and then lost him. I’ve taken root.