Chapter 65 Adela
I stare at the piece of paper for a long time before I touch it.
It's just sitting there beside my mug on the counter.
I can’t believe that I'm standing in the kitchen of Cody’s lake house, where I've been in twice now, under circumstances I never could have predicted.
And I'm staring at a folded piece of paper like it might do something if I look at it long enough.
It doesn't do anything.
It just sits there.
Theo's handwriting is on the outside. Just my name.
I can’t take it anymore; I reach for it and unfold the crease.
Top shelf. Kitchen. Left side.
I look up.
Top shelf. Left side. I'm five foot four on a good day, and the top shelf of this kitchen was not built for me.
I drag a chair over.
I climb onto the counter and reach up. My hand finds it first. It’s a book. I grab it and climb down.
I sit on the counter with my legs dangling and the book in my lap.
I look at the cover for a moment. The dark romance novel.
The one I chose blindly in a bookstore with his hands over my eyes.
The one he read the fake dedication from in a park above the water while I ate strawberries and laughed and thought — I genuinely thought — that I was safe.
That whatever it was, it was mine and something good.
I open the book.
The first margin note is on page four.
His handwriting is small in the left margin, the way it always is, pressed close to the text like he's in conversation with it.
I saw you before you saw me. I want you to know that. Whatever you decide about everything else — know that.
I read it twice and turn the page.
Page eleven.
I kept the pendant because I wasn't ready to give back the only thing I had of yours. That's not an excuse. I'm not offering it as one. I just want you to know the true reason because I'm done with every other kind.
I press my fingers against the words.
I turn the page.
Page nineteen.
You asked me once what broke. I said someone I love got hurt.
That was true. What I didn't say was that I was already breaking before that.
That I had been breaking for a long time.
You were the first person who looked at me like they could see it anyway.
I didn't know what to do with that. I still don't. But I'm done pretending I don't feel what I feel.
My throat tightens.
I turn the page.
Page twenty-three.
The library was supposed to be simple. “Find out what she knows. Get the laptop back. Leave.” That was the whole plan.
It lasted approximately one afternoon before I sat down across from you and you wrote something in the margin.
I read it and I thought — I'm in trouble.
I knew it that afternoon. I've known it every afternoon since.
I close my eyes.
I open them.
I keep reading.
Page thirty-one.
I'm sorry about Nessa. I'm sorry about all of it, but I'm most sorry about Nessa because she was hurting and I didn't see how much. She took it out on you, and you are in a hospital bed because of something that started with me, and I will carry that for the rest of my life.
I put my hand flat on the page.
I breathe.
I turn the page.
Page forty-four.
Week two. I drove past your parents' house. I didn't stop. I saw that your light was on at two in the morning, and I thought — she's not sleeping either. That helped more than it should have.
I smile.
It comes out of me before I can stop it. I sit on the counter in the empty kitchen, and I smile at a margin note written by a man who drove past my parents' house at two in the morning to find my window, and somehow that's the thing that breaks through.
I wipe my eyes and turn the page.
Page fifty-two.
I went to the library. Third floor. Our carrel. I sat there for two hours on a Tuesday, and I read what I wrote in the margins of my own book, and it wasn't the same. It wasn't even close to the same. I don't know what that means.
Scribbled further down on the page:
I know exactly what that means.
Page sixty-one.
You said you felt like you could see my soul.
In the park. You said it quietly and I don't think you meant for me to hear it but I did.
I've been thinking about it since. I've been thinking about whether that's true.
Whether there's something there worth seeing.
I think you're the only person who has ever looked long enough to find out, and I think that's the most terrifying thing anyone has ever done to me.
I'm not smiling anymore.
But my eyes are burning. I am not going to cry, I am absolutely not going to cry, I have cried enough in the last six weeks to last me a considerable amount of time—
Page seventy.
I'm not good at this. I want you to know that I know that.
I am good at hockey and I am good at reading rooms. I am good at staying in control.
But I am not good at this. At saying things out loud.
At letting people see what's actually there.
You made me want to be good at it. That's new. I don't know what to do with new.
I press my lips together and turn the page.
Page eighty-three.
Week four. I bought strawberries at the market. They tasted like you. I threw them away.
I put my hand over my mouth and chew my bottom lip.
Page ninety-one.
I read to you when you were unconscious in the hospital before you woke up.
I don't know if you could hear me. I read for three hours because it was the only thing I could think of to do.
Your voice wasn't in the room and I needed something to be okay.
This book specifically. Because it's ours.
Whatever else is true — this is ours and I needed something in that room that was.
The burning behind my eyes gets worse.
I breathe through it.
I turn pages.
Page one-hundred-and-four.
Week five. I almost called. I picked up my phone forty times and put it down forty times and on the forty first time I opened a new page in this book instead.
I think that's what this has become. Every thing I can't say out loud.
Every thing I would have written in your margin if you were still sitting across from me.
You're not sitting across from me and I'm still writing. I don't think I can stop.
Page one-hundred-and-twelve.
I think about the park. I think about it every day.
Not the kissing — though I think about that too, I think about that more than I'm going to admit, but I think about the moment before.
You lying on your back looking at clouds.
I have been trying to find words for what I felt watching you and I can't. I've been trying for six weeks and I can't. That might be the most honest thing I've ever admitted.
I close the book.
I sit with it closed in my lap, and I look at the kitchen ceiling. I breathe and feel everything that has been sitting in my chest for six weeks move and shift and rearrange itself into something I don't have a name for yet.
Something that is not anger.
Something that is not grief.
Something that has been underneath both of those things this whole time, waiting.
I open the book again.
There’s one more note. Different from the others. Written larger, like he needed the space, like the smaller, careful hand wasn't enough for this one.
I know what I did. I know what it cost you.
I know I don't get to ask for anything. I'm not asking.
I'm just telling you the truth in the only way I know how to tell it because you deserve the truth even when I'm bad at saying it out loud.
You deserve everything. I hope you choose it.
I hope you choose all of it. Whatever that looks like.
Whatever you decide. I just needed you to know that what happened in that library was the most real thing that has ever happened to me, and I would burn every other thing down before I'd take it back.
— T
I close the book.
I sit on the counter in the quiet for a long time.
Then I get down.
I walk to the front door and pause.
Is it locked? Are they keeping me hostage? I’m afraid the knob will shock me or something. I wrap my hand around it and twist.
It opens.
The November air flows in immediately. I shiver looking at the parked car. Cody is still asleep. Beckett glances at me. I look to the backseat, unable to tell if he’s there.
"Theo?"
A beat of silence.
It’s too cold, so I step back from the doorway.
I close the door and go back to the kitchen, holding the book.
I sit down.
And I wait.