Chapter Forty-One
Jess
Jess is starting to wonder if coming to this taster class was a mistake.
She’s distracted by thoughts of the book’s ending (and, if she’s honest, also by the attractive French teacher).
It feels like exactly the wrong time to be starting something new, even if she’s glad to be focussing on something other than her complicated feelings about Alex.
She needs to concentrate, and to fight her natural tendency to flit from one task or one hobby to another.
Part of her wonders if she is only doing this to escape from having to untangle the knot of The Alex Situation, as she has taken to referring to it in conversations with Lily and in her own internal monologue.
Jess already knows how her learning French is likely to end: she’ll be excited for a few weeks, thrilled to put her first few sentences together, then the real work of learning will start, and she’ll lose interest, and think about taking up cross-stitch or pickleball or the cello.
Still, though, escapism aside, it feels important to face what she’s been running from her whole life: that her dad did in fact exist, and part of her is inextricably linked with him.
It feels, maybe, like growth. Like taking her head out of the sand at least a little bit.
She’s been thinking about her conversation with Lily, about her claim that anything worth having requires work, and sometimes that work is inconvenient and painful.
Maybe this connection to her dad – to Jess’s own DNA, her own heritage – falls into that category.
And besides, this is just a taster class.
By the time it properly starts later in the year, the bulk of the editing work on the novel will surely – surely?
– be done. She’ll have space in her brain and in her timetable for something new.
Another reason to stay put, to not go rushing off on adventures – a reason to add to Ivy, and her grandparents, and maybe, if they can figure things out, to Alex.
She forces herself to tune back in. They are going round the class, each person sharing their connection to French, why they’ve chosen to learn it or refresh it at this point in their adult lives.
Jess’s heart begins to thump. She has a choice, she knows.
She can brush it off with a laugh, as she usually does with difficult things.
She thinks about saying, I want to be able to flirt with the hot men when I’m next on holiday, waiting for the others to chuckle, watching the teacher for signs of blushing.
She could say, I’m hoping to win the lottery and get a second home on the Riviera.
But when it gets to her turn, she surprises herself.
‘My dad was French,’ she says. ‘I never knew him, and I thought it would be nice to have more of a connection to him.’
Jess’s heart is so loud now that she is sure everyone can hear its unsteady rhythm.
But nobody else in the room seems unduly concerned: the only response is some sympathetic mmms, and the concerned, furrowed brow of the tutor, which once upon a time (last year, perhaps) might have annoyed her and put her off sharing anything that wasn’t light-hearted ever again.
Her ears are ringing, and she can barely hear what others have to say.
Alex, she knows, would be proud of her. He’s on his own journey processing his past, and he knows these small victories shouldn’t be taken for granted.
She knows, too, that thinking of him in these seminal life moments, wanting to share even the hard stuff with him, can only mean one thing: that she’s more deeply in love than she realised, and that what they have is worth fighting for.
Lily’s advice was well and good, but Jess is still smarting from Alex’s walking away.
And anyway, what is she supposed to do? Really, it’s up to him to contact her.
He’s the one who walked away. She doesn’t want to nag, and a text saying, Are you okay?
could feel to him like nagging, like she’s saying, Where are you?
Have you got over your sulk? Are you ready to discuss this like an adult?
Especially because, deep down – or maybe not even that deep down – that is how she actually feels.
She could overcompensate with emoji, and hope that covers any buried passive aggression, but she doesn’t trust him to read the right thing between the lines.
Especially as she’s not sure what the right thing is, what it is that she actually wants to tell him.
Sometimes, Grow up, is what she beams at him telepathically across London.
Other times, it’s I love you! Come back to me.
But mostly, she just misses him. She misses their creativity bouncing off each other, misses working with him on their book, talking about its characters, which have become so real to her.
She opens the text on her computer, scrolls up and down to her favourite parts: the witty dialogue Alex finally let her include, the new characters she introduced and developed.
It’s glaringly obvious, to her, which parts are her writing and which parts are his, but it’s the job of a good editor to smooth that out, and she trusts Nathan to do it well.
She’s proud of the work they’ve done together, even in its unfinished, unpolished form.
And maybe this is the answer. Maybe she’ll write her own ending to the book.
The characters who were exchanging coy looks as they waited for help from the emergency services, looking for any distraction from their fear, their hunger, the sharp pain from their injuries.
Maybe she’ll write them a happy ending, one in which they hash out their differences and discuss how to resolve conflict like grown-ups.
It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make it into the book; it can just be a message to Alex.
See, this is how it’s done. This is how adults communicate.
This is how I wish we would communicate.
See how they say I love you by the end of the story?
By the way, why haven’t we said that to each other yet?
In their book, many beautiful things have come from the wreckage of the crashed plane.
Reconciled spouses, a renewed faith in God for one character, and fresh determination to live life differently and with purpose for others – to pursue that art career, to write that book, to go back to college and finish that degree. And now, this love story.
Everyone’s life is a plane wreck in some small or big way – Alex with his anxiety, and his pain from having not been looked after the way he would have wanted as a child.
Even Jess, though she’s buried it and run from it and papered over it with fun and with books and with Netflix – she hasn’t exactly emerged unscathed from her childhood, from growing up without a dad and with an often absent mum.
But out of the wreckage of their two lives, maybe hope can emerge. Hope, and love.
She just needs to get the ending right.