Chapter Forty-Eight
Saying goodbye sucked.
Nora had never been good at it—probably because she hadn’t had much practice before this summer turned into one long, slow farewell tour.
Goodbye to high school friends who swore they’d write but wouldn’t.
Goodbye to teachers who looked relieved to be rid of students for the summer.
Goodbye to her sleepy little town, the one she used to think she’d escape from but now realized had a grip on her like an old, worn but comforting quilt.
Goodbye to music that stretched from sunrise to midnight, to guitars strumming under wide-open skies, to the indulgence of days with no real beginning or end—just a continuous loop of sound, laughter, and possibility.
And now, the hardest goodbye of all. To the house where she had learned to walk, to read, to dream.
To the walls that held her childhood in their quiet corners.
To the two people who had always been there, standing in the doorway, watching her leave—smaller now, somehow, as if they were the ones being left behind.
And then there was something—someone—else.
Joe Dumas.
Joe had been a highlight at the concerts.
Scribbling in his notebook and writing himself right into her summer and her heart.
They had shared long nights of whispered conversations about the world, about music, about all the places they wanted to go.
His typewriter and her wild ideas. His ambitions and her rebellion.
And then, just like that, the summer had ended, and possibly so had they.
“You’ll write to me, right?” she had asked.
“I’m a journalist,” he had said, like that was answer enough.
But she knew better. He would write. But maybe not to her.
They had talked on the phone a few times, voices stretching across the distance like a thread that kept fraying at the edges.
But knowing they lived on opposite coasts of the country—how different their lives were about to become—Nora had done the one thing she swore she wouldn’t.
She didn’t call him back that last time.
Maybe that was its own painless farewell.
Because now, goodbye to him too.
And hello, Yale.
Nora stepped out of her dorm and onto campus, where the air had that crisp, academic kind of coolness.
Somewhere between intellectual superiority and a late-September breeze.
The Gothic buildings loomed, ivy curling up their stone facades like they had been here before history itself.
Students shuffled past, notebooks tucked under arms, backpacks sagging under the weight of knowledge—or, at least, really heavy books.
The boys wore blazers with turtlenecks like they were auditioning for future roles as professors.
All of them looked significantly more confident than she felt.
Unlike them, she wasn’t just starting college; she was stepping into history.
As one of the first women allowed to attend Yale, she could feel the weight of that settling over her like an unspoken challenge.
Noticed the glances from some of the older professors, the way a few male students still seemed to shilly-shally when they saw a girl walking on campus with a stack of books in her hand, their brains struggling to recalibrate.
It wasn’t hostile, exactly. Just…uncertain.
Like no one had quite figured out yet if they were supposed to welcome the change or resist it.
The girls had long, straight hair, parted in the middle, or curls held in place with careful indifference—an indifference they worked hard to perfect as if it could offset the weight of history pressing down on them.
They were the first. The first women to walk these halls, to sit in these lecture rooms, to take up space in a place that had never been meant for them.
And they knew it. You could see it in the way they held their books a little tighter, their expressions schooled into effortless cool, their laughter never too loud, their presence never too demanding.
If they acted like they belonged, no one would question if they did.
She squared her shoulders. Let them stare. She hadn’t come here to blend in.
She took a breath. This was it.
She adjusted the waistband of her stiff new bell-bottoms and smoothed her blouse, the fabric light and airy, chosen to make her look effortlessly put-together. Her hair curled just right—the result of an entire can of hair spray and a silent prayer.
She checked her schedule. First class. No idea where she was going.
Which was frustrating because she had practiced walking the route yesterday, memorizing landmarks, convincing herself she had it all figured out.
But now, as she stood in the middle of this overwhelming, ancient, book-filled kingdom, her brain had gone completely blank.
But she was here. And if she could survive saying goodbye—to her town, her home, her past, and him—she could survive this.
Maybe.
Nora drew in a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and walked in the general direction of somewhere.
When she came back from the concerts, sunburned and half dizzy from a freedom that only existed in the spaces between songs, she packed up her room.
Folded her old life into boxes. Got ready for college.
But before she left, she did one more thing.
She called her adviser at Yale and told them she wasn’t going to minor in English; she was going to major in it.
No more playing it safe and going into marketing. She was going to be a writer.
She had a few people to thank for that. Herself, most of all, because, in the end, she had to be the one to make the choice.
But also her parents, who had always believed she could do anything, even before she believed it herself.
Her grandmother, whose stories had been a kind of alchemy—turning ordinary afternoons into adventures, filling quiet moments with whole worlds waiting to be discovered. And Joe.
Joe, who had held up a mirror and made her see that the life she had planned wasn’t the same as the life she wanted.
Who had asked the right questions, made her think, made her wonder if maybe the “responsible thing” wasn’t about playing it safe but about being brave enough to chase what set her soul on fire.
And she had learned something: Art was a responsibility too.
It was an artist’s quiet, relentless obligation to put something into the world that hadn’t existed before.
To take what was inside and shape it into something real.
And for her, that meant words. Sentences.
Stories. Meshing them together like brushstrokes on a canvas, letting them form something beautiful on the page.
This was her path. And for the first time, she wasn’t afraid to follow it.
Nora smiled, striding in the direction she hoped class was. She had about a fifty-fifty shot of being right, which, statistically speaking, was not terrible.
“Let me guess,” a voice drawled behind her. “You’re the kind of girl who likes Coca-Cola.”
She stopped dead in her tracks. That voice. That impossible, infuriating, unmistakable voice.
Her head snapped up, and sure enough, there he was—Joe Dumas, grinning like he had just gotten away with something. Which, knowing him, he probably had.
“What—” Her brain short-circuited. “What are you doing here?” She glanced around, half expecting some sort of elaborate prank, maybe a camera crew, or worse—some stranger in a lab coat ready to inform her she had officially lost her mind.
Joe shrugged, completely nonchalant, like he wasn’t supposed to be across the country. “Funny thing, they had an opening in their journalism department. And what do you know? I just so happened to be on the waitlist.”
She narrowed her eyes, clutching her notebooks like they were a life raft. “You never told me you applied to Yale.”
“Yeah, well, nobody likes to advertise their rejection letters, do they?”
“Fair.”
She blinked at him, still trying to process how the boy she had said goodbye to—dramatically, might she add—was now standing here, fate deciding to play a practical joke on her.
Then, before she could overthink it, she grinned, broad and unrestrained.
Joe slung an arm around her shoulder as if they had done this a thousand times before and the last few weeks of missing him had never happened.
“Come on,” he said, steering them toward the heart of campus. “Let’s go figure out what they call the center of this place. Quadrangle? Courtyard? Something fancy, I bet.”
“Ivy League nonsense,” she agreed.
Funny how just like that, the world tilted itself back into place.
“I feel like I should pinch myself,” she said, still half convinced he might be a mirage. “Or maybe you.”
“Don’t do it,” Joe warned, leaning in slightly. “I’m incredibly fragile. One good pinch and I might dissolve into pure charisma.”
She snorted. “Well, I think Yale just got a whole lot better.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” he said, eyes glinting. “Though, for the record, if you decide you’re sick of me at any point, feel free to flick me off—like rust on a can. No hard feelings.”
She laughed. “I think I’d be a bit more civil than that.”
But then she stopped walking, stopped everything, reaching for the front of his shirt, gripping the fabric in her fists, and pulling him down toward her.
She rose up onto her tiptoes.
And kissed him.
Joe made a small sound between amusement and approval, like he hadn’t entirely been expecting it but also had never wanted anything more.
When she pulled back, she flashed him a bright, carefree smile, her heart doing a little flip at the pure happiness shining in his eyes.
“Yeah,” she murmured, breathless. “This is going to be pretty groovy.”
He exhaled a laugh, shaking his head. “Understatement of the century, babe.”
Just like that, the future stretched ahead of her in ways she’d never even dreamed.
Bigger, messier, wilder than the careful plans she once thought she had to follow.
And all it had taken was chasing her grandmother across the country, watching her step onto stage after stage, fearlessly belting out the songs she was born to sing.
Somewhere between the long drives and late-night diner stops, between the music and the adventure, Nora had realized that dreams weren’t something she needed to wait for.
They were something to run toward, arms wide open, heart pounding, ready to make them a reality.
And now, standing in the middle of Yale’s storied campus, with Joe by her side and the whole world ahead of her, she knew one thing for certain—this was only the beginning.