Chapter 42
Felicity opened her eyes. Her hand went to the spot beside her in the bed, but all she felt was the ice pack she had used after knocking her bum wrist into a cabinet door while doing one of her ADHD insomnia–fueled cleaning marathons.
He still wasn’t back. She hoped this meant he’d developed some common sense and stayed in Texas and slept.
She sat up and rubbed her eyes. Morning sun streamed in the window and caught on a large fiddle-leaf fig tree.
“What in the…”
It was a gorgeous tree. The kind that was always in influencer houses. It was beautiful and well cared for. But while it was incredibly pretty, if he’d made an overnight trip to Texas to pick up a fiddle-leaf fig tree for her, she’d kill him. She stretched.
The pot was gorgeous too. It looked hand painted.
She got her laser eye surgery forever ago, but she never stopped being thankful for being able to see when she woke up in the morning.
She blinked again, and the world blurred around her.
At first, she’d seen the F and assumed it said Fiddle Leaf.
But it didn’t.
She gasped. “Fanny.”
Underneath Fanny were four painted words:
AD ASTRA PER ASPERA
She went to grab her phone, but where her phone should have been, there was a box. The box with the carved stars from Nic’s bookshelf. On top of the box were two folded sheets of legal pad paper.
The handwriting. The same perfect, slightly fussy cursive it had been fourteen years ago.
She’d thought her mind was playing tricks on her when he gave her that sticky note back in September.
How could Nic be the transatlantic, Ivy League–scrawny Nicky with the bleached-blond ringlets she’d met in a dumpster?
The idea was too bananas for her to even consider it.
After she met Nicky, she’d spent a year fixing Fanny. She’d thought it was a fairy tale. Something magical.
But he never came back.
She’d been so upset that she threw the tree on the curb with a sign that said FREE BECAUSE LOVE AND ROMANCE ARE DEAD. Aunt Jeannie must have saved it. She’d told Felicity that she sold it.
Aunt Jeannie always had been good at lying when she needed to.
Now, Nicky turned out to be the friend she’d fallen in love with this year. She wanted to strangle him.
She also inexplicably wanted to fuck him senseless.
She needed to know why the fuck he didn’t tell her before this morning.
It was all very confusing.
She put one arm around the fiddle-leaf fig tree and held the papers with the other.
Dear Felicity,
For starters, just in case you’re worried about this, I’m not gone. I’m probably helping your parents in the plant store or doing some prep work at the restaurant if I haven’t fallen asleep somewhere.
I will never leave you again unless you ask me to. Never.
That being said, I will understand if you want me to go.
I’m sure you’re pissed as fuck.
I can’t say I’ve spent all this time waiting for you. That wouldn’t have been fair for either of us. But I came back because I wanted to see you. I wanted to see if we could get to know each other, and if maybe what I felt that night was more than the wishful fairy tale of a sad, abused kid.
I thought you were avoiding me last year when I got here because you knew who I was. When I finally grew balls enough to talk to you again, you didn’t recognize me. I honestly can’t blame you for that. I’ve changed a lot. But you were the same.
I almost told you when you made the joke about gingers stealing souls, because you stole mine at nineteen when you walked out of that dumpster, and you were just as beautiful and full of life when I met you again over thirteen years later.
That night at the dumpster, I was high. I had been high more often than not for years before I met you.
Courtney had forced my ass into a rehab program nearby because Samantha worked close by, and it was far away from my dad and my shitty friends in LA.
I checked myself out a week later and went right back into everything I promised I wouldn’t.
I stole pills from her and my dad. I didn’t give a shit whether I lived or died at that point.
Your aunt knew, and she rightly kicked my ass about coming back for you a year later.
Said I wasn’t ready, and she was right. I’ve been working ever since to be a better person.
I didn’t do it for you, exactly, but it was because of you.
The last time I saw your aunt I told her why I hadn’t come back and visited you.
It was because I was chicken shit scared that I would be a disappointment, and I didn’t think I could handle that.
I thought maybe it was better to leave that magical night in the past, where it would be as perfect as it was then.
You said you feel haunted on May Day? I do too.
I wish I could say I was sorry you didn’t recognize me.
But it felt like getting to reread a favorite book for the first time.
Again, you started out so beautifully angry, and there I was, bewitched all over again in a matter of minutes.
I know it wasn’t love though. There is no comparison.
Love is exactly what you said it was that night.
Love is carrot cake and coordinated Halloween costumes and working and solving problems together.
It’s planting those sugar snap peas on St. Patrick’s Day and watching you light up with every inch they grew out of the ground.
It’s that birthday French toast you made me even if it was inedible at the edges and you lit my kitchen on fire making it.
“Asshole,” Felicity said under her breath.
I had this stupid idea that maybe I could convince you to fall in love with the me …
the me I am now. I thought if we were friends first …
but I realize now, I was being a coward again.
I know you hate sports metaphors, but as they say, the ball’s in your court this time, darlin’.
I can stay or leave. I drove back home yesterday to get Fanny because I knew I couldn’t put this off any longer.
She’s yours again either way. I’m sorry I kept her so long.
I’m going to knock on the door in a couple hours. Feel free to tell me to fuck off. I probably deserve it. I wrote you a letter every year for the last five.
Love,
Nicky
Nicolas Andrew Holm-Bozic (my full legal name, in case there’s any further confusion.)
P.S. You were right about the soil.
She tried to read through the other letters in the box, but when she saw the little brass plaque, her eyes were too blurry from more crying. She tried several times to stop crying, but every time she did, she looked up, saw Fanny, and started crying again.
Noise from the kitchen had her pause in her sobbing.
“N-Nic?”
“It’s Courtney.”
“O-oh. Okay. I thought you were in New York.”
Fast footsteps pounded up the stairs. “Felicity? Are you okay? I tried to get hold of Nic to tell him I was coming back early but he didn’t answer his phone, and…” Her gaze locked on the tall, beautiful fiddle-leaf fig tree. “Ah … that explains the crying. He left you a—”
Felicity held up the piece of paper. “A letter.” She held up the box. “More letters.” She was sobbing again.
Courtney handed her a box of tissues. She held her by the shoulders. She didn’t talk or tell her There there or Shh. All in all, Courtney was a pretty good mental breakdown companion. Ten out of ten stars.
Stars.
Ad astra per aspera.
On instinct, she touched the inked words on her shoulder.
More crying. “Why did he wait until he got fired and needed a job to see me again? Why did he wait so long?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I thought Nic got fired or something and that’s why he came here so desperate to make this work. I’m so confused. I don’t want to be a backup plan, but I’m also in love with him.”
Courtney rolled her eyes and mumbled at the ceiling. “Jesus Christ, he might look different now, but he’s still the same stupid Nicky.”
“What do you mean?” Felicity sniffled.
“That letter was two whole stupid pages, and he couldn’t have dropped in an extra line to explain.
And just so you know, I knew nothing about any of this until a few days ago when he called me and spilled the entire thing at eleven o’clock at night.
All these letters and he never told you what he does? ”
“Tell me what about what he does?”
“Nic owns all those restaurants. He’s been doing this ever since he became a chef.
He starts a restaurant and gets it running, then he trains someone—he tries to find people who have been overlooked and treated badly by the toxic parts of the restaurant industry—before he hands the restaurant over to them.
He loves it because he gets to make all different types of food. ”
“When did he even go to culinary school? When we met, he was at—”
“He quit Yale. He quit with the pills and the excessive drinking and the stealing. Nic kept saying something about being in the wrong pot.”
Felicity wiped her eyes and laughed.
“He started it a couple months after meeting you, I think. I should have figured it out with him visiting here all the time.”
“Visiting who?”
“Nic used to come to see Aunt Jeannie multiple times a year. How do you think this place was making ends meet with all her cancer treatments? That other account you found? It was money he’d given her for another round of treatments, but she’d already decided she was done. She knew he wouldn’t take it back.”
Felicity felt her eyes go wide. “My god, so he’s—”
“It can’t surprise you to learn that Nic had a trust fund.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me about the boy in cashmere in the alley, but this Nic? He drives a ten-year-old truck and wears T-shirts.”
Courtney gave her a small smile. “After getting him away from his dad and off the drugs, he was a different person in so many ways. But this was always who he was really. This was always who he really was. Generous. Kind. Doing too much for people whenever he can.”
“If this is all true, then why didn’t he at least, I don’t know, send me a goddamn email or text message or carrier pigeon? He waited forever to come back into my life?”
“That was my first question too.” She sighed.
“At first, he was worried he wasn’t ready.
Then he was worried he would screw up your life if he popped back into it at the wrong time.
Then he was worried you would feel pressure, or if you did like him, you’d just be in love with that stupid mophead teenager who found you in a dumpster. ”
Felicity pulled a pillow into her chest.
“You shouldn’t feel any pressure, Felicity. It was a shitty thing for him to keep you in the dark about this for so long. I’m pissed as hell at him for keeping all these secrets.”
“I love the Nic he is now.” She frowned. “The Felicity I was then wasn’t ready either.”
Courtney nodded. “He wanted you to be happy. He wanted him to be happy. He wasn’t pining or anything.”
“Yeah, Nic did say that in the letter. That was great.”
Courtney groaned. “He probably wanted to make it clear that he wasn’t putting you on a pedestal or moping around. But you were always there in the back of his mind. I think he fell in love with the idea of being the sort of person someone like you deserved.”
Felicity flipped through the envelopes she hadn’t read yet.
“Did he tell you what his restaurant group is called?” Courtney asked.
“Restaurant group?”
“It’s called Happiness Restaurant Group.” She nudged Felicity’s phone toward her. “Google it.”
She typed it into the search bar, and it came up with hundreds of hits.
Courtney took the phone from her. “Hold on a sec.” She scrolled through and found it. “This one.”
Felicity peered down at her phone. “He named the first one Fanny’s Place?”
“The tree was always there. I guess until last night. He learned how to start new trees from her cuttings when he was about to open his second restaurant. They didn’t all survive. But most of his restaurants have at least one.”
Felicity blinked rapidly.
“Click here.” Courtney pointed at the screen. “It’s on the back of the menus.”
The Story of Fanny’s Place
Once upon a time, a lonely prince came upon a wicked angel trapped in a cage in the deepest, darkest wood.
The prince freed the angel, and in exchange, she offered him one wish.
When she asked what he wanted to wish for, he said he’d always wanted to reach the stars, and so he wished to be set free.
Confused, the angel said, “What do you mean set free?” The prince explained he’d spent his entire life tied to the ground with invisible ropes.
As long as they held him, he would never reach the stars.
The wicked angel laughed. She plucked a star from the sky and handed it to him, saying, “Silly prince. You’ve never been trapped.
You’re only lost. I can’t free you, but I can find you. ” And she did.
“That is not an ending,” Felicity said through fresh tears. “Where’s the ending? And there’s not even a character named Fanny in that story.”
Courtney laughed. “There are actually message boards full of Texans debating who Fanny is and if she’s the wicked angel.”
“Does anyone on the message board know how it ends?”
“You’re the only person who can tell him how the story ends, Felicity.”
“I think…”
Courtney’s lips pressed together in anticipation.
“I think I want to go for a walk.”