Chapter 29 #2
I thought about the woman I’d been in that phone call with Anne, months ago, before any of this. I have a very settled stance on men. It’s settled. I’m not interested.
I’d believed it completely. I hadn’t been lying, or protecting myself, or waiting to be talked out of it. I had built a life that was full and good and mine, and I had needed nothing.
I still didn’t.
But standing at that window, watching the snow, I understood the thing I’d been circling for months.
Carter wasn’t something I needed. He was something I’d chosen.
The way you choose to climb the stairs of a house you already love, just to see what living on the top floor feels like.
And the bravest thing I’d ever done was let myself go up.
“What are you thinking about?” Carter murmured.
“Stairs,” I said.
“…Stairs.”
“I’ll explain it someday.” I turned in his arms and looped mine around his neck and looked up at him — this maddening, beautiful, younger, broken, mended man who called every single night. “Merry Christmas, Carter.”
“Merry Christmas.” He kissed me, slow, the snow lighting up the window behind us.
And then he pulled back and looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read — something soft and certain and a little bit like a man standing at the edge of a high board, deciding — and for a second I thought he was going to say something enormous.
He didn’t. He just tucked a piece of hair behind my ear and said, “You’re my girl, you know. Whatever comes, I’m not going anywhere.”
“I know,” I said.
And I did.
Outside, the city was going white under it, softening every edge, making everything look new. Inside, in a warm bright house full of the people we’d somehow collected, I stood in the arms of a man I hadn’t needed and couldn’t imagine living without, and I let myself be exactly that happy.
All the way happy. No walls. Hands full.
I’d finally learned how.
Anne and Liam called on speaker the next morning to tell us Liam had proposed. I sat down on my own kitchen floor to hear it, and I stayed there a while after we hung up.
Because here’s the thing about watching your best friend get engaged when you have spent your entire adult life certain that marriage was a thing that happened to other women.
I was happy for her. Purely, completely happy — no envy in it, none of that thin acid feeling you’re supposed to fight down when someone else gets the thing.
But it did one thing I wasn’t expecting: it made me hold my own situation up to the light and actually look at it.
And the truth was, I loved where Carter and I were. I loved it.
He was fun in a way I hadn’t let myself have in years — he made me laugh in my own kitchen, he showed up, he was extraordinary with Justin without ever once performing at it, and the sex — God, the sex, months in and it hadn’t cooled off an inch — made me feel like a woman again instead of just a mother and a title on a hospital directory.
He knew what he was doing and he paid attention, and there were mornings I’d left for work already counting down to the moment Justin’s light went out that night.
It was good. It was so good that for a while I hadn’t let myself want anything past it, because wanting more felt like a good way to wreck a thing that was already better than I’d planned on.
I hadn’t been looking for the next step. I’d told myself I didn’t need one. We were happy. Why touch it.
But somewhere in all that happiness for her, sitting there on my kitchen floor long after we’d hung up, something in me quietly came loose. And for the first time, I let myself sit with the question I’d been so carefully not asking.
Because the thing was — for the first time, I could picture it. Not Anne’s version. Mine. A morning like this one in a house that wasn’t quite built yet, and a man in the next room I’d stopped bracing to lose, and a question I would say yes to before he finished asking.
I’d spent years being very sure I didn’t want that, and I’d been telling the truth. But wanting it now didn’t cancel out not having wanted it then. It just meant I’d changed, in the one specific way I’d sworn I never would.
I didn’t say any of that to Anne. It was her morning. I told her I loved her and I’d see her at the salon, and I got up off the floor and went to find the reason I’d changed my mind about everything, who was in the living room letting my son beat him at a board game he was very clearly throwing.
A week later, we brought the new year in at home.
Not at a party. Carter had a game on the thirtieth and a morning skate on the second, and somewhere in there we’d both quietly decided we didn’t want to spend the one free night at a crowded bar counting down with strangers.
So it was the three of us: Justin, who had big plans to stay up and watch the ball drop and instead fell asleep mid-sentence on the couch at nine-forty; and then just the two of us, once Carter had carried him to bed.
We stood at the window of the temporary apartment with the lights off and a bottle of something good, watching a soft, undramatic snow come down over a city I was slowly learning was mine — the new house closed on but still weeks from ready, waiting for us across town.
Somewhere out there, fireworks I could hear but not see went off in ragged little bursts.
“Last year on this night,” I said, “I was in Chicago. Justin was asleep, and I was reading a management book with a glass of wine, and I remember thinking it was a perfect night.” I leaned back against him.
“It was, too. I want to be fair to her, the woman who thought that. She wasn’t wrong.
She just didn’t know what she was missing, because she’d made very sure never to find out. ”
His arms came around me from behind. “And this year?”
“This year I know exactly what I’d be missing.” I turned in his arms so I could see his face in the light coming off the snow. “That’s the difference. That’s the whole difference.”
He didn’t say anything clever. He just kissed me, slow, as somewhere out there the year turned over — and I kissed the new one in with both arms around the reason I’d stopped being so careful.
Happy New Year, I thought. To all of us.