Chapter Six
Max
I don’t sleep well.
I knew I wouldn’t forty-five minutes after Becca left last night.
I spend half the night lying in my bed staring at the fan on the ceiling and thinking about Callan Reed.
Not Patrick. Patrick I’ve had years to metabolize. Patrick is a finished sentence.
Callan Reed is the opposite. A sentence that barely had a beginning. One I never got to start, let alone finish.
I sit up and pull my knees to my chest and look around the dark bedroom.
Bart is at the foot of the bed, one ear lifted in question, like he’s trying to decide if I’m having a crisis that requires his presence or if he can go peacefully to sleep.
He sets his head down, apparently deciding on the latter.
I reach over to the nightstand and pick up the pen.
I’ve been doing this since Becca left. Picking it up. Setting it down. Reading the inscription again and again like the words might change. But they don’t.
Don’t give up your light, Sims, and don’t let it shine on anything or anyone who dims it.
The memory of him handing it to me is sharper than it should be. I remember the weight of the box in my hand. I remember wanting to open it, seeing the look in Cal’s eyes. And then Patrick’s arms were around me and the box was gone before I could say anything, and Cal’s face was—
I put the pen back on the nightstand.
Cal’s face when Patrick pulled me away was something I didn’t let myself look at directly then.
But I keep circling back to it now. It’s not the pen or even the inscription, but the way I had trained myself not to look at Callan Reed too closely—especially when Patrick was around.
Like looking at him directly would give something away.
Like maybe I already knew, at twenty-two, that what I felt standing next to Cal was a thing I wasn’t supposed to feel.
And if I looked too closely, for too long it might grow into something I couldn’t really have.
I married myself to school and law school prep and Patrick Ellison’s expectations and called it ambition while I watched Cal show up for me.
With coffee in the library. To walk me across campus in the snow.
To sit with me on the commons steps when Patrick was in one of his moods and I couldn’t go home.
And I think I filed away all of those conversations and laughs and late nights inside my brain under friendship.
And maybe Patrick made it so I couldn’t consider it being something else. Something more.
But it could be something else now.
I get out of bed.
No version of this night exists where I stay horizontal overthinking Callan being here, and I know this about myself.
The kitchen is dark and I don’t turn on the lights, just absorb the warm lights still on under the cabinets. I make tea I probably won’t drink and stare at the island, playing the logistics through in my head.
Callan Reed works at Ellison & Parker.
Ellison & Parker just moved to Main Street.
My Main Street.
I could see Callan as regularly as I did in college. I will also have to see Patrick, but I file that thought in a drawer somewhere and slam it shut.
Because Callan is here.
I put my face in my hands.
The tea steeps. I don’t drink it. I carry it to the living room and sit on the couch and pull the throw blanket around my shoulders.
I look at the pen on the coffee table where I set it after carrying it from the nightstand, where it made its way from the desk, which was after Becca left.
But before I realized I was going to be moving the pen around the house all night like a woman with a problem she literally can’t put down.
Bart appears and puts his chin on my knee.
“This is not an emergency,” I tell him.
He doesn’t believe me. He has wise eyes for a dog.
“It’s a coincidence. People coincide all the time. He’s going to be two blocks away and we will be professional and polite and whatever feelings I apparently have that I didn’t know I had will be an internal experience that has zero bearing on my outward behavior.”
Bart’s tail wags once. Not a convinced wag.
“Okay, yes, okay? I had feelings for a guy—feelings that I, apparently, did not realize existed—seven years ago,” I place emphasis on the last part, because apparently confessing my feelings to my dog at one in the morning is how tonight is going to go.
“Maybe—I don’t know. But nothing happened.
Nothing is going to happen because it’s not like he ever—”
I went back for you.
That’s what he said outside Wildhorse. That’s what he said leaning against the brick wall with his hands on either side of my face while the band played something through the wall and the parking lot threw a yellow glow around his shoulders.
His big, wide, strong shoulders. My teeth press into my bottom lip.
I went back for you.
Meaning he went to Ellison. In Boston. Thinking I was there and I wasn’t.
Meaning he looked for me after everything fell apart with Patrick.
But I was already gone. Meaning for two years he was somewhere I had been, walking around an office that I spent so many days and nights in.
And I was here. Buying an old house to sink my free time into and learning the square footage of my loneliness while eating China House with Becca every Friday night.
I think about the inscription on the pen again.
Don’t give up your light, Sims.
He called me that earlier tonight like no time had passed.
Like seven years was a breath we held between us, and it was easy to release.
The version of him that sat across from me in the library at midnight, pushed coffee at me and gave me every compliment in the book was just waiting somewhere—preserved but just off the page of the story I was living.
I drink the tea. It’s cold.
I’m acknowledging it for the first time. At one in the morning in my dimly lit house, alone with my dog.
There was always something there. I knew it.
And I wore uncomfortable heels and dyed blonde streaks into my brown hair and stood outside Patrick’s glass office.
I told myself that was the shape my future had decided was right.
But in the back of my mind, shoved in the back of a drawer in my old antique desk by Patrick, no doubt, there was a blue and gold pen with my name on it.
I close my eyes.
The last thing I think before I finally fall asleep there on the couch, wrapped in a throw blanket with my cold tea on the coffee table, is that I don’t actually know what I’m going to do about any of this.
But for the first time in a long time, I feel excited. Because I think I might want to find out.