Chapter 34
DARCY
The red pen has been in my hand for an hour and it hasn't marked a single thing.
The quizzes are stacked on my kitchen table, unread. The tea I made has gone cold in the mug. My phone is dark, lying face-down at the edge of the table.
Finn hasn't tried to reach me again. I should be relieved. After all, I'm the one who's been ignoring his texts, sending his phone calls straight to voicemail.
Because I'm a coward.
I don't want to hear him tell me goodbye. I don't want to see his face held in some gentle expression of remorse—or worse, oblivious to my hurting as he tells me his resort dreams are coming true and he's on his way to go make them happen. In Colorado, two thousand miles away from Mattichogue.
All the fantasies I indulged in earlier today, of confessing my love for him and offering to share my life with him wherever that life took us, taste like acid on my tongue now.
He's leaving tomorrow. His dreams await him somewhere else, and obviously, those dreams don't include me.
His last attempted call was half an hour ago, and since then, nothing.
No voicemail. No text. I've checked the screen four times to make sure there's nothing to check.
My silence did the hard work for me. He got the point.
That's what I wanted, and it worked, and there's no reason at all for it to feel like being left twice in one day.
The apartment isn't helping. It's small, but now it feels confining.
Last night it was ours, and now everywhere I look there's a place where he was.
I don't go into the bedroom. I don't look at the bathroom door.
I've been sitting in the one chair in the one corner of my home that isn't filled with memories of him, and it turns out that corner is too small to live in right now too.
I need space to think. To recalibrate this new reality. I need the library.
I stuff the quizzes back in the tote, then take my mother's spare key off the hook by the door and head outside.
It's a soft June evening and Main Street is winding down, the hardware store closed, the diner's sign buzzing.
An ordinary Monday for everyone else. I keep my eyes on the sidewalk and walk the four blocks on autopilot, the way I've walked them my whole life.
The big oak doors are locked and dark when I get there, and my mother's spare key turns the heavy old lock on the first try.
Inside, the library is completely still.
I don't turn on the mains. I know this floor in the dark, every table and cart and stray footstool of it, and I make my way to the reading tables and switch on one green-shaded lamp.
The light pools on the wood, and I stand there for a second and just breathe the place in.
Lemon polish and old paper. Binding glue and aged ink.
The smell has meant safety to me since before I could reach the top shelves.
Other people have churches. I have a yellowing card catalog nobody's used since 2004 that my mother refuses to throw out.
This is where I came when my father left.
Ironic, and not a little bit sad, that I would be back again after being hurt the same way by another man.
Except this hurt cuts deeper than my father leaving.
This hurt hasn't truly been cut open yet.
It's just the preview of what tomorrow will feel like once Finn leaves town to board a plane to another life. Without me.
The leather chairs are back in their corner, the ones I used to fold myself into after school with a book big enough to hide behind.
A little more than two weeks ago, they were pushed against the wall to make room for cocktail tables, and there was a temporary stage over there by the periodicals, and a man on it with his hands in his pockets, looking at me like I was the only bidder in the room.
I stood almost exactly where I'm standing now, in a room so crowded I could barely breathe, and raised a paddle in front of the whole town and spent everything I had on him.
For what? Some ridiculous revenge idea.
I felt so vindicated when he was mine to punish for an entire weekend. I thought I'd finally won against my lifelong enemy. I had no idea what I was setting myself up to lose. My public pride, my self-respect... my heart.
I sit down and uncap the red pen, then I pull the quizzes into the lamplight. Twenty-six chances to think about something else.
I barely get through one before memories of him crowd in on me.
It's the room's fault. I picked this building because it's the one place that's only ever been mine, except even the library will never be the same for me anymore.
The corner table by local history is right there, just past the lamplight, and I can see him at it like he's still sitting there.
Large-print editions in a stack. Audiobook cases lined up beside them.
My mother across from him kindly pretending to believe his excuses as she slid a reading program pamphlet across the table, and me frozen in the biography section with my heart squeezing from love for both of them.
That day at the vineyard, when he brought me to his secret hideaway in the loft, Finn handed me the heaviest thing he carries. His past. The pain of his father's scorn, of his own feelings of inadequacy. He said it out loud, just to me, looking me in the eye while he did it.
That's the part I can't square with the rest of it. His leaving without including me in the decision. The bet with his billionaire friends that makes me feel the butt of a joke I didn't even know I was part of.
A man who is running a joke on you does not hand you the only weapon that can injure him.
He doesn't sit in your mother's library sounding out his own shame.
There's no version of the punchline that requires him to bleed first, and he bled.
I watched it. I was standing right there in biographies with my chest aching, and he never knew I saw.
There's no audience in that story. No performance for laughs. There's just him, doing the hard thing anyway, alone.
So there it is, the whole of me, laid out on a library table—the part that can't stop feeling in her bones that it was real between us.
And the part that has been waiting since I was thirteen years old for the proof that I was a joke, and got handed that proof this afternoon in my own classroom, gift-wrapped, with a million dollars on it.
Neither part will yield. The one who believes him and the one who believes the hurt. They can't both be right, and I have so much practice at being wrong in only one direction.
It doesn't matter now.
Tomorrow is only six hours away. Finn will be gone, and Mattichogue will go back to what it was during all the other years that he wasn't here. Life will go on, mine included.
Somehow, I'll make my life go on.
I pull the half-graded quiz back into the light and I get to work. That's the one thing left that I know how to hold.