Chapter 3
Each step Rebecca took up the stairs to the apartment above the diner brought a new memory: racing down them as a child, eager to help in the diner.
Descending in her graduation dress as her grandmother brushed away tears and took photographs.
Running down the stairs with exciting news about university acceptances, scholarships, dreams come true.
Walking down the steps in the green dress she wore to the spring dance, senior year.
This brought a pang, though, and she pushed past it, flicking over it like a file she didn’t plan to look at. She opened the apartment door and called out, “Hello?” again.
“I’m in your room!”
Rebecca paused. She remembered her room as a shrine, could picture it the last time she had been home, the day of the funeral, looking just like it had when she was in high school: the twin bed with the patchwork quilt, the bookshelf overflowing with dog-eared paperbacks, the desk where she’d written countless papers.
All there, preserved like artifacts in a museum of her former life.
She had spent an agonized, sleepless night in that bed, and then, in the morning, had closed the door on the difficult memories.
“Come on!” Sabrina called out again. The light from the apple-blossom lamp in the living room cast warm shadows down the hallway, and Rebecca followed the beams of light toward her room.
The door was half-closed, a shaft of light making its way out into the hallway.
She took a deep breath and pushed the door open.
What she saw made her feel confused about which door she had chosen. Where was she? What was this room?
The desk and shelves, once cluttered with old spelling bee trophies, too many books for the shelves to hold, novels and journals, were culled and organized.
Sabrina had stripped the faded quilt and old flannel sheets and replaced them with crisp white bedding and a sage-green duvet.
There was a new floor lamp, bronze with a bright white shade, that cast a steady glow over the bedside table, where Sabrina had set a stack of favorite books and a vase of freshly cut zinnias.
A pair of framed prints of brightly colored vintage book covers—Little Women and Pride and Prejudice—adorned the walls, replacing her time-faded Tegan and Sara and Fleet Foxes band posters.
It no longer looked like a room from her past. “This is amazing…How did you…When did you? I know how busy you are.”
Sabrina’s blond curls were pulled back from her face in a low ponytail, and her blue eyes were as bright as ever.
She had been putting the finishing touches on a shelf, placing a miniature model of the Eiffel Tower just so, but she stepped back, turned toward her friend, and grinned.
“Come here.” She opened her arms for a hug.
“I am never too busy for you,” she said into Rebecca’s hair.
“And I really wanted you to feel comfortable here. Not stuck in the past. Even if I know it’s all around you in this building.
But I’ll help you with that, too. This room is just the start. ”
“Right, with all the time you have during harvest at the orchard, and Autumn Festival coming up in town, you’re also going to help me repair and clean up this building.
” The Autumn Festival, a Bramley Hollow tradition, had been going strong since Rebecca was a teen.
It was a weekend-long celebration of the season that every townsperson and business participated in.
It had grown over the years to include not just apple- and pumpkin-pie-baking contests, but pie-eating contests, too.
The garden vegetable competitions had expanded to include elaborate farm and handicraft displays.
The midway added a new ride every year, plus there were pony rides and a petting zoo.
As always, a fall-themed dance capped the weekend—but the BIA had fundraised for a new tent and a disco ball.
At the edge of town, Calloway’s Orchard built a giant hay maze every year, for tourists and townspeople alike to get lost and found in as much as they pleased.
“I have staff now, you know,” Sabrina said with a smile.
“An assistant, even. His name is Byron and he’s very efficient.
Sometimes, I think he secretly wants my job.
I’m learning to off-load things, though.
I don’t need to be involved in every single aspect of the running of the orchard.
” Her eyes were still bright, but Rebecca could see a sadness in them, too.
In the spring, the man Sabrina had been dating—Raj, a cider press mechanic—had broken things off with her because, he had said, she never had time for him.
He had told Sabrina she was married to the orchard and didn’t have room in her life for a partner.
Rebecca knew Sabrina had really cared for Raj—and also, that her friend needed someone who understood and supported how hard she worked for the family business because she cared about it, it was important to her, and it fulfilled her.
Raj hadn’t been wrong; Sabrina’s work-life balance needed adjusting.
But her wholehearted intensity was just part of who she was, and Rebecca hoped one day her friend could find someone who didn’t just accept that but celebrated it.
“I’m glad to hear you’re outsourcing,” Rebecca said. “But I still can’t believe you found the time to do this.” She looked around the room again. “Where did you put all the stuff I’d been hoarding in here for years?”
“Don’t worry, I didn’t get rid of anything yet.
I just wanted to get this room updated so you don’t feel like you’re living in a museum of your former self.
It’s not healthy for you, even if you are only here for a month.
I brought boxes, packed them full, and put them in your grannie’s office, to be dealt with later.
” She paused and looked around, too. “I guess this is the beginning of the staging-to-sell process everyone has to do before they put anything on the market these days. And, of course, Cort will be helpful in that regard, when it comes to downstairs, in the diner. I just left that as is. You don’t even need to go down there until he comes over to give you a quote on the work.
” She paused. “Hey, are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I’m—” Rebecca struggled to find the words, even though she had practiced her speech about this repeatedly on the drive from Toronto to Bramley Hollow.
I can’t hire Cort because he’s part of the reason I stayed away for an entire year.
“I…” Her cheeks were flaming hot, an automatic response to the name “Cort” she had hoped would have faded after so much time.
“The thing is…I had been thinking…maybe I’d hire someone else. ”
“What? Why? Not only is Cort the best contractor in town, he’s the only contractor in town. His specialty is heritage buildings like this. He’s your friend; he’ll give you a deal. Plus, I already told him you’d be calling.”
“Why did you tell him that?” Rebecca said faintly.
“He was asking about you. Wanted to know exactly when you’d be back. And—” But Sabrina shook her head and didn’t say whatever had been on the tip of her tongue. Meanwhile, Rebecca’s heart was racing so fast she had to sit down on the bed.
“I’m not ready to decide on a contractor just yet,” she managed. “There must be more than one contractor around by now. The town is growing. Isn’t that what Crispin always says?”
“It’s what Crispin wishes. Bramley Hollow is the small-town equivalent of a mosquito preserved in amber.
Change is slow. And I don’t get it: Why wouldn’t you use Cort?
He does amazing work. He did such a great job of restoring the old barn where my apartment is now; I know you agree.
Staying on time and on budget is no small thing.
Plus, he just did a gorgeous loft bedroom for my parents in the main house.
We know him. We trust him. We love him. He’s Cort. ”
“Exactly,” Rebecca mumbled.
Sabrina had joined her on the bed, had her hand on Rebecca’s back.
She patted it, going for “reassuring friend”—but Rebecca knew Sabrina didn’t like to be a step behind.
“What am I missing?” she asked. Rebecca looked up at her.
Normally, she told her best friend everything about her life, and had since they had met in kindergarten, when Sabrina had accidentally glued one of her nostrils shut during craft time and been too embarrassed to say anything to the teacher.
Growing up in a diner, Rebecca knew more about cleanup emergencies than most five-year-olds.
She had taken Sabrina to the school bathroom, used warm water and a paper towel, and they’d ended up in fits of giggles, thus starting a friendship that had lasted and deepened through elementary school, then high school.
Now that Rebecca lived in Toronto, texts and chats were a daily occurrence, and they were so close they considered each other family.
While she had confided in her friend frequently throughout the year about how much she missed Lenore, Rebecca had not been able to bring herself to tell Sabrina about this piece of it.
But she knew she couldn’t hide it forever.
“It’s part of why I stayed away so long,” she said.
Sabrina furrowed her brow. “I thought that was because you missed Lenore. That it was too hard to be here without her. That you wanted to avoid”—she spun one hand in a circle, taking in the room but hinting at the rest of the apartment and what was downstairs, too—“all this.”
Rebecca looked around. “I do miss her. I always will. And cleaning out this building does feel like a lot. But that’s not everything. The thing is…”
“Becca, what else is there?”
“Cort and I, we had a moment. After the funeral. After you went home from the Tipsy Apple.”
“I knew it, there was a vibe!” Sabrina’s eyes were dancing now—but then grew serious as she saw the look on Rebecca’s face.
“Not a good vibe,” Rebecca said, each word feeling like it took a huge effort. “It was one of the most mortifying moments of my life, and there have been a few. For some reason, the most notable ones are always connected to Cort Adams.” Had she said his name aloud in a year? She wasn’t sure.
She stood and crossed the room to the bookshelf, now clear of so much clutter but still filled with many of her favorite books—the ones she had left here when she moved.
Different from the ones she had at her apartment, not for work, but for life.
She remembered who she was, how old she had been, when she had read each one.
She ran her fingers along the spines. The Awakening.
The Diviners. The Handmaid’s Tale. She paused, then coaxed her copy of Wuthering Heights from the shelf.
Its spine had been broken open so many times, the lines in the paper nearly obscured the title.
It was a pocketbook edition, so compact she could hold it in her palm.
She flipped open the cover, revealing a name in pen on the inside.
Cort Adams
Her fingers traced the letters of his name. She turned the book toward her friend. “I discovered this a few years after graduating high school, that Cort and I must have accidentally swapped copies senior year,” she said.
“Back when you tutored him.”
Rebecca nodded, gazing down again at the name in the book.
She could almost see a teenage Cort, leaning back in the corner diner booth, teasing her for knowing so many passages from this book by rote.
The way he had always made her blush, made her heart race and her fingers tingle.
That feeling had never gone away over the years, even as they had left high school behind and managed to become friends.
It had always been one-sided, though. She knew that now.
Because for Rebecca, when Cort Adams was around, she felt seventeen again.
Pulse fluttering wildly at every one of his crooked grins, each of his effortlessly sweet, endearingly charming statements.
But he didn’t feel the same. He never had.
She turned to Sabrina. “Remember how we used to call it the Cort Adams Effect?”
Sabrina’s smile was tentative. She was worried, Rebecca could tell. “The guy is a sorcerer,” she agreed.
Rebecca closed the book and slid it back into its place on the shelf.
“I had my reasons for staying away, and a lot of them had to do with how hard it is being here after losing my grandmother. But I was also trying to get to a place where I would stop being so thrown off-kilter by the mere thought of him. Football star. Prom king. The guy who was never meant to be mine. But it didn’t work. Especially the last time I was here.”