Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The ghost hunting—and subsequent ghost-hunting huddle—lasts until nine that night. Henry eventually shoos them out of his apartment with promises of following up with his agent.
“Coming home?” Gretchen asks Frannie as they stand outside Henry’s door, Gretchen and Brad shouldering their bags.
“I’ve got a little to catch up on here. You guys go ahead,” Frannie says with a casual shrug.
She has a bunch of things she wants some privacy to figure out. And she hasn’t missed the significant glances Brad and Gretchen have been throwing each other all night.
“Okay. But you’ll watch the first cut with us over the weekend,” Brad says firmly.
“And you’ll come home at a semi-reasonable time tonight,” Gretchen adds.
“Yes, Mom. Now, get out of here … without being haunted,” Frannie says.
They beam at her and head down the hall hand in hand. Frannie waits. There’s a shriek and a bang before they get to the opposite staircase. She hopes Michael and Bridgette follow them all the way out. That way, she’ll get a little time before they come looking for her to do their own debrief.
She hustles up to Henry’s storage unit and finds both the biography and another book on the construction of New York’s mega apartments. She brings them back to her office, bundles into her parka, boots up her personal laptop, and plugs in her electric gloves.
It’s freezing. For all its frustrations, she’s gotten used to co-working with Henry. It’s a little odd to be in the office at all now. The Christmas tree is still set up in the corner, the twinkle lights dark but still hanging. She reaches out and turns them on. The glow helps.
She opens the biography, burying her nose into research, but it proves frustratingly fruitless. Will she have to go to City Hall to get the plans? Why don’t any of these books have the original schematics?
Frannie rubs at her temples and closes her eyes. She doesn’t even really know what she’s looking for. She’s just hoping to strike gold with a perfect, easy, obvious way to send Michel and Bridgette and Elsa across the street.
Not that she knows exactly where she’ll be moving. There’s so much she can’t control. What if the only available apartments on Seventy-Third Street aren’t on the old grid?
“What are you doing in here?”
Frannie keeps her eyes closed for a moment. If she doesn’t look over, she doesn’t have to face this tonight. Doesn’t have to try and articulate all the feelings swirling in her head. Doesn’t have to deal with the reality that—
“You should be home celebrating.”
Frannie sighs and turns to look at Elsa where she’s leaning her hip against the corner of Frannie’s desk. “Not really in the mood for Gretchen and Brad to play footsie around me,” Frannie says.
Elsa snorts. “It is impressive eye sex; I’ll give you that.”
Frannie would laugh if Elsa simply standing there didn’t make her breath catch. The light haze around her face is only accentuated by the twinkle lights behind her. “Yeah.”
“Still, you must have someone else you could go out with. Somewhere else to go,” Elsa insists.
“Maybe I like it here,” Frannie snips.
Elsa’s shoulders sag. “I wasn’t trying to chase you away.”
“No?” The hurt rises quickly, eclipsing her lingering resentment. “Just trying to make sure I didn’t choose to stay?”
“Making sure you didn’t tie yourself to a life as Henry’s underling without at least trying for something better,” Elsa corrects her.
Frannie clenches her jaw as she watches Elsa look down at her desk, her eyes tracking the book titles.
“Seems you’re making other plans anyway,” Elsa remarks.
“Someone has to,” Frannie says, closing the unhelpful biography with a light smack. “And Maribel thinks the publishers will want a happy ending.”
“I like the ending.”
“So you’ve said.” Frannie grunts, trying to lift the big coffee table book without standing up.
Elsa huffs and grabs the other side, helping Frannie heft it over her laptop.
“Do you really think I’ve never thought about it?
” she asks. Frannie reluctantly looks up to meet her eyes.
“That I didn’t spend every minute looking for a way out when I realized Michael and Bridgette were trapped here too?
That I didn’t try to build us something more than this? ”
Frannie sits back in her chair, tugging the coffee table book with her so it leans heavily against her chest, almost like armor.
“We looked for those power lines for years,” Elsa continues. “I thought, if we found them, maybe we’d be able to leave. Maybe we’d be able to go anywhere. It wouldn’t be a life, but it would be more than being stuck here, and that was worth the risk. But we never found them.”
“I’m sure they’re here,” Frannie says, knee-jerk and desperate.
Elsa hops up to sit on the corner of Frannie’s desk, her heels knocking into the desk leg with a very real thump. “You’ve been spending too much time with Michael.”
“He—”
“Is a boy.” Frannie goes to argue, and Elsa holds up her hand.
“Bridgette and I gave up after a couple years. I couldn’t take seeing them disappointed, and Bridgette wanted to have fun, to find things to do that actually fill the day.
But Michael—every time a new book about the Dakota shows up, he’s off researching.
I take his schematics, he finds them again.
I take the books, he finds a Kindle. There’s been no stopping him. ”
“He’s determined,” Frannie argues.
“He’s obsessed. And now he has a research buddy, and it’s giving him more hope than I think is healthy.”
“What if we could find them?” Frannie presses, unwilling to give in, unwilling to let go of that last thread of hope. Elsa made sure she can’t stay, so she has to make sure—“I can go to City Hall. I can be eyes on the outside.”
“And then what? We get across the street and we’re stuck in some brownstone?”
“Stuck in my brownstone,” Frannie says. It comes out high and a little tight; Elsa’s staring at her.
“If I make the money it sounds like I’m going to make on the book, then Gretchen and I are going to get an apartment, and I’ll make sure it’s one on the grid.
Gretchen will be working on her show most of the time, and even if she’s not, I think she’ll be cool with ghost roommates. Brad would love it.”
Elsa doesn’t move, doesn’t open her mouth.
She’s just sitting there, wide-eyed, so Frannie plows on, “We figure out what power lines the buildings share, make sure we can send a strong current, and then we get you guys down to the basement, flip the breaker, and you zip across. Then you’ll be there.
We’ll be there. It’ll be a whole new life to live. ”
“To haunt.”
Frannie’s stomach bottoms out.
“It would be a smaller place to haunt,” Elsa says, her voice soft, and gentle.
“So, I can’t stay here, and you won’t go with me,” Frannie deduces. Pain replaces her desperation. “Even though I could build a home for us. The kids could have their own room; I could get you anything you wanted or needed.”
“We don’t even know if—”
“There’d be a whole new set of tenants to spy on,” Frannie says over her. “You could have the whole roof to yourselves. It would be a place for you—for us.”
Elsa breaks her gaze and looks down at the biography next to Frannie’s laptop. She reaches out and traces her fingers down its spine. “It sounds like a fairy tale.”
“People get happily ever afters all the time. Why not us?” Frannie asks, trying to sound sure and steady. “You’d get your wish. I wouldn’t be working for Henry anymore, but it wouldn’t mean I have to abandon you and leave you all trapped here. It’s a win-win.”
Elsa slowly drags her eyes up to meet Frannie’s. “I’m not choosing to be trapped here. There isn’t an alternative. That’s the difference.” She looks so calm and collected about it.
“You’re just choosing not to try,” Frannie says, leaning back in her chair, hurt eclipsing everything else. “And I can’t force you into it by sending something to Henry, so you actually have the choice. I guess one of us should.”
Elsa purses her lips and hops off the desk. “You staying here as Henry’s assistant wasn’t a valid option.”
“That wasn’t your decision to make!” Frannie exclaims, staring up at her, her chest tight and eyes stinging. “You didn’t even ask. At least I’m asking.”
Elsa meets her eyes and Frannie’s surprised to see a tear make its way down her cheek. She takes a deep breath. “And I’m saying no.”
And then she’s gone.
The office is quiet, the lights steady. Frannie can’t hear anything but the soft whir of her work laptop.
Her breath hitches; her chest clenches. That’s that, then. She fell in love with a ghost and her two children, and now she has to lose them. But unlike in her book, it’s all happening before they even try for a happy ending.
Is it even a tragedy if you don’t see it through to the end?
Frannie thumps the coffee table book onto the corner of the desk where Elsa sat, staring at its cover. She’s supposed to walk out and leave her friends behind without a backward glance. Leave the woman she’s in love with behind. For her career.
Elsa thinks she can’t give her enough, so Frannie’s just supposed to accept that and walk away, like Joan, without putting up a fight. Like it’s a foregone conclusion.
Frannie glares at the picture of the Dakota on the book’s cover, resolve hardening in her chest.
She wrote a book that’s got all the publishing houses clamoring.
She impressed Henry.
She fell in love again when she thought she never would. And so did Elsa.
Surely, surely, she can do this too.