Chapter 14
Ellie
I woke up thinking about four words.
Not the almost. Not his hand on the side of my face — which had happened, which was a fact, which I was not processing yet in any direct way because direct processing required a kind of stillness I did not currently have access to.
Four words.
This counts. Whatever word.
I lay in bed for eleven minutes — I know because I watched the clock, which I do not generally do, I am not a clock-watcher, I find it counterproductive — and I thought about those four words and what they meant and whether thinking about what they meant was the same as deciding something, and whether deciding something was wise given the timeline, and whether wisdom was even the relevant framework here or whether I was using wisdom as a synonym for protection the way Jo had suggested I did.
Jo.
Jo had walked in.
Jo had absolutely seen.
Jo had put candles on the counter with the serenity of a woman who has learned that the most gracious thing you can do when you arrive somewhere at the wrong moment is pretend, convincingly, that the moment is entirely ordinary.
Jo was going to say something today.
I got up. Made coffee — my method, standard settings, which were now permanently insufficient — and stood at my kitchen window and looked at the morning and had a very firm, very clear conversation with myself.
The conversation went as follows.
He is leaving in two weeks and four days.
I know.
Two weeks and four days is not a long time.
I know.
You have spent three years carefully not letting anything matter too much and you are quite good at it and this is not the moment to stop being good at it.
I know.
So.
So.
A pause.
His hand was very steady, I thought. When he raised it. It was not tentative. It was a question but it was a confident question, which is a specific kind of question that is harder to dismiss than the tentative kind.
I finished my coffee.
Got my coat.
Went to work.
Jo was already there.
Of course she was.
She was behind the counter with her own coffee and the serene expression of a woman who had decided exactly how she was going to handle this conversation and was simply waiting for the right moment to begin it.
I hung up my coat. Went to the coffee maker. Set it to 4 and then 7.
I felt Jo watching me change the settings.
"New method?" she said.
"It's better this way."
"Who told you?"
I said nothing.
"Ellie."
"Jo, please."
"I'm simply asking about the coffee maker settings."
"You are absolutely not simply asking about the coffee maker settings."
She smiled into her mug. The smile of a woman who has made her point without making her point, which was one of Jo's most refined skills and one of the things I found simultaneously admirable and deeply irritating about her.
"Last night," she said.
"Nothing happened last night."
"I know. I was there for the nothing happening."
I turned to face her. "Jo."
"Ellie." She set her mug down. Not the playful version of her voice now — the real one, the one she used when she was actually saying something. "I saw you. Both of you. And I'm not going to pretend I didn't."
"It was—"
"It was something," she said simply. "I don't know what. You don't know what. That seems to be where you both are." A pause. "And I'm not going to tell you what to do about it. You're a grown adult and so is he and this is not my business."
"Thank you."
"I'm just going to say one thing."
"Jo—"
"One thing."
I waited.
"You've been protecting yourself for three years," she said.
"Since the manuscript. Since you put it away.
You stepped back from everything that felt like it might — take something from you.
Writing. People. Anything that required you to be actually present rather than just useful.
" She looked at me steadily. "Noah Calloway has been here for less than a month and you have been more present than I have seen you in three years.
I notice these things. It's my job to notice these things and also I love you so I notice them for that reason too. "
I looked at the window.
The morning was gray and still. A bird on the footpath. A car turning at the far end of Main Street.
"He's leaving," I said.
"Yes."
"Two weeks."
"Yes."
"That's not — Jo, that's not enough time to—"
"Enough time for what?"
I stopped.
Because the end of that sentence was the problem. Enough time for what, exactly. To feel something that mattered. To let something be real. To write it into a story that had an ending I recognized.
"I don't know," I said.
"That," Jo said gently, "might be the most honest thing you've said about it."
He came down at six.
Not his usual time — his usual time was between two and four, depending on how the work was going, the better the session the later he appeared, which I had learned to read as an indirect indicator of his word count without ever asking. Six was early. Six was unusual.
I was shelving. Fiction section, alphabetical, the eternal maintenance of a system that customers cheerfully dismantled every single day. I heard the back stairs — second step, fourth step, the creak of the third — and then he was in the doorway.
I kept shelving.
"Ellie."
"I know you're there," I said.
"I know you know."
I placed a book — Fitzgerald, correct position, home — and turned around.
He looked the way he looked when he had been working well and had stopped not because he wanted to but because something else required attention. Slightly distracted. Present but from a distance.
He also looked like a man who had decided to say something and had committed to saying it.
I recognized that look. I had worn it myself recently.
"About last night," he said.
"Nothing happened last night."
"Something almost happened."
"Almost is—"
"Ellie." Steady. Not pushy. Just — steady. "I'm not going to pretend it didn't almost happen. I don't think you are either. I just wanted to say—" He stopped. Tried again. "I don't want you to spend today deciding it was a mistake before it was even a thing."
I looked at him.
"Was it a mistake?" I said.
"I don't know. I know it wasn't nothing."
"You're leaving in two weeks."
"I know."
"Two weeks is—"
"I know what two weeks is." He said it quietly. Without defensiveness. "I'm not asking you to ignore the timeline. I'm asking you not to use it as the reason before you've — before you actually know what the reason is."
There it was again. The same thing Jo had said, differently worded.
You're deciding something is relevant or not before you've let yourself feel it.
I put the book I was holding back on the cart. Turned to face him fully.
"I have three notes in my pocket," I said.
He went still.
"I've had them there since Friday," I said.
"I re-folded the coffee maker one because the first fold was uneven.
I noticed that I had re-folded it and I didn't stop.
" I looked at him directly. "That's not nothing.
That's me already — that's already something.
And I don't know what to do with that given the timeline. "
He was very quiet.
Outside a truck went past — heavy, the building doing its slight shudder the way it always did with heavy vehicles.
"Can I say something?" he said.
"Yes."
"I've written nine hundred words this morning," he said.
"In three hours. Before Wren Falls I was writing four pages a month.
Here I am writing thousands of words a week and I know — I know exactly where it's coming from and it's terrifying and it's the best thing that's happened to my work in fourteen months.
" A pause. "I'm telling you that so you understand that when I say this is not nothing, I'm not saying it lightly. "
My chest did something inconvenient.
"Noah—"
"I'm also not asking you for anything," he said. "I want to be clear about that. I'm not asking you to decide something or feel something or — I'm just asking you to let whatever this is exist. Without immediately putting it in the Misc folder."
I stared at him.
"The what?" I said.
Something crossed his face — a flicker, quick, almost too fast to catch.
"Sorry," he said. "Poor word choice."
"No." I stepped forward slightly. "That is — that's a very specific thing to say. The Misc folder."
He said nothing.
"That's what I called it," I said. "The folder. Where I put the manuscript. I don't think I've ever said that out loud to anyone." I looked at him carefully. "Have I said that to you? At some point?"
A pause that was slightly too long.
"I don't think so," he said.
"Then how did you—"
"Lucky phrasing," he said. "I'm a writer. Occasionally I say the right thing accidentally."
I looked at him for a long moment.
There was something — some edge of something, a corner of a thing I couldn't quite see — and then he held my gaze steadily and it slipped back, whatever it was, below the surface.
"Okay," I said slowly.
"Okay?"
I took a breath.
"Okay," I said again. "I won't — I won't put it in the Misc folder.
Whatever this is." I felt strange saying it.
Strange in the specific way of saying something true that you have not previously allowed yourself to say.
"But I need you to understand that I don't — I'm not built for things that have endings I can see from the beginning. I know that about myself."
"I know," he said. "I know that about you."
"You've known me for less than a month."
"I know," he said again. Quietly. "I know that too."
We stood in the Fiction section in the early evening light — the shelves around us, the books that had been here longer than either of us and would be here after — and the thing between us that had no word yet sat in the room with us the way it had since the previous night.
Not smaller. Not larger. Just — present.
"The book club book for next month," I said finally. "The one you suggested."
"Yes."
"I ordered it."
Something shifted in his expression. Small. Warm.
"Good," he said.
"It was a good suggestion."
"You already knew about that author."
"I did. Doesn't mean the suggestion wasn't good." I turned back to the shelving cart. "Coffee maker is at 4 and 7 now permanently."
"I noticed."
"Don't be pleased about it."
"I'm not pleased."
"You sound pleased."
"I sound like someone who was right about the settings."
"Upstairs, Noah."
"Going." He moved toward the back stairs. Paused at the doorframe. "Ellie."
"Yes."
"Tonight — if it comes. Don't stop."
"You say that every time."
"Because you stop every time right before it gets to the real thing."
I kept my eyes on the shelving cart.
"I didn't stop last night," I said quietly.
A pause.
"No," he said. "You didn't."
He went upstairs.
Third step. Creak.
I stood in the Fiction section for a moment with a copy of Fitzgerald in my hand and the evening going golden through the front window — that twenty minutes, the light doing what it always did, and me standing in it.
I did not put anything in the Misc folder.
Instead I went to the back of the shop, to the storeroom where Jo kept supplies, and found a small cardboard box. Brought it to the counter.
Opened my pocket.
Put all three notes in the box. Carefully. The re-folded one on top.
Closed the lid.
Put the box under the counter.
Not hidden. Not filed away. Just — kept.
For now, kept.
That night I wrote for four hours straight and did not stop when it got to the real thing.
Two people in a room. A power cut. A hand raised slowly in the dark.
And the specific, terrifying, unavoidable fact that some sentences — when you finally figure out what they mean — cannot be unfinished.