Chapter 25
Noah
We had the conversation at Carol's diner.
Not because the diner was significant — though it had become significant, the booth by the window now carrying the specific weight of a place where something had been said before and could be said again.
We chose it because the apartment felt too small for a conversation this large and the bookshop felt like it belonged to the part of the day that was working and this needed to be separate from working.
Carol seated us without comment, which from Carol was itself a kind of comment. She brought coffee and left.
Ellie had her notebook with her. Not to write in, I understood — to have. The way some people hold their phone or their keys, something to anchor a hand that needed anchoring.
"Okay," she said. "After."
"After," I agreed.
"You go back to New York in nine days."
"Yes."
"What does New York look like?" she said. "Specifically. I want the real version, not the — not the polite version of an answer."
I thought about how to give her that.
"Dana wants the revised manuscript by August," I said.
"Which means the next two months are revision — heavy, daily, the kind of work that requires being near my editor for in-person sessions some weeks.
I have a launch for the current book in the fall — the one before this one, the one I sold before I came here — which means events, readings, the publicity cycle.
I have an apartment I haven't been in for thirty-two days that I assume has mail piled up to a concerning degree.
" I paused. "I have a life there. It's not nothing.
It's just — it's a particular kind of life.
Structured around the work in ways that don't leave a lot of room. "
"And the agency," she said. "The day-to-day of it."
"I'm not involved in day-to-day operations.
Marcus runs submissions, there's a managing partner who handles the business side.
My father built the structure to function without him needing to be in the office every day, which was — that was deliberate, actually.
He wanted the agency to be something that could continue regardless of any one person's daily presence.
" A pause. "I go in periodically. For specific things.
It's not where I spend most of my time."
She absorbed this.
"And Wren Falls," I said. "What does it look like? For you. After I'm gone."
She was quiet for a moment.
"The same as it's always looked," she said.
"The shop. Jo. Book club on Tuesdays. The revisions — Marcus's notes, which I'm going to start this week.
The new manuscript, which I'm going to keep writing.
" A pause. "My life is here. It's structured the way it's structured for reasons that are real — Jo needs me, the shop is what I'm good at, Wren Falls is where I've built something over nine years that I'm not interested in walking away from. "
"I'm not asking you to walk away from it," I said.
"I know. I'm establishing the facts before we talk about what happens with them."
Fair.
"Here's what I think," she said. "I think long distance is a real thing that real people do.
I'm not naive about that. I think it's also genuinely hard in ways that are easy to underestimate when you're still in the easy part.
" She looked at me directly. "We are still in the easy part, Noah.
Thirty-two days in a small town with no responsibilities pulling us in different directions is not the same as you in New York with a launch and revisions and me here with a shop and Jo and book club and the specific reality of missing someone across four hours of driving or a flight. "
"I know," I said.
"I need you to actually know it. Not just agree with the sentence."
I held her gaze.
"My parents," I said, "were together for six years before they got married.
My father traveled constantly — the agency had authors all over the country, this was before video calls were normal, before any of the infrastructure existed that makes this easier now than it would have been then.
My mother used to tell me that the hardest year of their relationship was the year before I was born, when he was in London for four months negotiating foreign rights deals and they spoke twice a week on a phone line that cost a fortune per minute.
" I paused. "She also told me it was the year she became sure.
Not despite the distance. Because of what the distance revealed about whether the thing between them could hold its shape when it wasn't being constantly reinforced by proximity. "
Ellie was listening.
"I'm not saying it's easy," I said. "I'm saying I know it's not easy and I'm telling you I want to try anyway. With clear eyes. Not the version of myself that's currently easy and charmed by a bookshop in spring."
"How," she said. "Practically. What does trying look like."
I had thought about this. For the last three days, since the standoff had broken, I had been thinking about almost nothing else in the spaces between revision works.
"I have flexibility that most people in long distance don't have," I said.
"I work from wherever I have a laptop. The revision work with Dana requires some in-person time but not constant in-person time — we can do most of it remotely with periodic trips.
I could be here — Wren Falls, this apartment if Jo's willing to keep renting it to me, or somewhere nearby — more weeks than not.
New York for the parts that genuinely require New York. "
"You'd commute."
"I'd structure my life around where the people I care about are," I said, "instead of the other way around. Which is a thing I have the actual ability to do and have simply never done because I never had a reason that mattered enough."
She looked at me for a long moment.
"And the agency events," she said. "The launch. The life you described."
"Those are weeks, not the whole structure.
I can be in New York for what requires New York and here for what doesn't and the math actually works if I'm honest about it.
" A pause. "I did the math. Actually. Three nights ago.
I sat at the desk and worked out the calendar for the next six months — the launch dates, the revision deadlines, the things that need me physically present somewhere specific.
It's maybe eight weeks total out of the next six months that require New York specifically. The rest is flexible."
"You did the math," she said. Slowly.
"I did the math."
She was quiet.
"That's not the behavior of someone who's not serious," she said.
"No," I said. "It isn't."
"What about the manuscript," I said. "Yours. The revisions. How does that change things — practically, for you?"
"Marcus wants a call this week to go through his notes in detail. Then I start revising. He said six weeks is reasonable if I'm disciplined about it, which—" a small, real smile, "—I generally am."
"And after the revisions."
"He submits it to editors. We wait. That part is entirely out of my control and I'm trying to make peace with that part separately from everything else."
"And the new manuscript. The one you're writing now."
"Keep writing it," she said. "Marcus said that explicitly — don't stop the new work for the old work. Both at the same time."
I thought about something.
"Can I ask," I said, "what it's about. The new one. Not specifics — just, broadly."
She considered this.
"Two people," she said. "Who are careful for very different reasons?
Who end up in the same place not by design and have to figure out whether what's happening between them is real or just — proximity.
Convenience. The thing that happens when two careful people are forced to be less careful by circumstance.
" A pause. "I started it before I knew it was about anything specific. Now I know what it's about."
"Does it have an ending yet?"
"No," she said. "I told you. I don't write toward endings I already know. I discover them."
"Do you have a guess?"
She looked at me for a long moment.
"I have a hope," she said. "Which is different from a guess."
I held that.
"What's the hope," I said.
"That it's not a tragedy," she said quietly.
"That the two careful people figure out how to be less careful in a way that actually holds.
That the ending isn't one of them deciding the distance was too much or the timing was wrong or any of the easy reasons that make a good story but don't actually—" She stopped. "That's the hope."
"That's a good hope," I said.
"It's just a hope. The actual ending depends on what actually happens. I don't get to write the real version. I only get to write the fictional one, and the fictional one has to follow whatever the real one does, eventually, whether I like it or not."
Carol came by with the check, sensed something in the air, and left it without a word.
I looked at Ellie across the table.
"I want to ask you something directly," I said. "Not hypothetically. Not as part of a discussion about logistics."
"Okay."
"Do you want to try this," I said. "The actual question. Not the logistics around it — the actual thing underneath the logistics. Do you want this to continue past nine days?"
She was quiet.
The diner around us. Tuesday evening, mostly empty, Carol behind the counter giving us the specific privacy of someone who understood when not to be present.
"Yes," Ellie said.
Simply.
"I'm angry still," she said. "About the not telling.
I want to be honest that hasn't fully resolved and I don't think it should resolve in nine days.
But underneath the anger — yes. I want this to continue.
I have wanted that since before I knew about the agency, before any of the complication.
I wanted it on the floor of the bookshop during the power cut and I have wanted it every day since even on the days I was angriest." She held my gaze.
"Yes is the answer. I just needed you to actually ask the question instead of building toward it through logistics. "
"Yes," I said.
"You too?"
"I did the math three nights ago," I said. "For six months. Because the answer was already yes and I was working out how to make the yes practical."
Something in her face moved — slow, full, the thing I had been learning the name of for thirty-two days.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay."
"Nine days," she said.
"Nine days. And then we figure out the rest of it. For real. Not in theory."
"For real," she agreed.
She reached across the table and took my hand — the same gesture from Main Street, three weeks ago now, unannounced and certain.
I held it.
Outside the diner window Wren Falls was settling into evening, the streetlights coming on in their amber sequence, Earl's rocking chair occupied now, the dog and its owner somewhere on their evening route.
Nine days.
Then revision and distance and a manuscript finding its way to editors and a new one finding its ending and six months of math that I had worked out at the desk because the answer had already been yes.
"Carol," Ellie called, without turning, "can we get pie?"
"Already cutting it," Carol called back, from somewhere near the kitchen.
Ellie looked at me.
"Apple," she said. "Both of us. Celebratory."
"What are we celebrating?"
"Today," she said simply. "Today we figured out the actual conversation instead of circling it."
I thought that was, in fact, worth celebrating.
We ate the pie.
Held hands on Main Street walking back.
Nine days became eight became the kind of countdown that exists in every long story before the part where everything either holds or doesn't.
I believed, walking back to the bookshop with her hand in mine that it was going to hold.
I had been wrong about things before.
I did not think I was wrong about this.