CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Four days after Christmas
The morning of my flight home, the paperwhites are in bloom.
I know it before I even open my eyes. Their fragrance floats up the stairs, so potent I can almost imagine a visible wisp of scent, like in a cartoon.
When I finally get out of bed and go downstairs, I take each step slowly, savoring the musical creak of each one.
The tiny easel on the side table sits empty, and the chalkboard still lies face-down where I put it earlier in the month.
I stand it back up. What would I do with my time if I still had this many days left?
I did build a little life here, even though it was brief. Even though it’s ending. We live so many different lives within a single lifetime, don’t we?
In the watery morning light, the clustered blooms of the paperwhites seem to glow ghostly white.
In a glass vessel, in just an inch of pebbles and water, they bloom months before they’re meant to.
Nourished by cold light through a windowpane instead of the drenching shine of a springtime sun.
And they’re still beautifully, perfectly complete.
They’re still paperwhites. And when all that’s left are the bulbs sleeping beneath the soil—they’ll still be paperwhites.
That’s their true beauty. Their resilience, their potential. They remain exactly what they are, regardless of where they’re planted, and even when the timing is wrong. And they’ll bloom again.
The last thing I do before I leave for the airport is top off the water in the vase. It makes me feel like I’m leaving a home behind, and in a very real way, I guess I am.
* * *
I’m sitting in the terminal when my phone rings, and I’m convinced its Jake.
But it’s not. Of course it isn’t. Jake Frost—walking green flag, boundary-respecting consent king—does as he’s asked. And I’d asked him to let me go.
It’s Maddie. “Ready to come home?” she says as soon as I answer.
“Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”
“Claudia has been sleeping in your room. I think she misses you.”
“Well, I guess even cats don’t know what they’ve got ’til it’s gone.” My voice cracks on gone, and I have to swallow hard past the lump in my throat.
“Oh, Evie.” Maddie hesitates. “What happened?”
“Never made it to the mess phase. Took a calculated risk. I’d forgotten how shitty I was at math.”
“You fell in love with him, didn’t you.” It’s not a question.
I can’t answer. There are too many people around, and if I try to talk about it more right now, I’ll unravel completely.
“Oh, honey.” Maddie does the thing where she puts her face so close to the camera that she turns into a blurry, peachy blob. It’s her instinctive way of trying to get closer to me from 3,000 miles across the ocean. “Come home. We’ll figure it out.”
* * *
I see Maddie before she sees me in the arrival hall. She holds a handmade sign that reads “WELCOME BACK TO THE PAST, EVIE,” riffing on my stupid joke about London being five hours ahead of New York. In her other hand is a sack from my favorite bagel joint in Queens.
When she finally spots me, she bounces in place, and I can’t suppress my tired smile. She drops the sign and crashes into me, wrapping both her arms around my head in a suffocating hug.
And I’m home.
* * *
Maddie gives me a bit of time alone after we get to our apartment.
It’s dark in my room, and I’m cycling through the stages of grief like a roulette wheel.
When I finally unzip my bag, most of my clothes smell like Paperwhite.
Some of them smell like Jake, but at this point I’m too numb and too tired to cry.
I leave the luggage open on the floor. I can’t deal with it right now.
I guess I’m a masochist, because I pull out my laptop and search for Jameson Kiernan Frost, Jr., desperate to see his face in something other than the grainy Polaroid Quinn took.
One of the first results is a press conference photo from a story The Juniper did about Frost, Acton, and Isaacs.
That tiny flicker of recognition I had one of the first times I saw Jake was because of this photo.
When I’d been preparing to apply for a staff-writer position at The Juniper, I’d devoured as much of their content as I could get my eyes on.
Even then, Jake stood out to me in the photo.
So achingly beautiful, so young. And so deeply, unmistakably miserable.
Based on what I know now, this article and this photo would have happened around the time Jake started trying to separate himself from his father’s firm. I touch a fingertip next to his face on the screen.
I think I made a mistake.
I was so intent on finding a reason to distrust, a reason to leave, that I clung to the first difficult thing that happened between us.
Right after I’d resolved to stop treating love like a test that could be failed, we were tested, and I struck through what we had with metaphorical red ink.
But ultimately, would it have even mattered?
We were a perforation on a journal page. Designed to eventually come apart.
Maddie knocks on my door, peeking around the edge. “You OK?”
I answer with a deadpan “Never better.”
Maddie sits next to me on the bed, and I set my laptop aside. “What are you doing here, honey?”
“Um. Do you not remember picking me up at the airport earlier today?”
“That’s not what I mean. You fell in love with a beautiful man in beautiful London. And now you’re here in Queens.”
I lean back and cross my legs under me. “I’m sorry, what was it you said to me at the beginning of the trip? Have all the sex, then fly home?”
Maddie gives me a long look. “This is what you do, Evie. You walk away from things when they get tough.”
Tough is when your favorite taco joint goes out of business, or your favorite book series gets canceled before the author has a chance to finish. Or your new vibrator meets its maker three days after arriving in the mail. Tough implies that it’s hard, but doable. Survivable.
Walking away from Jake Frost wasn’t tough. And neither was deciding to stay. They were both impossible. I just had to choose the slightly less-impossible impossible.
“You’re kind of a bitch,” I say.
“I love you, too. But listen. If you had a choice between living here and living a charmed life where you’re beloved and bounced against a mattress by Jake Frost every night, I would hope you would choose the latter.”
“Are you trying to get rid of me? You can just say you don’t want to live with me anymore.”
“Well … There are these things called planes—”
Jake said something similar once. That’s what breaks me. It feels like my lungs have ballooned into my throat, closing my airway. Tears soak the collar of my shirt. Maddie gathers me into her arms on the bed, and I spend hours unloading to her about London. About Christmas. About Jake.
After I’ve gone quiet for a while, she says, “I need to tell you something. And I want you to know, it’s OK for you to be pissed off.”
I push upright and tuck my hair back out of my eyes. “Oh no, Mads. What did you do?”
She pulls at a thread on the sleeve of her hoodie, takes a deep breath. “I never intended to go to London, Ev. I always planned for it to just be you.”
I’m not sure what to do with this information. I’m self-aware enough to know that I’d have reacted much differently a month ago, though. Harnessing calm, I exhale a long breath through my nose. Waiting.
“I never even had a plane ticket for myself,” she adds.
“I bought two ghost tour tickets as a diversion.” Maddie has been my best friend for a decade now, and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen her cry.
Now, her chin trembles as she looks up at me, and tiny lights from the buildings across the street from our flat—our apartment—glisten in the tears in her eyes.
“I’m so sorry. If I’d had any idea you’d meet someone like Jake, and fall in love, and be so torn up—”
I throw my arms around her. She hugs me back, and we cry into each other’s hair.
“I love you, Ev.”
“I love you too, Mads. It’s OK.”
* * *
New Year’s Eve
When I wake up on December 31st, it’s dark, and I’m disoriented.
I hear early-morning bustle outside a nearby window.
But the sounds are all wrong. Instead of the sound of clattering crates or the rhythmic beep of a reversing van, it’s the hiss of my local bus’s brakes and the hydraulic lift of the seafood truck that supplies the Thai restaurant across the street.
I hear the gentle hum of my white-noise machine, and smell the homey scent of burnt dust in my radiator, and a trace of Maddie’s perfume drifting into my room from the hall.
Claudia is asleep at my feet, softly snoring.
Then I remember. I’m in Queens. London is more than 3,000 miles away.
Just as I’m about to crawl to the kitchen for coffee, my phone rings. It’s a UK number, but not Jake’s. When I answer, there are four faces crowded into the screen. It’s Genny, Cait, Maeve, and Indi. They’re at Marleigh.
“Hiiii,” Cait says.
My heart climbs into my throat. “Morning,” I croak.
“It’s still bloody dark there, Gen,” Indi scolds. “I told you we’d wake her up.”
Genny and Indi shove each other like they’re teenagers instead of grown women.
“We heard you’d gone home,” says Maeve.
Quietly, I ask, “Is he there?” My insides feel like they’ve fallen through the mattress.
“He’s not, love,” Genny says. “He said he couldn’t make it back here for New Year’s.”
We chat a bit longer, but after a while, I’ve yawned so many times, they shoo me back to bed. As I fall back to sleep, I swear I can feel gentle fingertips against my back, and warm breath in my hair.
* * *