After
AFTER
In the weeks after I get home, Kate does her best to nurture me through the Grayson incident, like she did right after Michael died. She brings over kettle corn and marathons Lucifer on Netflix with me. She alternates with my mother to leave dinner on my doorstep every week, which is incredibly thoughtful, but really, I don’t need caring for this time. Each passing day only solidifies my conviction that what happened with Grayson at the cabin changed me. Or maybe it helped me to change myself.
Maybe those aren’t actually two different things.
I light the lantern nightly. It illuminates a place inside me that does more than admit he was right. It believes him, for my own sake.
I am strong. Which means someday, I’ll think about him and Michael without dissolving into pain and doubt.
Someday, I’ll open that damn office door.
I take up hiking again.
I pull all my gear out of the storage closet and acquaint myself with the trails that crisscross the mountains around Seagrove. Out in the woods, summer makes a slow surrender to autumn. I soak up September’s sunshine and watch the squirrels stash acorns for winter.
I revel in the beauty of the woods, and even though it’s not the cabin, forest bathing proves almost as restorative as it did when I was fifteen.
One evening at the end of September, just moments after I send off a medical article, the old, haunting question returns.
At what moment did I cease to be a wife?
It floats up from my subconsciousness, almost tentative at first. Yet I reach out and grab hold. Examine it from every angle.
And promptly decide that shouldn’t be the question at all, because I never belonged to Michael the way I did to Grayson. Of course I didn’t receive some cosmic broadcast from the universe at the moment of his death. I’m no longer sure that what I was doing right then even matters.
No, when I sift back through the years, the event around which my life pivoted didn’t pass unnoticed, after all. I spent it in front of the windows of Michael’s condo, frantically calling what I thought was his phone, so choked with fear that I couldn’t have swallowed a grain of rice if I’d tried.
Because I knew. Somehow, some way, I felt Grayson leave my life.
I sit back in my desk chair, the knowledge hollowing out my stomach. Everything changed for me not in the bathtub, but in front of a rain-streaked windowpane in Seattle, and I spent the next fourteen years besieged by a longing I had no way to understand.
Which means maybe I never really ceased to be a wife.
Maybe I never truly was one in the first place. At least, not the way I thought.
At the beginning of October, my Travelique article goes to print, then goes viral. Two weeks later, Siobhan Monroe calls to ask if I can come up to Seattle to discuss the “future direction” of my career. She barely finishes asking before a yes bursts from my lips.
When the day arrives the following week, I make the long drive to Seattle and parallel park outside the Travelique headquarters. I can’t help but notice that Grayson and I once lived a mere five blocks from here.
Michael and I did, too, of course. For far longer. But it’s that month with Grayson that carves out space in my thoughts, and to my surprise, I let it.
Inside, I punch the elevator button for the sixteenth floor and emerge into a sleek office space done in hues of greige that showcase the stunning photography and article reprints decorating the walls.
Front and center, behind the receptionist, hangs the photo Grayson took in Millbrook. The same one that stopped my heart that night in his hotel room. The same one that went to print with the article I wrote, which garnered more views in its first week than any other story in the site’s history.
“Mina Drake?” says the boy behind the desk. He’s barely twenty, with dyed rainbow hair that makes me want to ask for his stylist’s card.
“Yep,” I say. “I’m here for my one-o’clock with Siobhan.”
“Absolutely. Right this way.”
He presses a bottle of water into my hand and leads me to a corner office. A slender Black woman in a gray-and-white geometric sheath dress rises to extend her hand over the desk.
“It’s so nice to meet you in person, Mina.” She waves me into a seat and settles back, her fingers tented.
I mirror her smile, then fight the urge to smooth my hair and pull at my white ruched dress shirt. Siobhan is stunning, with lush lips and the kind of bone structure people write poetry about. Her hair is cropped short, barely there at all, but somehow that only makes her beauty more obvious.
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” I say. “Thanks for inviting me. This place is amazing.”
For long moments, she sizes me up, her overt interest clearly more than just professional curiosity. I find myself wondering if she and Grayson ever...
Ugh. I twist off the bottle cap and swig some water. Jealousy is not a good look. On anyone.
“As you know, your story knocked it out of the park,” she says, her assessment apparently complete. “I’ll admit, I thought we were taking a chance on it, and I might not have agreed if your...colleague hadn’t offered to collaborate, but what you wrote seems to have hit all the right notes. We’ve had a flood of responses, and from what our readers have said, they’re hungry for a different kind of travel journalism. Not just where to go and what to do, but why . Why do we wander? What are we looking for out there? Is it more about something we’re looking for in ourselves?”
My pasted-on smile stabilizes into something more genuine. She gets it. She read my writing and she gets it.
“I think,” she continues, “you’d be exactly the right person to explore those questions.”
My breath catches. Is she saying...? “Well, I’d love to try. I’ve got plenty more where that first piece came from.”
“I’m glad.” Her eyes sparkle. “Because we’re offering you an ongoing position. But we’d like you to venture further afield, this time. We’d start by sending you to Greece, if you’d be open to it. Next month.”
Everything stops. Behind her, seagulls wheel between the skyscrapers, but I swear they’re flying in slow motion. “Greece?”
She measures my reaction with dark-eyed curiosity. “Yes. And I’ll be honest—that’s not an arbitrary choice. Grayson said it’d be the place most likely to get you to say yes.”
My throat works. Time seems to trickle backward. Warm, turquoise waves rearrange the sand beneath my feet while somewhere far away, a circle closes. I almost feel like I’m twenty-two again, staring the world in the face. Only this time...
“I’ll get on that plane tomorrow, if you want me to,” I say. “And thank you. This is... Well, in all honesty, it’s something I’ve dreamed about since I was a little girl.”
Siobhan’s eyes crinkle at the corners. “Grayson said you’d say that. He also said the photo collaboration would have to be a one-time thing, because you wouldn’t want to work with him going forward. Forgive my curiosity, but between that and the shared last name, I have to ask. Are you and he—”
“No,” I blurt, then reconsider. “And yes. Whatever you’re about to ask, the answer’s both no and yes.”
She taps her fingernails against the desk. “I see.” Oddly enough, I get the sense that she actually does.
I shift in the chair, emboldened by my victory. “If you’ll forgive my curiosity, are you asking because this has...personal meaning for you?”
She laughs, silver and musical. “I have a bit of a soft spot for him, that’s all. I’ve always taken a shine to people with his kind of candor. Truth be told, I have tried to play matchmaker for him a few times, but I think I see now why it’s never worked.” With a smile, she moves on, asking if I have questions about the job.
I do, of course. Dozens. By the time I leave her office, we’re chuckling together like two old friends, and when I get back to the car, all I can do is grin like an idiot.
There is one downside, of course. Telling my parents. My mother, specifically.
But since August—and the anniversary of my brother’s death—has safely given way to October, I at least have the confidence to invite her over instead of letting her leave yet another casserole on the doorstep. She hasn’t seen my house yet, anyway, and I want to show her the transformation.
She arrives on a rainy Sunday afternoon as I’m putting the finishing touches on a late lunch. I greet her in the entryway as she shakes out her umbrella. “Hi, sweetie.”
“Hey, Mom. Here, let me take your coat.”
She frowns as I stash her jacket in the front closet. “You look...different. Are you okay?”
“Of course. You know I’m always...” I stop. Back up. “Actually, you know what? Things are kind of complicated right now. The truth is a lot has happened. Stuff you don’t know about. And I’m still trying to figure out what it all means for me.”
She leans her umbrella against the wall. Rainwater trickles onto the tile, but I don’t care about the ensuing puddle. Michael would have, but I don’t.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she says.
I give her a warm smile. “Actually, you know what? Yeah. I do.”
I tell her everything. All the yearning I’ve stoppered up since childhood finally comes spilling free like a river bursting through a dam.
I start with my childhood dreams of other countries, how they filled me with a potent combination of longing and terror, because I always feared what chasing my hopes would mean for her. I admit that I walked away crushed when she and my dad shot down my foreign-exchange idea in college, and that the most sacred, secret chambers of my heart have always pulsed with hopes of becoming a travel writer. I tell her about my ill-fated attempt to move to Greece at twenty-two, why I ended up staying more out of fear than anything else. Which brings us to now, when my former brother-in-law has helped engineer the kind of fantasy job offer I’ll only get one chance at.
“It’s like my whole life has come full circle, Mom. And this time, if I don’t go, I’ll never forgive myself.”
She sits silent, tears streaming down her face. The waterworks started somewhere around the part where I decided to stay with Michael instead of going to Athens, and they haven’t let up.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she says, her voice breaking. She twists her wedding ring around her finger, over and over.
I don’t quite know what to do, so I clasp her hand over the polished knotty-pine dining table. We’ve finished our market salads and pushed the plates aside, and she dabs at her cheeks with one of the linen napkins that’s survived my purge.
“You must hate me,” she says. “All these years, I’ve held you back.”
“No, no, Mom.” I squeeze her fingers. “That’s not what I’m getting at, not at all. I’m saying I’ve held myself back. I’m the one who never got on that plane. Who never told you what I really wanted. I settled for a life that felt too small for me and insisted on telling myself it was fine. None of that was you. I just fed my fears with yours. Nothing more.”
She sniffs. Her blue eyes are shot through with red, her black hair mussed. She looks so much like me, only flooded with guilt and, beneath that...relief?
As if we’ve needed to do this for a long time.
“I think you should take the job,” she says.
My breath stops. “You...do? Because I’ve been so stressed out that you’ll only worry while I’m gone.”
“I’ll worry myself sick.” She smiles gamely. Her makeup is a mess. “But you’re an adult. Plenty old enough to make your own decisions. That hasn’t been my job for a long time. My job is just to help you be happy. That’s all a mother wants for her children, anyway. I’m sorry if I didn’t make that clear enough while you were growing up.”
I sit back, a telltale burn creeping up my throat. I can’t cry, too. Then she’ll start all over again, and we’ll never stop. “Wow. That’s not the reaction I was expecting.”
Her smile turns rueful. “No?”
“No.”
“I just wish you’d trusted me enough to tell me this before. But I know why you didn’t.”
For a moment, neither of us speaks. Oddly, the silence feels more like a gift than anything else. My mom clears her throat.
“Have you spoken to this Grayson of yours? Thanked him for getting you the offer?”
I try to cover my reaction, but her eyes track the way my hands dive into my lap. “No. I really don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“There’s...a lot more to the story, Mom. With him. You wouldn’t even believe me if I told you.”
“I bet I would,” she says.
As it turns out, she’s right, though she makes me explain some parts two or three times. I skip all the sexy bits, but aside from that, I confess everything, from how I accidentally fell in love with two different brothers to the way they switched places in Hawaii. I talk about Michael’s gaslighting and Grayson’s emails, how the truth finally came out at the cabin, how confusing and crushing I’ve found the whole thing.
When I finish, she gathers the dishes and goes to the sink, where she hand-washes each one and sets it in the dish rack.
I keep my seat at the table. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“Shh,” she says. “I’m thinking.”
Well, that’s more than Kate did. Something winds tight, some inner piece of me that craves her approval, even though, as she’s pointed out, I’m an adult, and I can’t say exactly what I want her to approve of .
Still, the feeling makes me restless enough to drive me out of my seat and toward the sliding doors to the deck, where I stare out through the panes. The forest blurs in a misty panorama of silver.
Dishes clatter. The water snaps off. Finally, my mother appears and hands over a freshly opened seltzer water. The can sucks the warmth from my palm.
“I think you should call him,” she says.
I almost drop her offering. “What? Why? There’s nothing to say.”
“Isn’t there?” There’s a strangeness in her voice, a gentle sort of leading, as if she knows something I don’t.
“No,” I say. “If we talk again, it’ll only make things messier. And I can’t go back to that. Not when this is finally starting to make some sense.”
She cocks her head. She’s wiped off the mascara mess, and now appears as an older, wiser version of myself. “I’ll just say this one thing, then, and that’s that I’ve never seen you glow the way you did just now. When you were talking about him, every time you said his name, you had this look on your face. Like you were suddenly more alive than you ever were with Michael.”
I hide the purse of my lips with a swig of fizzy water. “Mom. He lied to me . Then and now.”
She sighs, tucks my hair back behind my ear. “And then he told you the truth. And I’ve been overprotective all your life, but here we are, and now I’m going to do better. We all mess up, sweetheart. And then we learn. All of us are growing up, all the time, and I don’t think there’s a person in this world who doesn’t deserve a second chance.”
A second chance . I can’t believe I’m hearing this from my mother, of all people. “But you never had a second chance. Jasper died, you were never the same. Some things cut too deep to ever recover from.” I clamp my teeth together. I can’t believe I even went there.
She doesn’t fall apart, though. Tears only pool in her eyes. “No, I was never the same. I never will be again. But I could’ve done a better job than I did. I could’ve...” She glances down, away.
“What?”
A lifetime passes while she considers. “Celebrated your birthday.”
That jars me. I didn’t know she realized how much that bothered me.
“I should have,” she continues.
I take a mile-long breath. “You still could, you know. If you want to. Next year. My half birthday’s kind of ruined forever, anyway.”
She glances up, her smile shy. “Maybe I could take you to Woodhouse? We could get massages. Then go to lunch. Something fancy.”
I gape. And then I’m crying, too, and she starts all over again, and within moments, I’m sobbing on her shoulder like a little kid with a skinned knee, my arms thrown around her neck.
When we finally pull apart, I say, “You’ll tell Dad? About Greece? Why I have to go?”
“Of course.”
“What will he think?”
My mother pauses. “Probably whatever I tell him to think.”
I giggle, which ends on a hiccup. How saucy of her.
By the door, she fiddles with her umbrella and takes one last look around. “What you’ve done here is incredible.”
I help her with her coat. “You like it?”
“I love it. I’ll be honest, I never really understood this place before. But now I think I do.”
I nod. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
“And, Mina?” She turns back in the open doorway, framed by the silken wet outside. “You were right before. You can never start over. But that doesn’t mean you can’t start new.”
She leaves me standing there, blinking, my head awhirl.
That doesn’t mean you can’t start new .
From the lips of my own mother, who has more reason to cling to the past than anyone I know.