Book Lovers(101)

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Brendan meets the home inspector at the house, but Libby and the girls stay back with me, giving him some much-needed quiet after his weeks as a solo parent.

They’re not moving in earnest until November, a month before Number Three’s due date. Until then, Brendan will be back and forth, getting the house ready.

Two and a half months. That’s how long we have left together, and it’s going to count.

We spend the morning wandering the woods, trying to keep the girls on the trail and googling “what does poison ivy look like” every forty-five seconds, never getting any closer to a concrete answer.

We take them to the fence, and the horses clomp over eagerly to be petted, despite our lack of bait. “I guess we know where you and I stand,” Libby jokes as the girls’ little fingers swipe down a chestnut mare’s pink snout.

Afterward, we take the tin buckets from the cottage’s cabinet out to the blackberry thicket at the edge of the meadow and pick and eat plump berries until our fingers and lips are stained purple and our shoulders are sunburnt.

By the time we arrive home, our knees smudged with dirt, Tala is fully asleep in my arms, sticky and warm, and we pour her onto the couch to keep napping. Bea leads us into the kitchen to explain the art of blind baking a pie crust for the blackberries—she and Brendan have watched a lot of Great British Baking Show this month—and I still feel like a city person, through and through, but maybe it’s possible to have more than one home. Maybe it’s possible to belong in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people and places.





34





THE GIRLS ARE tucked into the air mattress in the upstairs bedroom (I’ve been relocated to the foldout couch), but Brendan, Libby, and I stay up late, picking over the leftovers of Bea’s blackberry pie.

Someone knocks on the door, and Brendan kisses Libby’s forehead on his way to answer it. “Nora?” he calls. “For you.”

Charlie’s standing in the doorway, his hair damp and his clothes perfectly wrinkle-free. He looks like a million bucks. Actually, more like six hundred, but six hundred very well-appointed dollars.

“Up for a walk?” he asks.

Libby shoves me out of my chair. “She sure is!”

Outside, we wander across the meadow, our hands catching and holding. It’s been years since I’ve held anyone’s hand other than Libby’s or Bea’s or Tala’s. It makes me feel young, but not in a bad way. Less like I’m powerless in an uncaring world and more like . . . like everything is new, shiny, undiscovered. The way Mom saw New York—that’s how I see Charlie.

When we reach the moonlit gazebo, he faces me. “I think we need to consider an alternate ending.”

I balk. “We already sent the notes. Dusty’s been working on edits all week. She’s—”

“Not for Frigid.” He lifts our hands, holds them against his chest, where I can feel his heart speeding. His eyes bore into me. Black-hole eyes. Sticky-trap eyes. Decadent dessert eyes.

“We take turns visiting each other,” he says seriously. “Once a month, maybe. And when you’re able, you come here for holidays. And when you can’t, I get my sister and her husband to fly out and be with my parents so I can get up to New York. We video call and text and email as much as we’re able—or if that’s too much, I don’t know, maybe we skip all of that. When you’re in the city, you’re working, and when we’re together, we’re together.”

My stomach feels like it’s overstuffed with drunken, glittering fireflies. “Like an open relationship?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “But if that’s what you’d prefer . . . I don’t know. We could try it. I don’t want to, but I will.”

“I don’t want that either,” I tell him, smiling.

He releases a breath. “Thank fuck.”

My heart twists. “Charlie . . .”

“Just consider it,” he presses quietly.

It didn’t work for Sally and Clint. For me and Jakob. Charlie and Amaya. Even if I can overcome my travel anxiety, even if Charlie doesn’t mind talking me down in the dead of night, how am I supposed to deal with the constant fear of losing him? The anxiety every time he cancels a call or a visit falls through? Waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the day he finally says, I want something different.

It’s not you.

I want someone different.

A slow, excruciating heartbreak unfolding bit by bit for weeks.

I’d take a swift beheading over that death by a thousand paper cuts, every time.

“Long distance never works,” I say. “You said that yourself.”

“I know,” he says. “But it’s never been us, Nora.”

“So we’re the exception?” I say, skeptical. “The people it just works out for.”

“Yes,” he says. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

His eyes rove over me as he regroups. “What else can we do, Nora? I’m open to notes. Tell me what you’d change. Get out your fucking pen, and shred it all up, and tell me how it’s supposed to end.”

It actually hurts to smile. My voice sounds like it’s scraping over broken glass. “We enjoy this week. We spend as much time together as we want, and we don’t talk about after, and then I leave, and I don’t say goodbye. Because I’m not good at them. I’ve never really said one, and I don’t want to start with you. So instead when I kiss you for the last time, neither of us draws attention to it. And then . . . I get on a plane and go home, incredibly grateful for the life-ruiningly hot man I once spent a month with in North Carolina.”