Marcus’s eyes glittered with tears, and Nick felt his throat thicken with emotion. Marcus gave his shoulder another squeeze, then he dropped his hand and they crossed the road together. Nick turned the words over in his mind as they walked.Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. He thought about the famous Australian poem he’d loved as a kid.I love her far horizons, I love her jewel sea. Her beauty and her terror, the wide brown land for me.He thought about Carly, how she’d stormed into his life, stunned him, and stormed out again. How she’dhappenedto him, all beauty and terror and delight and confusion. Chaos. Control. Contentment, for a few precious moments there, before they’d allowed their insecurities to destroy it all.
No feeling was final. He wouldn’t feel rootless forever. He wouldn’t feel insecure forever. He wouldn’t miss Carly forever.
“You didn’t really answer my question, though,” Marcus said, after another block. “What happened with Carly?”
Nick sighed. Might as well come all the way clean. “The photos we were taking? I got a job offer out of them. A big one, fromVogue. They want me to go all over the world photographing dancers for them. I found out the day before the wedding.”
“Mate, that’s huge, congratulations.”
“Thanks,” Nick replied quickly, “but that wasn’t what was supposed to happen. The whole point was to help Carly get promoted, and it didn’t work. They’re not renewing her contract, and she found out I’d been lying about my own work, and, well.”
“She did a Carly,” Marcus finished.
“Big time,” Nick said. “Which I deserved, because I should have told her the truth, too, but the thing is—”
“You’re crazy about her.” It was a statement, not a question.
“I—How did you know?”
Marcus laughed, and Nick stared at him in surprise.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” Marcus grinned, sounding frankly delighted that he got to be the one to break the news to Nick, “but it was super fucking obvious last night. The way you were looking at her? Like she was holding your heart in her hands? Anyone watching you would have known in two seconds that you were head over heels for her.”
Nick opened his mouth to argue, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. Marcus was right. He was head over heels for Carly Montgomery. The problem was, the woman who was holding his heart in her hands was on a plane, headed for the other side of the world.
“I don’t know what to do,” he sighed. “TheVoguething is such a huge deal, and I should be happy about it. And being back here just makes it more complicated, because it’s home, but it’s not, and I’m from here, but I don’t live here, and I … I just feel unmoored, you know? And now, she’s gone, too.”
“My mum still doesn’t want to sell the house,” Marcus said, as they approached the coffee shop, and Nick frowned at the sudden non sequitur. “We tried for a while, Davo and me, to get her to give it up, but she’s still so attached to it, because of Dad, because of us. And one day I asked her why she couldn’t make a home somewhere else, an apartment or something without stairs and stuff. You can make any place feel like home. Home is where the heart is, right? And she said, ‘No, home is wherever it hurts the most to leave.’
“And I don’t know if I agree with that, but maybe home doesn’t have to be a place. Maybe it can be a sound, a taste, a feeling. A person. Maybe it’s where you feel the most like yourself. Or maybe it’s more than one thing at once. You can still call Australia home,” Marcus said, gesturing over Nick’s shoulder at the beach, “but I think the luckiest people get to call multiple places home.”
Nick nodded, his throat too thick with tears to say anything, and let Marcus order his coffee for him. They walked back in silence, down the frangipani-scented street and towards the salt spray wafting off the beach.
He had left home a long time ago, and now, it didn’t hurt to leave any place. But it sure as hell hurt to be left.
Chapter 26
Carly trudged away from the baggage carousel at JFK airport, having checked three times that the suitcase she’d pulled off it was actually hers. She didn’t bother with a luggage cart this time. She might never risk a luggage cart ever again.
To her surprise, she saw a familiar man waving at her and holding up a tablet with her full name on it. Of course her parents had sent Timur, the family’s longtime driver, to collect her.
Exhausted from two long and sleepless flights, Carly returned his wave with far less enthusiasm and followed him out to the curb, where a sleek black town car was waiting. It was already dark at 5:00PM, and freezing rain pelted them as he loaded her suitcase into the trunk.
“In, in!” he urged her, and she fell into the backseat, plopping her backpack at her feet with a sigh.
“Hello, Caroline.”
Carly started. Her mother was sitting on the other side of the pebbled leather seat, looking at her appraisingly.
“Hi, Mom,” she managed, weakly.
Marlene Parker-Montgomery looked flawless as ever, every strand of her shoulder-length auburn hair in perfect place, as though it had just been blown out at the salon. Which, Carly reminded herself, it probably had been. She was wearing a classic Marlene outfit: black wool slacks and an immaculately crisp white silk blouse under a Burberry trench coat. Her camel-colored kitten-heeled boots were made of a leather that looked so soft Carly would have used it for washcloth, and a Hermes scarf was tied carefully around her neck, not quite concealing her usual two-strand pearl necklace, which she always wore with matching pearl earrings. The entire interior of the car smelled like her custom-blended perfume, the familiar peppery-floral scent that announced that Marlene was in the building.
“You look well,” her mother said, in a tone that made it very clear that she was only being polite.
Carly resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “It’s a long flight back, and I’m tired.”
“You could have flown in first, you know. Your father and I would have been very happy to—”
