“It’s the snow globe effect,” I tell him, remembering what Elsie said in the coffee shop a few days ago. “It makes everything better — unless you’re actuallyinthe book, then it just makes everything much,muchweirder. But don’t change the subject. Why’d you spend all that time trying to find her if you were just going to make it all up, anyway?”
Elliot shrugs.
“It was fun,” he says at last. “Wasn’t it? It gave us something else to focus on. It made us a team.”
“And we wouldn’t have been one without that? Wait: what am I saying? Of course we wouldn’t. You don’t become a ‘team’ in 23 days, do you? You don’t really becomeanythingin 23 days. We weren’t even a couple; not really. It was barely even a relationship.”
I put my drink down so quickly the coffee sloshes out of the lid and onto my hand. I think I get it now; why he changed so many of the details that ended up in his book. He did it because the ‘mystery woman’ was better as a blank slate. She was more useful that way, because if he didn’t know who she really was, he could turn her into whoever he wanted her to be. And I guess the same goes for me. Twenty-three days wasn’t enough for him to know me, let alone love me. So he had to pretend.
“I don’t know what you want me to say to that, Holly,” Elliot says, throwing his hands up in exasperation. “Do you want me to argue with you? Do you want me to apologize?”
I want to say yes to this. Yes to all of it. Because I do. I want him to tell me I’m wrong; that we were every bit the ‘team’ I thought we were, and I want him to apologize for not living up to the imagined version of himself that existed only in my head. Imagination is always better than reality, though, isn’t it? And, unfortunately for us, no one’s writing this script for us, so we’re having to make it up as we go along.
“Holly, are you in there?”
The door swings open and Dad’s head appears, his hair now doing a passable impression of Albert Einstein’s.
“Oh!” he says, looking surprised to see Elliot standing in the corner of the room, as if he’s haunting it. “I thought you’d gone, Elliot? Your publicist has been looking for you.”
“Thanks for letting me know,” says Elliot, sounding normal again. “Tell her I’m on my way, would you?”
Dad’s head disappears again, and Elliot and I face each other, neither of sure what happens next.
“For what it’s worth,” he says. “Iamsorry. I didn’t mean for the book to ruin your life. I really didn’t.”
“It didn’t. I’ve had a perfectly nice life, thanks,” I say stiffly. “It’s been… nice.”
“Nice? Is that all?”
Elliot gives a low chuckle.
“I’ll leave you to get on with your nice life, then,” he says, crossing to the office door, which he tugs open with much more force than it actually requires. Then he stops suddenly and turns back to face me.
“Doyou still have it?” he asks, framed in the doorway. “The snow globe? I’ve always wondered.”
I look up at him from my position at the desk.
“No,” I say quietly. “No, I don’t. I got rid of it years ago.”
“Right. I should’ve guessed.”
There’s nothing I can say to that, so I just sit there at my desk and watch as the door swings closed behind him. Then, once I’m sure he’s definitely not coming back, I open the desk drawer beside me and rummage around in it for a minute until I find the thing I’m looking for lurking at the back.
I pull it out and place it on the desk in front of me, checking the door first to make sure it’s definitely closed.
The snow globe still looks exactly the same as it did ten years ago. The tiny buildings are still recognizably Bramblebury, the snow still swirls around them, and the little couple still stand there, locked in their eternal kiss.
Everything’s the same.
And yet every single thing is different.
14
PAST
DECEMBER, 10 YEARS AGO
For the two days that follow Elliot’s suggestion that I come to America with him for Christmas, I let myself believe I’m actually going to do it; that I’m going to hop on a plane, and my life is finally going to begin.
