“Well, I’m going to eat a taco,” the boy says, then runs back over to his table.
Hugo lifts a chip in his direction. “Cheers to that.”
As he stands up again—feeling light-headed and a little dizzy—his eyes land on a map of California on the wall near the cash register. There’s a blue star toward the bottom, the words printed neatly beside it:Los Angeles.
And just like that, he realizes he already knows what his first stop will be.
Later, once all theguests are gone, the three of them collapse onto the couch amid a sea of empty wineglasses and dirty plates.
“Well,” says Pop, putting an arm around Dad, who leans against him, “I guess that’s it, then.”
Dad sighs. “She would’ve hated those crab puffs.”
“Yeah, but she would’ve loved the petits fours.”
“And your eulogy.”
“Yours too,” Pop says, giving him a kiss. “Though she would’ve killed you for telling that story about the donkey.”
“It’s a great story,” Mae says, and they both look over as if they forgot she was there.
“Didn’t we already send you off to college?” Dad asks with a grin.
Mae laughs. “Yeah, but it didn’t take.”
Her phone buzzes in her hand, and when she sees that it’s an email from Hugo, she sits up, feeling the steady drumbeat of her heart pick up speed.
Dad raises his eyebrows. “Is that him?”
“About time,” Pop says. “What’d he say?”
“Yeah, what’s going on?”
Mae looks up, still smiling an alarmingly stupid smile, to find them both watching her expectantly. “I’m, uh…gonna go upstairs for a bit.”
“Say cheerio for us,” Dad teases, waving as she hurries out of the room. But Mae barely notices. She’s already opening Hugo’s email.
All it says is this:How can I ever thank you?
Below that, he’s forwarded a note from someone at the University of Surrey, and her heart lifts as she reads it.
He actually did it.
She laughs, filled with a sudden joy, because she knows how much he wanted this, how much it means to him. And she wishes more than anything that they were together. (Though hasn’t she been wishing that all day?)
She moves on to the letter he sent, the one she’d pushed him to write, feeling giddy that it worked. Near the end, he wrote:
Someone recently told me that if you want something badly enough, you have to make your own magic. You have to lay it all on the line. And most of all, you have to be brave. When you grow up as one of six, it can be hard to say what you want. But that person was right. Which is why, no matter what ends up happening, I had to write this letter. Because some things are worth fighting for—and this is one of them.
It’s not exactly a love letter, but it still makes her cry.
When she’s done reading, she reaches for her computer and pulls up the rough cut of her film, including the part she recorded this morning. And then, before she can think better of it, she sends it off to him, because it seems that the very least she can do is try taking her own advice.
The note she includes is short, just a simple answer to his simple question:You already have.
Hugo is still awake—his head far too crowded for sleep—when the video arrives. He reads her message with a grin, then opens it up, expecting to see Ida and Ludovic and Katherine and everyone else they’d interviewed last week. Expecting the sort of straightforward documentary he thought they’d been shooting all that time.
But instead, it starts with Mae.
