I tapped the photo. Typed:I promised to send this weeks ago. Sorry it’s so late. xTap and tap and wait, my heart knotting, for a reply.
Which didn’t come.
Because it’s the middle of the night in Dublin, stupid. He’s not lying awake, waiting for your not-a-booty call. I hoped he had hisnotifications turned off. But when I got back from brushing my teeth, my screen was lit with a message.
TIM:How’s the story coming along? xx
I snatched up the phone. It’s coming. Everything but the happy ending.
I still wasn’t sure how my protagonist’s journey ended. I knew she had to return to the real world. But how could she leave her companions behind?
TIM:You can do it. You deserve the happy ending. xxx
I stared for a long time at that extrax, like an unknown value in an equation, like the mark on a treasure map.
I think I’ve finally figured that out, I typed at last.xxx
—
Every morning from July into August, I woke with the rooster and wrote until nine or ten. Broke to feed the chickens and rake the yard. Wrote again and then pegged laundry. Wrote and harvested or chopped vegetables for dinner. I wrote late into the night and crawled into bed exhausted, sleeping with the book Tim had given me, my hand on the cover, taking comfort in touching something he had touched. In my dreams, the farm world and my story world bled and blended together, spilling onto the page—the field mice and twisted apple trees, the old water bucket and Em’s china cream pitcher shaped like a cow.
I finally understood Gray.
I would never forgive him. But the way he’d taken bits of our real life, pieces of me, and twisted them into a narrative that felt true to him... I got that now. Wasn’t I doing the same? Pulling threads from New Dee and Old Dee, Farm Dee and Academic Dee, my mother’s Dee and Em’s, and knitting them together. I didn’t have to let myself or my story be defined by other people’s expectations. I could make something wholly my own.
At one thirty in the morning on a Wednesday, I finished. I stared blearily at the computer screen, my body shaking with fatigue, adrenaline, and caffeine.
In the end, Dorothy went home, lessons learned, magic elixir in hand. But I left open the possibility that she would return.
Not a sequel. Not yet. But a promise.
I saved it in two files—the chapters and outline that comprised my thesis and the actual completed manuscript, nearly twice as long—and emailed them both to Maeve.
And to Oscar Diggs.
And, finally, to Tim.To happy endings, I wrote, and hitsend.
—
There was nothing in my inbox the next morning. Or the next day. Or the day after that. Not even from Tim. Not even a text. Over the weekend, I drove to the hardware store and bought a bunch of painting supplies.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Em asked.
I carefully rolled paint on my bedroom walls. Blue, to match the bedspread and the sky. “Painting. If I don’t keep busy, I’ll explode.”
“Seems like a waste of time. Since you’re leaving.” There was nothing Em abhorred more than waste. “Not that it doesn’t look nice,” she admitted grudgingly.
“You could use this room as your office. After I’m gone.”
Her hand stroked the desk. “I don’t need an office.”
I thought of all the years I’d watched Em do the farm books at the kitchen table. Maybe I wasn’t the only one reluctant to take up too much room. Or maybe Em had given all the room she had, in her home, in her heart, to us.
“Shame to waste the space,” I said.
“Hm.”
I grinned. “Of course, you’d have to keep at least one of the beds in here. For when we come to visit.”
