“What if you break mine?”
I stared at him.
“Ilikeyou,” Tyler said again. “I like how smart you are and how curious, and I never know what you’re going to say, and you keep me on my toes, and I like when you let me in and I get toseeyou. And, Shir. What if it’s really, really good?”
“I don’t even know how to think about this,” I said.
“Start with—do you like me? As a person? As a friend?”
“Yes.”
His shoulders dropped with relief. “And you like making out with me.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “It’s all right.”
“And—if you didn’t have, uh, historical data about me—you would say yes if I asked you out.”
I looked at him.
I thought of Grandpa this time, not Grandma. Grandpa, who had loved a girl when he was young but hadn’t gone after her. Who might always have wondered,What if?I thought about Sarah Barbanel, who had been brave enough to do a wild thing. I thought about miracles, about light, about how important it was to push back the dark when we had a chance.
Screw it. Screw being sensible, and protective of myself, and closed off. If he broke my heart, he broke my heart, and I would pick myself up and move on. “Fine.”
He looked at me questioningly. “Fine...?”
I folded my arms. “We can give this a shot. You can, like, give me your chockpin if you want. Not that Sarah’s sailor did that, actually, since he didn’t exist.”
A slow, radiant smile started to grow on Tyler’s face. “You sound very enthusiastic.”
“It’s still important to keep your ego in check.”
He bounded across the bed and enveloped me in a tight hug, resting his chin on top of my head. “I thought you were going to say no,” he whispered, and I could hear ragged emotion in his voice. “I thought you wouldn’t want me.”
I tilted my face up so I could see his, resting a hand on his cheek. “Of course I want you. I want you so much.” I kissed him, and I could feel us both trembling.
Slowly, slowly, every single of inch of me started to relax and expand, like I’d been carrying around a tension my entire life I hadn’t known existed. I could hardly believe it. I wasn’t sure when I would believe in the idea of Tyler and me actually lasting. Not today, certainly. Probably not tomorrow. But I was willing to try.
“Oh,” he said. “I looked something up last night when I got home, when I couldn’t fall asleep right away.”
“Yeah?”
“The captain’s logs.” He grabbed his laptop, bringing it over to the bed so we could both see it. “From theRosemary. I thought the captain might have mentioned Sarah, or Sam Ferston at least,” Tyler said. “But I found something else.” He turned the screen toward me.
Picked up a passenger, Marcus Barbanel of Nantucket, in Philadelphia, the log read.Will be returning him home as we head there next.
“Marcus boarded theRosemaryin 1825, on the last leg of Sarah’s trip,” Tyler said. “They reached Nantucket in May and married three months later.”
I touched my finger to the words. There was no way to know the reason Sarah left theRosemary, if it had anything to do with the passenger she’d met, if he even knew about her disguise at the time. But.
Maybe she didn’t have to stop sailing because her identity had been revealed. Maybe she met a man on a ship, and they sailed together, and she liked him. Maybe she decided to make a home with him. Maybe she decided there was a different way to be happy than the one she’d originally imagined.
You couldn’t ever know anything for sure. But you could hope. You could trust. You could try.
“So are you my boyfriend, then?” I asked. “Or is this more casual dating?”
“Shira Barbanel,” he said gravely. “I would very much like the honor of getting to call you my girlfriend.”
I laughed. “You’re a nerd,” I said, and bit my lip, and felt once more like I held too much happiness to possibly contain. This might be the most foolish idea in the world.Fool me twice, people might say to me a month from now, but I didn’t care. I believed we were going to work, that we were going to be together. And if I was wrong, if we were wrong, so be it. Right now, we worked. Right now, we were together. Right now, I believed we would prove true.
