She'd come home. And I'd been hiding twenty minutes away for three months without reaching out, because reaching out meant explaining why I was here, and explaining why I was here meant revealing what I'd become.
But now there was this invitation. This ridiculous, tacky, blue-and-gold invitation to a night of forced nostalgia and awkward small talk.
Would she be there?
The question hooked into my heart and pulled. I had no way of knowing. We had no mutual friends anymore, no shared connections that would tell me whether Charlotte Huston planned to spend her Saturday night reliving high school memories in a badly decorated gymnasium.
She might have thrown her invitation away the moment it arrived. She might have better things to do. She might have moved on so completely from our shared past that the idea of attending never even crossed her mind.
But she might be there.
And if there was even a chance, even the smallest possibility?—
I set the invitation down on the counter, then picked it back up.
"This is a terrible idea," I said aloud. "This is the worst idea you've ever had, and you once tried baking."
The invitation didn't argue with me. The grandfather clock ticked from the hallway, counting seconds I couldn't get back.
I thought about my father's voice, cold and certain: "Sentiment is a luxury for those who can afford failure."
I thought about the way Charlotte had looked at me in that flour-covered kitchen, like I was someone worth seeing.
I thought about five years of holding everyone at arm's length because getting close meant letting them see the tremor, the stiffness, the slow erosion of a body that used to obey me without question. Five years of careful distance and surface-level connections and the growing certainty that I would spend the rest of my life alone because being known meant being vulnerable, and being vulnerable meant being left behind.
"One night," I told the empty house. "I'll go, I'll look for her, and if she's not there, I'll leave. Simple."
It was a terrible plan. It was barely a plan at all, more like organized self-destruction with a nostalgic veneer. I had no guarantee Charlotte would attend. No guarantee that even if she did, she'd want to talk to me. No guarantee that fifteen years and a progressive neurological disease hadn't finally erased whatever she'd once seen in me that made her think I was worth knowing.
But for the first time in three months, I felt something other than the suffocating weight of grief and isolation. It was faint, fragile, probably foolish.
It felt dangerously close to hope.
I carried the invitation back to the living room, to my father's desk, and set it beside my laptop. A splash of garish color against the dark wood. A dare I wasn't sure I had the courage to accept.
My right hand had calmed to its usual, almost imperceptible rest tremor. I looked at it, then at the invitation, then at the boxes still waiting to be opened.
Two days. I had two days to decide if I was brave enough or foolish enough to walk back into the past and find out if anything worth saving was still there.
The grandfather clock ticked on, steady and indifferent, marking time I couldn't afford to waste.
I didn't throw the invitation away.
That night, I dreamed of flour-covered kitchens and green eyes and the sound of Charlotte's laugh, bright and real and completely unguarded. I woke up at 3 AM with my heart pounding and my right hand shaking against the sheets, and I knew, with the kind of certainty that defies logic, that I was going to that reunion.
Not because it was smart. Not because it was safe.
Because some chances only come around once, and I'd already let Charlotte Huston slip away fifteen years ago.
I wasn't sure I could survive doing it again.
3.Charlotte
Miles Cameron is attending.
Three words. Three stupid words on a glowing phone screen, and I'd been useless for two days. I'd burned dinner twice, walked into a door frame at work, and changed my outfit for tonight approximately forty-seven times. My bedroom currently looked like a clothing store had exploded, dresses and jeans and sweaters scattered across every available surface like fabric shrapnel.
"This is fine," I told my reflection, standing in my bra and underwear in front of the closet. "This is completely normal behavior for a thirty-five-year-old woman attending a casual social event."
