Proud. She was proud of me. I turned the word over in my mind, examining it from different angles. People had been proud of Danny. People had tolerated me. The distinction had felt important for most of my life.
“What about this weekend?” I asked.
“What about it?”
“We had plans.”
“Plans can change.” Her voice was firm, certain. “This is more important. We’ll do something when you get back. I’ll make dinner.”
“You’ll make dinner?”
“I’ll order dinner and put it on plates. Same thing.”
I laughed. Actually laughed, the kind that came from somewhere deep and surprised me on its way out. “Maggie Shaw, domestic goddess.”
“Don’t push it.”
We talked for another twenty minutes—about the interview, about what I should wear, about whether New York pizza was actually better than Boston pizza (she said yes, I said heresy). By the time I hung up, the apartment didn’t feel quite so quiet anymore.
I looked at the trash can. The crumpled letter was still there, a ball of yellow paper among coffee-stained napkins and junk mail.
Three times. Three times in our year together, Maggie had let me get close and then pulled away. After New Year’s, I’d been certain the pattern would continue. That she’d surface eventually, all apologies and charm, and then disappear again the moment things got real.
But she wasn’t disappearing. She was making plans, was proud of me. And she was telling me to chase my dreams and promising to be there when I got back.
Either something had changed, or I was about to get my heart broken in a new and creative way.
I looked at the photograph of Danny on my bookshelf. He was twenty-two in that picture, fresh out of basic training, grinning like he knew something the camera didn’t. He’dbeen dead for sixteen years. Sometimes it felt like yesterday. Sometimes it felt like a story that had happened to someone else.
“What do you think?” I asked him. “Am I being an idiot?”
Danny didn’t answer. He never did. But I thought, maybe, he would have told me to take the chance. Danny had never been afraid of anything—not Vietnam, not love, not the possibility of losing. He’d lived like someone who expected to win, right up until the day he didn’t.
I couldn’t be Danny. I’d spent my whole life learning that lesson. But maybe I didn’t have to be. Maybe I just had to be brave enough to try.
I left the letter in the trash and went to bed.
9
Maggie
Day 7 — February 8th, 1987
The Public Gardenwas a study in gray and silver, bare branches against a pewter sky, the frozen pond reflecting the light like hammered metal. Boston without its postcard prettiness, stripped down to bones and cold air and the quiet of a city holding its breath against winter.
Jack met me at the Arlington Street gate, coffee in hand, collar turned up against the wind.
“You’re early,” he said.
“You’re earlier.”
“I was eager.” He said it simply, without embarrassment, and something warm spread through my chest despite the cold. The old Jack, the guy I remembered from the first timeline had been careful about admitting things like eagerness. This version seemed less guarded. Or maybe I was just paying better attention.
We walked without any destination in mind, following the paths that wound through the landscape. A few joggers passedus, breath visible in the cold air. An older man sat on a bench feeding pigeons from a paper bag, the birds clustering around his feet like supplicants. The willows along the water’s edge trailed bare branches into the gray, beautiful in their starkness.
“I used to come here with my brother,” Jack said. “Before.”
I knew what before meant. Before Vietnam. Before the telegram. Before Danny became a photograph on a bookshelf instead of a person who threw a kid in the air and taught him to catch a ball.
