“What did you do?”
“Fed the ducks, mostly. He’d buy stale bread from the bakery on Charles Street. They sold it cheap, day-old stuff, and we’d throw chunks until the whole flock came running.”
Jack smiled, and it was the kind of smile that had history behind it. “He told me once that the secret was to throw the small pieces first. Get their attention. Make them want more.”
“Good advice.”
“Danny had a lot of good advice. I didn’t understand most of it until he was gone.”
We walked in silence for a while after that, and he seemed to understand that sometimes the best response to grief was simply to stand beside it.
By the time we reached the café on Newbury Street, my fingers were numb and my nose was running, and I’d never been happier to see a door with a fogged-up window and the promise of warmth inside.
The café was small and cluttered, the kind of place that would be called “artisanal” in 2014 and charged triple. Now it was just a coffee shop with good hot chocolate and a radiator that worked overtime.
Jack ordered two hot chocolates while I claimed a table by the window, the glass thick with condensation, the street outside reduced to impressionist blurs.
“So,” he said, settling into the chair across from me. “Tell me something.”
“Something like what?”
“Something I don’t know. Something surprising.”
I thought about it. There were a lot of things he didn’t know. A whole lifetime he couldn’t even imagine, and most of them I couldn’t tell him. The rules of the magic, if you could call them rules, seemed to prohibit the obvious cheats. No lottery numbers, no stock tips, no dire warnings about the future that would make me sound insane.
But there were other things. True things. Things I’d never told anyone because the old me had been too scared.
“My mother left when I was twelve,” I said. “Just... disappeared one day. No warning, no explanation. She sent birthday cards for a few years and then stopped. I haven’t heard from her since I was sixteen.”
Jack’s face didn’t change, but something shifted in his eyes. Recognition, maybe. The understanding of someone who knew what it meant to lose people.
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.” Except it wasn’t, not really. The wound had scabbed over decades ago, but underneath, it was still raw. Still bleeding whenever I poked it.
“The thing is, I think I’ve spent my whole life expecting everyone to leave the way she did. Like it’s inevitable. Like love is just a countdown to abandonment.”
“Is that why you kept pulling away?”
I looked at him, really looked, past the journalist’s careful neutrality, past the guarded edges, and saw someone who was asking because he actually wanted to understand. Not to judge or to use it against me later. Just to know.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s why.”
“And now?”
The hot chocolate was warm in my hands. The café hummed with conversation and the hiss of the espresso machine. Outside, Boston moved through its Friday afternoon rhythm, everyone hurrying somewhere, everyone with somewhere to be.
“Now I’m trying to stay,” I said. “Even when it scares me.”
Jack reached across the table and covered my hand with his. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
Jack
The bookstore was called Wordsworth,and it had been my favorite place in Cambridge since I’d discovered it my sophomore year at BU.
Three floors of used books, floor to ceiling, arranged in categories that made sense only to the owner, a man named Winston who claimed to have read every book in the store and might actually have been telling the truth. The smell hit you the moment you walked in. Old paper, dust, and the must of stories that had been loved and passed on and loved again. I’d spent entire weekends here, browsing, discovering, losing myself in the stacks.
I wanted Maggie to see it.
