“No.He just erased himself instead. Stopped going to work. Stopped eating. Stopped being my father. I spent the next sixyears basically raising myself while he disappeared into his own grief.”
I squeezed Jack’s hand. “He died of a heart attack when I was nineteen. The doctors said it was his heart, but I think he just… gave up. Stopped wanting to be here without her.”
He was quiet for a long time as the wind blew and the city hummed around us.
“We’re quite a pair,” he said finally.
“We really are.”
He pulled me closer, tucking my head under his chin, and we sat there on his fire escape in the freezing dark, two people who’d learned too young that love could vanish, parents could crumble, and the world didn’t stop spinning just because yours had fallen apart.
It should have been sad. It was sad, in a way. But it was also something else, something that felt like recognition. Like finding a language you didn’t know you spoke, and discovering someone else who spoke it too.
Then Jack reached across me for his pizza and accidentally elbowed the plate off his knee. We both watched it sail off the fire escape and arc into the darkness below, landing with a splat somewhere in the alley, now food for the rats.
“Well,” he said. “I guess that’s the universe telling me I’ve had enough carbs.”
I was laughing again. He had that effect on me—pivoting from the deepest conversation of my life to a perfectly timed disaster without it feeling jarring. Like sadness and silliness were just two rooms in the same house, and he knew how to move between them without closing any doors.
11
Maggie
Day 9 — February 10th, 1987
The airport wastotal chaos at 6 AM with businessmen in suits clutching briefcases, families wrestling with luggage, and a few retirees ambling along, everyone trying to get somewhere on time.
Jack’s flight left at seven. We stood at the gate—you could do that, walk someone all the way to the plane, unlike in 2014—and I tried not to feel like I was watching him disappear.
“Four days,” he said. “I’ll call every night.”
“I know.”
He kissed me, quick, very public-appropriate, nothing like the kiss by the Charles, and then he was walking down the jetway, turning once to wave, and then he was gone.
I stood there for longer than I should have, watching the plane taxi away from the gate. Four days, counting today, until he came back, the day before Valentine’s Day. The math kept running in my head, a countdown I couldn’t stop, every moment measured against an endpoint I was trying to rewrite.
The plane lifted off into the gray morning sky, and I turned and walked back through the terminal alone.
Something shifted as I walked. Not physical—nothing I could point to or measure—but a feeling, like a door closing softly behind me. Jack was going to New York. He was going to talk about the job he’d been dreaming of his whole life, and whatever he decided in that building would rearrange the future like a hand sweeping pieces across a chessboard.
My future. His future. And somewhere in the city behind me, a woman named Rebecca was waking up to a life that had already changed because of me. Jack had ended things with her—gently, honestly, the way he did everything, but the ending had started the moment I’d walked back into his life. She’d handled it with more grace than I deserved.I hope she’s worth it,she’d said. I still wasn’t sure I was.
I thought about Rebecca’s gallery opening. About the career she was building, the life she was constructing piece by careful piece, now without the man she’d been quietly hoping might stay. In another version of this story, the one where I’d never come back, where I’d stayed in 2014 with my corner office and my empty apartment, Rebecca might have been the one standing at this gate. Might have been the one who Jack kissed goodbye. She might have been the one he called every night from a hotel room in Manhattan. They might have built something steady and good together, the kind of relationship that lasted because neither person asked too much of the other.
But I was here. And Rebecca was somewhere across the city, adjusting to a future she hadn’t chosen. And the door that had closed behind her was one I’d pushed shut.
I spent the day wandering. Not aimlessly, I had destinations, a private pilgrimage to places that lived only in my memory. The bookstore on Newbury Street, the one with the creaky floors and the owner who recommended obscure French novels. It wouldclose in a few years, though I could no longer remember the exact date, driven out by rising rents. The knowledge sat heavy as I browsed the shelves, running my fingers along spines that had maybe ten good years left.
The diner on Boylston, the one with the red vinyl booths and the pie case by the register. In the future, it would be a Starbucks. Then the Starbucks would close and become something else, and that something else would close too, and eventually nobody would remember that there’d once been a place here where you could get coffee and eggs for two dollars and sit for hours without anyone asking you to leave. I ordered coffee. Sat in a booth by the window watching people go about their day.
The record store was last. Nuggets, on Commonwealth Ave, cramped and cluttered and presided over by a guy with a ponytail who looked like he’d been there since 1972. The cassette section was in the back, and I flipped through plastic cases until I found it. The Joshua Tree. U2. I remembered loving this album, playing it until the tape wore thin, memorizing every word of “With or Without You.”
I bought it for $7.99. A piece of my time here to carry with me, however long I stayed.
I was on Newbury Street, walking back toward the T, when I saw her.
Rebecca.
