“I loved you.” Past tense. I hadn’t meant past tense, but there it was, hanging between us like an accusation.
“I loved you, and you made me feel like that was a problem you were trying to solve. Like I was something you couldn’t decide whether to keep.”
My voice cracked on the last word. I turned away, gripping the edge of the counter, not wanting her to see whatever was on my face.
“I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I have it in me to believe you one more time and then watch you walk away again.”
For a long moment, there was only the sound of the radiator and the rain against the window and my own stupid heart, beating too fast in my chest.
She touched my shoulder.
“Turn around,” she said. “Please.”
I didn’t want to. Turning around meant letting her see everything I’d just said written on my face. But her voice was gentle in a way I’d never heard before. Tender. Like she understood exactly what it cost me to say those things, and she wasn’t going to make me regret it.
I turned.
Her eyes were bright with tears she wasn’t letting fall.
“You’re right,” she said. “About all of it. I did treat you like a problem to solve. I did keep you at arm’s length. I did make you feel like loving me was some kind of burden I hadn’t agreed to carry.”
“Maggie—”
“No.Let me say this.” She took a breath, steadying herself. “I can’t undo the back and forth of our time together. I can’t go back and be the person I should have been. But I can tell you this, I’m not asking you to trust me because I say I’ve changed. I’m asking you to let me show you. Every day. For as long as it takes.”
She reached up and touched my face, her fingertips against my jaw. Like I was something precious.
“I know I hurt you,” she said. “I know you learned to live without me, and I know asking you to unlearn that isn’t fair. But I’m asking. Because I love you, and I want to spend the rest of my life proving that I mean it.”
She’d said it.
I love you.
Three words I’d waited a year to hear. Three words that changed everything and nothing and might not be enough, but might, also, be exactly enough.
“And if I take the Times job?” My voice came out quieter than I expected. “If I move to New York?”
She met my eyes. Didn’t flinch, didn’t look away, didn’t do any of the things she’d done a dozen times before when the conversation got too real.
“Then I guess we’ll find out if I meant it.”
The silence stretched between us. This was the moment. This was where I either took the risk or didn’t.
“I’m cooking chicken,” I said.
16
Maggie
The tension didn’t break. It became something we could navigate around, something we could address while our hands were busy with plates and forks and the mundane business of eating dinner.
Jack’s kitchen was barely big enough for two people who weren’t fighting. For two people who were trying not to fight, it was intimate in ways that felt dangerous, every reaching arm a near-collision, every turned shoulder a choice about proximity. The overhead light buzzed faintly, casting harsh shadows, and the window was fogged with steam.
The chicken was definitely overcooked—dry enough that I needed three sips of water to get the first bite down. The rice was crunchy in ways rice shouldn’t be. But we ate it sitting at his tiny table by the window, watching the rain fall while we figured out how to talk to each other like people who might actually have a future.
“So this is a pattern,” I said, gesturing at the chicken with my fork.
“What is?”
