“She is.”
“So don’t waste it.” He looked at me across the table, really looked, the way he did when he was trying to solve a puzzle. “That’s what I keep coming back to. I hurt someone good because I chose you. And I need that to mean something. I need you to be the person who stays.”
“I’m staying.”
“You say that now.”
“I say that now.” I reached across the table and took his hand. “And I’ll say it tomorrow. And the day after that. Until you believe me.”
Something shifted in his face, not quite belief, but the first crack in the wall where belief might eventually get through.
I thought about Rebecca, somewhere across the city tonight, adjusting to a future she hadn’t chosen. A door I’d pushed shut just by showing up. A life she’d never live because Jack Cavanaugh chose terrifying over comfortable, chose the woman who made him feel like he was standing on the edge of a cliff.
Don’t waste it.
I wouldn’t.
“New York,” I said instead. “Tell me about it.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything. The job. The city. What your life would look like there.” I squeezed his hand. “Whatourlife might look like there.”
He was quiet for a moment, processing the shift from fighting to planning, from past to future. The radiator clanked. Outside, a car horn sounded.
Then he started talking about the Times building, the gray stone facade and the weight of all that history. About Jim Davis’office on the third floor, the view of 43rd Street, the sound of a newsroom that had been shaping American journalism for a century. About the apartment he’d looked at in Brooklyn—Cobble Hill, he said, quiet enough to think but close enough to the subway. About what investigative journalism looked like at a paper that could actually change things, topple governments, expose corruptions that mattered.
His voice changed when he talked about it. Became younger somehow, more open. This was the dream he’d been carrying and he’d decided to become someone worth noticing. The dream that had gotten him through every late night at the Globe, every source who wouldn’t talk, every editor who said his story wasn’t ready.
“There’s a Burmese restaurant in Carroll Gardens,” he said, “that Jim says has the best noodles in the city. And a bookstore in the Heights that stays open until midnight that you’d love. And—” He stopped. Laughed at himself. “I’m rambling.”
“I like it when you ramble.”
“You’re the only one.” But he was smiling now—really smiling, the kind that changed his whole face. He ran a hand through his thick hair.
“What about you? Publishing in New York—that’s where everything happens, right?”
“That’s where everything happens.” I tucked my hair behind my ear as I thought about Harrison & Webb, Patricia’s cigarette smoke, the slush pile that had become my whole world.
“I’d have to start over. New company, new contacts, new everything. Nobody there knows who I am.”
“Yet.”
“Yet.” I looked at him across the table, this man who’d almost given up on me and then decided not to, and felt something shift. Not certainty—it was too soon for certainty. But the beginning ofit. The foundation on which certainty might be built. “I’ll figure it out. I’m good at figuring things out.”
“I know you are.”
And somewhere between the overcooked chicken and the crunchy rice, we started building something new.
After dinner, he pulled out a record—Coltrane,A Love Supreme—and we sat on the couch in the dark, listening to the music fill the apartment. His arm was around me. My head was on his shoulder. The city hummed outside the window, oblivious to the quiet revolution happening in this small space.
“Tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day,” he said, the stubble on his cheek was rough against my face.
“I know.”
“I had this whole plan. Rosetti’s, the restaurant where we had our first real date. I was going to ask you to—” He stopped. “But now I’m thinking maybe we don’t need a fancy dinner. Maybe we just need this.”
“This is good.” I pressed closer to his side. “This is really good.”
