“I know.” I covered her hands with mine. “I know that. I just—it takes a minute. To believe it.”
“Take all the minutes you need.” She kissed me. “I’ll keep showing up until you run out of doubt.”
I pulled her close. Held on.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” she said against my chest.
“Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“I should warn you I’m making breakfast. It’s going to be terrible.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
We made breakfast together in the tiny kitchen, bumping hips and elbows, ruining eggs and burning toast in what was becoming our signature style. She pressed her cold feet against my shins under the table and I yelped, and she laughed, really laughed, the kind that crinkled her whole face, and I pulled her chair closer to mine because I could.
“I should go home,” she said eventually. “Shower. Change. Let Diane interrogate me about where I’ve been all night.”
“Will you survive the interrogation?”
“Barely.” She stood, and I caught her hand before she could move away.
“Maggie.”
She looked at me. Waited.
“Thank you for being here when I woke up.”
Something shifted in her face, understanding. She knew what it had cost me, those minutes of an empty bed. Knew what it meant that I’d said it out loud instead of hiding it.
“Every morning,” she said. “That’s the plan.”
She kissed me one more time, got dressed, and left. I stood in the kitchen listening to the sound of her footsteps in the stairwell. The woman I loved, walking away. The woman I loved, coming back.
While she was gone, I sat at my desk and wrote.
Not the follow-up piece I owed the Globe. Not the notes I should have been making for the Times. I pulled a sheet of yellow legal paper from the drawer—the same pad I’d used for the goodbye letter, the one she’d found crumpled in my trash, and I wrote her a different kind of letter.
The words came slowly. I crossed things out. Started over. Crossed out more. The pen left dents in the paper where I pressed too hard, trying to get it right.
I wasn’t good at this. I could write a thousand words about city council corruption without breaking a sweat, but trying to tell one woman what she meant to me reduced me to a stuttering mess on yellow paper. I kept writing.
When I finished, I folded the letter and put it in my jacket pocket. For later. For when she came back and the night was quiet and I could say the things I’d spent all morning trying to get right.
18
Maggie
The T was crowded, even for a Thursday morning. Commuters in wool coats and puffy jackets, breath fogging in the cold, everyone clutching coffee cups and folded copies of the Globe. A man near me was reading the sports section, something about the Celtics’ chances this season, and a woman in a power suit with shoulder pads sharp enough to cut glass was marking up a legal brief with a red pen.
I found a spot near the door and held onto the pole, watching the city blur past the windows. No headphones, no phones, no way to disappear into a screen, just the rattling of the train and the murmur of conversation and the particular intimacy of strangers sharing space.
My reflection stared back at me from the dark glass between stations. Messy hair. Yesterday’s clothes. The look of a woman who’d spent the night somewhere she hadn’t planned to spend it.
I looked happy.
It startled me, that realization. I’d spent so long looking tired, or worried, or carefully neutral, the face of someone who’d learned to hide what she was feeling so no one could use itagainst her. But this morning, there was something different in my eyes. Something that looked almost like hope.
The train pulled into my stop. I climbed the stairs to the street, squinting against the gray morning light. Jamaica Plain looked the same as it always did, triple-deckers lining the street, the corner bodega with its hand-lettered signs, Mrs. Kowalski’s cat watching me from the window of the first-floor apartment.
