But I felt different. Lighter. Like I’d set down a weight I’d been carrying so long I’d forgotten it was there.
Diane was in the kitchen when I let myself in, standing at the stove in her bathrobe, making what appeared to be pancakes. The radio was on—WZLX, the classic rock station—and “Take My Breath Away” was playing, which felt almost comically appropriate for Valentine’s Day. She looked up when I walked in, took in my yesterday’s clothes and my walk-of-shame hair, and grinned.
“Well, well, well.”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m not starting anything. I’m just making an observation.” She flipped a pancake with entirely too much satisfaction. “You look like someone who spent the night at Jack Cavanaugh’s apartment.”
“I look like someone who needs coffee and a shower.”
“Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.” She poured me a cup from the Mr. Coffee on the counter—the one we’d bought at Filene’s Basement last year, the one that made coffee that was always slightly too weak no matter how many scoops you used. “So? How was it?”
“We talked.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We had dinner.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And then we—” I took a sip of coffee to buy myself time. “We figured some things out.”
Diane turned off the burner and faced me fully, arms crossed, spatula still in hand. “Margaret Elizabeth Shaw. I have been your best friend since sophomore year of college. I have watched you sabotage every relationship you’ve ever been in, including this one. I have listened to you rationalize and deflect and make excuses for why you couldn’t just admit that you were in love with him.”
She pointed the spatula at me. “So you are going to sit down at this table and tell me everything, or I am going to eat all these pancakes myself and feel zero guilt about it.”
I sat down at the table and told her everything.
Not everything everything—not the time travel, not the fifty-year-old consciousness in a twenty-three-year-old body, not the Polaroid that had faded to nothing in my purse. But I told her about the letter. About finding it in Jack’s trash, about the goodbye he’d written and never sent, about standing in his apartment holding the proof that we’d both been running from each other in opposite directions.
I told her about the conversation that followed. About the way he’d looked at me when I said I’d come to New York. About the fear in his eyes and the hope underneath it.
I told her about saying I love you and meaning it. About staying the night and waking up next to him and realizing that this—this ordinary, terrifying, wonderful thing—was what I wanted. What I’d always wanted, even when I’d been too scared to admit it.
When I finished, Diane was quiet for a long moment. The pancakes sat cooling between us, forgotten.
“So you’re moving to New York,” she said finally.
“Eventually. Not right away. But... yes.”
“And you’re sure about this?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “For the first time in my life, I’m completely sure.”
Diane reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
“Then I’m happy for you.” She smiled, and her eyes were suspiciously bright. “Genuinely, stupidly happy.”
But she held onto my hand, and after a moment her expression shifted, something quieter moving underneath the brightness.
“Can I say something?” she asked.
“Since when do you ask permission?”
“Since it’s something I’ve been thinking about and I don’t want to ruin your perfect morning with my emotional baggage.” She took a breath.
“I’ve known this was coming. Not the New York part specifically, but the... leaving part. I could feel it. The way you’ve been different these past couple weeks. Braver, more open, more like the Maggie I always knew was in there somewhere. And I kept thinking, she’s going to go. Wherever she’s going, she’s going to go, and I’m going to be the one who stays.”
