We didn’t talk much. Didn’t need to. We walked through Chinatown and past the Common and through the financial district, where the office buildings stood dark and empty, their lobbies glowing with the pale green light of security desks. We walked through Southie, past the bars spilling warmth and noise onto the sidewalk, past the church on the corner where someone had left a wreath on the door that was slowly being buried in snow.
At one point Jack stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, turned to face me, and kissed me. Not the quick, coffee-warm kiss from this morning. Something slower. Something that saidI can’t believe you’re hereandthank you for stayingandI am going to spend the rest of my life enjoying every moment.
When he pulled back, snow was caught in his eyelashes.
“What was that for?” I asked.
“Valentine’s Day.” He took my hand again. “Come on. It’s freezing.”
We walked the rest of the way home with his arm around my shoulders and my hand in his coat pocket and the snow falling all around us like the world was trying to make a point aboutbeauty and timing and the magic of being exactly where you’re supposed to be.
19
Maggie
Valentine’s Night
The apartment waswarm after the cold. Jack turned on the lamp by the couch, the one that cast everything in amber, and put on a record while I kicked off my boots and curled into the corner of the sofa. Coltrane again.A Love Supreme.Our record now, apparently. Every couple needed a song, we had a saxophone solo.
“Wine?” he asked.
“Please.”
He poured two glasses of the cheap red we’d bought at the corner store—the bottle with the Italian name neither of us could pronounce—and settled beside me. I tucked my feet under his thigh, and he rested his hand on my ankle, and we sat there for a while just listening. The music filling the apartment. The radiator clanking. The snow falling outside the window, visible in the orange cone of the streetlight.
“I wrote you something,” he said.
I looked at him. His face was half-lit by the lamp, shadows pooling in the hollows of his cheeks.
“Today. While you were at Diane’s.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded piece of yellow legal paper. The same kind he’d used for the goodbye letter—but this was different. I could see it in the way he held it. Carefully. Like it mattered.
“Read it to me,” I said.
He unfolded the paper. Cleared his throat. His hands were shaking slightly, and I wanted to reach over and steady them, but I didn’t. He needed to do this himself.
“Dear Maggie,” he read. His voice was quiet but steady.
“Back in the fall, I wrote you a different letter. A goodbye letter. I called you someone who wasn’t sure, someone who couldn’t choose me, someone who would never be willing to take the risk of loving someone fully.”
He looked up at me. “I was wrong.”
He ran a hand through his hair.
“I don’t know what happened to you in the time we were apart. I don’t know why you came back to me different, or why you suddenly seem able to say things you never could before. Part of me wants to ask. Part of me thinks that whatever it is, it’s yours to tell or not tell.
“But here’s what I do know. You’ve been showing up. Every day for two weeks, you’ve been present in a way you never were before. You’ve said things I didn’t think you could say. You’ve stayed when I expected you to run.
“And that’s everything.”
Coltrane played. I pressed my fingers against my eyes because they were burning, and I didn’t want to cry yet, not before he finished.
“I’m taking the job at the Times. You know that. And when I asked you to come with me, you said yes. Just like that. Likeit was simple. Like you hadn’t spent a year making everything between us the opposite of simple.
“I don’t think you know what that did to me.
“I’ve been sitting here all morning trying to write the thing I couldn’t say out loud last night. Which is this. I was ready for you to say no. I had a whole version of this prepared , the version where I moved to New York alone and called you on weekends and slowly watched us become people who used to know each other. I’d practiced it. I’d made peace with it.
“And then you said yes, and I realized I hadn’t made peace with anything. I’d just gotten very good at pretending I had.”
