“I’m asking you to choose me, Maggie. Not because I deserve it, God knows I’ve made my share of mistakes with us, but because I choose you. I’ve been choosing you since the night you called me a ‘tragically literal thinker’ and I realized I’d never met anyone like you. I’m choosing you now. And I’m going to keep choosing you, every day, for as long as you’ll let me.”
He folded the letter. Set it on the coffee table between us. His eyes were bright.
“So that’s it,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to say. Happy Valentine’s Day.”
For a moment I couldn’t speak. The words sat between us, on the coffee table, in the air, in the space where the old Jack and the old Maggie had spent a year circling each other like planets too afraid to collide.
“Can I keep it?” I asked.
“It’s yours.”
“I’m going to frame it.” I picked up the letter and pressed it flat against my chest. “Hang it somewhere prominent. Show it to people and say ‘this is what Jack Cavanaugh wrote me on Valentine’s Day in 1987.’”
“Please don’t.”
“Too late. Already decided.” But I was reaching for him, pulling him toward me, the letter crumpling slightly between us as I kissed him. I tasted wine and salty tears. Mine, his, I couldn’t tell anymore, and when I pulled back, his forehead rested against mine.
“I love you,” I said. “I said it last night and I meant it, and I’m saying it again now because I want you to know this isn’t just me being caught up in the moment. This is me choosing you. Deliberately. Intentionally. With everything I have.”
“I love you too.”
The words came out easy. Like they’d always been there, waiting for us to stop being afraid of them.
We stayed on the couch for a while after that. Talking about nothing, about Robbie’s dumplings, about Diane’s threat to move into our apartment if I didn’t call enough, about the fish tank in the restaurant and whether the goldfish was happy or just very good at hiding its existential despair. The kind of conversation that meant nothing and everything, the ordinary mortar between the bricks of a life being built.
“I’m going to shower,” he said eventually, kissing the top of my head as he stood. “The hot water takes forever, so if you hear banging on the pipes, that’s just the building expressing its feelings.”
“The building has feelings?”
“Strong ones. Mostly about plumbing.”
I heard the bathroom door close. The squeal of the faucet. The building expressing its feelings, right on cue.
I sat on the couch for another minute, holding my wine glass, listening to the water run. Then I set the glass down and went to the window.
I grabbed Jack’s coat from the hook by the door, the wool one that smelled like him, newsprint and cold air, and climbed through the window onto the fire escape.
The cold hit me immediately. February in Boston, eleven-something at night, and I was sitting on an iron grate in borrowed coat and bare feet that I’d regret in about three minutes. But the city spread out below in its winter quiet, the streetlights glowing orange through the snow, the rooftops of South Boston dusted white, and I needed this. Needed the air. Needed a moment alone with whatever was happening inside my chest.
I thought about New York.
Not the abstract idea of it, not theconceptof moving, which I’d already agreed to. But the specific, tactile reality. Packing boxes. Labeling them in marker. The U-Haul or the Greyhound or however you got your life from one city to another in 1987. Walking into a new apartment that didn’t smell like anything yet. Waking up in a borough I’d never lived in, in a bed I hadn’t slept in before, in a city that had twenty million stories happening at once and didn’t care whether mine was one of them.
Starting over. At twenty-three. With a man I loved and a career I’d have to rebuild from scratch and nothing but the knowledge—impossible, unearnable, entirely private—that I’d done this before. That I’d built a life once, alone, on grit and fear and the stubborn refusal to need anyone. And that it hadn’t been enough.
This time I was building it with someone. This time I was building it on something better than fear.
I pulled Jack’s coat tighter around me and watched my breath cloud in the cold air.
Doors, I thought. That’s what a life is. A series of doors. You open one and walk through, and the one behind you closes. Sometimes softly, sometimes with a sound that echoes for years. You can’t go back. You can stand in the hallway and stare at the closed door and wonder what was on the other side, butyou can’t reopen it. That’s not how doors work. That’s not how choices work.
I’d closed so many doors to get here. The door to my old life. The corner office, the bay windows, the years of careful solitary success. The door to the people I’d loved in that life, whose faces I could no longer picture, whose names I could no longer?—
A pang. Sharp and sourceless, like a muscle cramp in my chest. I pressed my hand to my sternum and waited for it to pass.
There had been people. I was sure of that. Important people, people I’d loved, people whose absence should have left a hole big enough to fall into. But when I reached for them in my memory, there was nothing. Just white space. Just the faint impression of something that used to be there, like a photograph left too long in sunlight.
I’d closed those doors. And new ones had opened.
