New York. Jack. The career I’d build at whatever publishing house would have me. Wednesday phone calls with Diane. Sunday mornings with the man who’d written me a love letter on yellow legal paper because he couldn’t figure out how to say it out loud. A whole life, stretching out ahead of me, unknown and terrifying and mine.
The snow kept falling. I tipped my head back and let it land on my face, cold pinpricks that melted on contact, each one a tiny shock against my skin.
Then from the church down the block, from the clock on someone’s mantel, from somewhere deep in the bones of the city came the first chime of midnight.
One. Two. Three.
The sound moved through me like a current. Each toll heavy, deliberate, final, the way a clock sounds in fairy tales when the spell is about to break. I gripped the railing of the fire escape and felt the hair rise on my arms.
Four. Five. Six.
Thirteen days,the voice had said.You have thirteen days.
Seven. Eight. Nine.
And now the thirteenth day was ending. The clock was striking midnight. Valentine’s Day was over.
Ten. Eleven.
Margaret.
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Low and warm, with an edge of something ancient that I’d almost forgotten in the weeks since I’d last heard it. It arrived with the eleventh chime and hung in the air like the last note of a song I’d been hearing all my life.
Twelve.
The final chime faded into silence. The fire escape was very still. Snow fell around me in slow motion, each flake catching the streetlight as it drifted past.
I didn’t move. Didn’t turn. Just sat there, gripping the cold iron railing, feeling my heart beat slow and steady in my chest.
“Yes,” I said quietly. “I’m here.”
You’ve made your choice. I see it in you, the way you’ve let go of what was, the way you’ve reached for what could be.
“I have.” My breath made clouds in the cold. “I’ve made my choice.”
The future you lived is fading. Soon it will be gone entirely.
I thought about the blank space in my memory. The people I couldn’t name. The love I couldn’t locate. Tried to summon a face, a voice, anything, and found nothing. Just the knowledge that I’d lost something precious, and the inability to remember what it was.
The grief was there, somewhere deep beneath the happiness. I could feel it like a stone at the bottom of a river. Present, solid, permanent, but covered by water so clear you could almost forget it existed. I’d lost something to be here. Someone. Andthe worst part was that I couldn’t even properly mourn them, because I didn’t know who they were anymore.
There is still time to return.
The words hung in the frigid air between us.
To go back to the life you left. The promotion. The apartment. The people you loved.
I felt it then—the last door. The biggest one. Standing open behind me, letting in a draft of something colder than the night air. I could turn around. Walk through it. Wake up tomorrow in 2014, fifty years old, alone, with a corner office and a Polaroid of people I’d remember again.
Or I could let it close.
“I don’t remember them,” I said. My voice was barely a whisper, and the snow swallowed the sound almost as soon as it left my mouth. “The people. I know they existed. I know I loved them. But they’re gone. I can’t bring them back by going back. I can only?—”
Only what?
“Only try to deserve this.” The words came slowly, pulled from somewhere deep. “The chance you gave me. The life I’m building. I can’t undo what I’ve done, can’t undo the choice I’ve made. But I can make it mean something. I can love him the way I should have loved him the first time. I can be brave instead of scared. I can build something worth the cost.”
I pressed my palms flat against the cold iron railing, feeling the chill seep through Jack’s coat into my bones.
