He crossed the kitchen in three steps and pulled me into his arms, lifting me off my feet. I laughed—surprised, breathless—and he set me down and kissed me and I kissed him back.
“We’re doing this,” he said. “We’re really doing this.”
“We’re really doing this.”
He held me there in the kitchen, and I pressed my face against his chest and listened to his heartbeat, the same steadyrhythm I’d fallen asleep to last night, the same rhythm I planned to fall asleep to for the rest of my life.
Outside, the snow from last night was starting to melt. The sky was clearing. Somewhere in New York, a publisher was making plans for a book about a retired librarian and a stray cat, and somewhere in the same city, an apartment was waiting to be found, and a life was waiting to be built.
And somewhere on a fire escape in South Boston, the snow was covering the place where I’d sat at midnight and made the only choice that mattered.
The one that led me here.
21
Epilogue
February 14, 2015
Twenty-Eight Years Later
Maggie
The gala wasat The Pierre. One of those charity events where the tickets cost more than some people’s monthly rent and the champagne was actually worth drinking. I stood near the bar in a black dress that cost too much and heels that were already killing my feet, watching the room and thinking that Maggie Shaw from Jamaica Plain would never have believed she’d end up here.
Maggie Cavanaugh, though. Fifty-one years old and still not entirely used to the name after twenty-eight years. She’d figured it out.
The ballroom glittered with the particular excess of New York philanthropy. Crystal chandeliers cast warm light across women in designer gowns and men in tuxedos, everyone holding glasses of champagne and making conversation about stock portfolios and summer houses and which private school had the bestlacrosse program. A string quartet played something classical in the corner, barely audible over the hum of networking disguised as small talk.
I’d attended a hundred events like this over the years. First as Jack’s plus-one, then as an editor building my own reputation, then as someone who actually belonged in these rooms. I’d never quite gotten used to it, the ease with which these people moved through the world, the casual assumption that everything would work out because it always had. But I’d learned to fake it well enough that most people couldn’t tell the difference.
Jack appeared at my elbow with two glasses of something that sparkled. “You’re making your judgy face.”
“I’m making my ‘these shoes were a mistake’ face.”
“Same thing.” He handed me a glass. His hair was gray at the temples now, distinguished in a way that irritated me because my own gray required monthly appointments with a colorist. But his eyes were the same, blue and sharp and looking at me like I was still the most interesting person in the room. “To us.”
We clinked glasses. Drank.
Twenty-eight years since a snowy Valentine’s Day in Boston. Of building a life I’d never imagined, in a city I’d learned to love, with a man who still made me laugh and still drove me crazy and still, after all this time, looked at me like I was worth choosing.
My career at Calloway & Marsh, and then Random House, and then back to Calloway when Jonathan offered me the editorial director position, had exceeded everything I’d dreamed of.
I’d started that conversation in April of ’87, sitting across from Jonathan Calloway in his office on West 18th Street, and had never looked back. I’d championed books that became bestsellers and a few that became classics. By the time I’d retired three years ago, I’d been Executive Editor with the corner office, the industry respect, and the career I’d spent mywhole life building. Different from the life I’d left behind, but no less successful. Maybe more, because this time I’d done it without the fear. Without the walls. Without spending every day wondering if I was missing something essential.
Our apartment was in the Village now, the second one, bigger than the first, with built-in bookshelves lining every wall and a view of Washington Square Park that I never got tired of watching. Jack’s Pulitzer sat in his study, next to a photo from our wedding day and a framed letter on yellow legal paper, the one he’d written me that Valentine’s Day, read aloud on a secondhand couch while Coltrane played. I’d made good on my threat to frame it. He’d pretended to be embarrassed, but I’d caught him looking at it sometimes, when he thought I wasn’t watching.
“You’re thinking too loud,” Jack said, pulling me back to the present. “I can hear you from here.”
“I’m thinking about us. Is that allowed?”
“On our anniversary? I’ll permit it.” He clinked his glass against mine again. “What specifically about us?”
“How lucky we got.” I looked around the ballroom at all these people in their expensive clothes, living their expensive lives, probably convinced that they’d earned everything they had. “How easily it could have gone differently.”
“It didn’t, though.”
“No.” I leaned into him, feeling the solid warmth of his shoulder against mine. “It didn’t.”
