Jack found me. He always found me, had been finding me for twenty-eight years whenever I drifted too far into my own head.
“Who were they?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” I watched Sarah and Emma disappear into the crowd. “I thought... I don’t know what I thought.”
“You okay?”
I turned to look at him. My husband. My partner. My choice, made on a snowy Valentine’s night on a fire escape in another time, remade every morning when I woke up next to him and decided to stay another day.
“Do you ever wonder about the paths we don’t take?” I asked.
He considered the question seriously, the way he considered everything, like it mattered, like my thoughts mattered, like the inner workings of my mind were worth his full attention.
“Sometimes,” he said. “But I’m pretty happy with this one.”
“Me too.”
Diane materialized at my other elbow. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
I looked across the ballroom, but Sarah and Emma were gone.
“Maybe I did.”
Diane didn’t push. She hooked her arm through mine and steered me toward the dance floor.
“You know what I keep thinking about?” Diane said, spinning me once, poorly, nearly taking out a waiter. “That morning you told me you were moving to New York. When I made you pinky swear.”
“I remember.”
“You kept your promise.” Diane’s voice was quieter now, almost lost in the music. “Twenty-eight years, Mags. You never disappeared.”
My throat tightened. “Neither did you.”
“Of course I didn’t. Pinky swear. Legally binding in the state of Massachusetts.” Diane squeezed my hand. “Never let you go. Not even when you were a pain in the ass, which, for the record?—”
“Ninety percent of the time.”
“See? You do listen.”
The song ended. Diane released me with a theatrical bow and disappeared into the crowd.
The band started playing something slow. I recognized the opening bars—“At Last,” the Etta James version, the song we’d danced to at our wedding in a small ceremony with Diane as maid of honor and Ed as best man.
Jack appeared. He took my champagne glass and set it on a nearby table alongside his own. Then he offered his hand, palm up, the same gesture he’d made a thousand times over the years.
“Dance with me, Mrs. Cavanaugh?”
“Always.”
We moved onto the floor as the music swelled, finding each other the way we always did, my hand in his, his arm around my waist, our bodies fitting together with the ease of long practice. I rested my head against his chest and listened to his heartbeat,steady and familiar, the rhythm I’d fallen asleep to for twenty-eight years.
Somewhere in another life,I thought,I might have been “Aunt Mags.”
The thought came from nowhere or from somewhere so deep I couldn’t trace its origin. A little girl in a hospital bed. A book about friendship and sacrifice. A voice sayingI love you, Aunt Mags,in a tone that meant everything.
I might have watched her grow up. Might have been there when she got into Harvard. Might have cried at her white coat ceremony, might have been the person she called when she matched at Sloan Kettering, might have known the fierce particular love of a bond that wasn’t blood but was real anyway.
I didn’t remember any of it.
