She has to pass me to get to the sandwich place, so I don’t take my eyes off her as she comes toward me. Her gaze darts between me and whatever is going on around me. She slows as she approaches me.
“Hey,” I say. “You look ... hungry.” I was going to start with “beautiful,” but I don’t want this to be confusing for her. Although telling her she looks hungry probably wasn’t the best start.
“Yeah, I’m going to get some lunch.”
I hold up the paper bag with the sandwich in it. “I got you lunch. It’s the special. I thought we could try it together.” Her gaze slides from me to what I’m holding up and then back again.
“How long have you been out here?”
“Oh, I only got this fifteen minutes ago.” I’d called my assistant down and gotten them to go get another lunch for us both. I didn’t want to take my eyes off Lucy’s building. I couldn’t risk missing her. My assistant thought I’d gone completely nuts. Just getting me out of the building for ten minutes would usually be almost impossible. I’d been standing out here for two hours. But it’s worth it.
“Okay,” Lucy says suspiciously. “Thanks. I think.”
“Want to eat together?” I ask. It occurs to me that Lucy’s late for lunch because she’s busy and she’ll need to get back immediately. If that’s the case, I’ll have to wait. She’s worth it, even if every minute without her feels like a month.
She looks around at the tables. “Sure. I’m trying to only have a thirty-minute lunch break so I can spend the other thirty minutes studying.”
“Studying?” I ask. “The LSAT?” I let her lead the way to an empty table.
“Yeah,” she says as she sits down. “I’m at least going to try.”
“Right,” I say. “You have to try. Because if you don’t, you’ll never know if you could have had something.”
She frowns and looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.
I empty the brown bag onto the table. “‘I am half agony, half hope,’” I mumble to myself.
“What was that?” she asks with a smile. “Did you just quote Jane Austen at me?”
“Might have,” I say. “There was a big Jane Austen display at the airport bookstore yesterday. I remember you sayingPersuasionwas your favorite. I picked it up. And then there was no internet on the plane on the way back to New York.”
“Where did you go?”
“Boston. Back to the beginning.”
“Back to the beginning?”
“I needed to say a few things to Ed,” I say. “Things that needed to be said face-to-face.”
She takes a bite of her sandwich and watches me as she chews, waiting for more information.
“I wanted to apologize to him. I haven’t been the best business partner.”
Lucy nods like she knows what I’m saying is the truth.
“Because of what happened with me and my dad.” It’s good to say it out loud. Like saying it dilutes the feelings.
She swallows. “You were worried Ed was going to abandon you, betray you, like your father did.”
I nod. Of course, she’s always known. Lucy knows me better than anyone ever has. “One of the lines from the book really stuck with me. I mean, a lot stuck with me, but when Anne is talking to Captain Harville—”
“When Wentworth is writing Anne the letter?”
“Yeah, she says, ‘If the change be not from outward circumstances, it must be from within.’ It stuck with me. Not because of what he’s saying about Benwick, but because it finally made me see that my dad’s never going to admit what he did. I just need to accept that and know within myself what happened. Trust myself that I know the truth.”
She breaks into a grin. “That’s my favorite scene of any Austen book.”
“Wentworth is half crazy, needing to know if Anne has given up on him,” I say, wondering whether Lucy will give me a sign. “We find out what we’ve always suspected—that he never stopped loving her.”
