“It’s fine,” he says, turning his wrist under my grip. His fingers close around mine, his thumb settling into my palm. “I spent the past two days in the cardiac unit, just to find out it wasn’t a heart attack. It was my body reacting to the pain of losing you.”
His body’s reaction to losing me. Not a heart attack. A heartbreak. The man whose actual heart condition brought us together, whose chest I used to fall asleep against, whose pulse I feel throbbing so heavily now under my fingertips as I hold on to him like I don’t dare let go.
My grip tightens on his hand. I can’t speak. My throat has closed around everything I want to say and the tears sliding down my cheeks are saying it for me.
“I called you,” he says, his voice thick. “From the hospital bed that first night. I don’t even know if the call connected or how long it rang. I was on a lot of medication and I could barely hold the phone. When I tried again the next day, your number was blocked.”
The tears come harder now. Fast and hot down both cheeks, because I am hearing the other side of a silence I’ve been living inside. The blank phone screen. The “maybe he doesn’t care” story I told myself over and over while wiping down counters and smiling at customers. All the while he was in a hospital bedtrying to reach me and hitting a wall I built with my stubborn pride.
“I’m sorry.” My apology comes out wet and shaky. “I didn’t know. I thought you just... I thought we were done.”
“I don’t want us to be done.” He says it simply. The way he says other things that are not up for negotiation. “I’ll never be done trying to make you forgive me.”
His free hand comes up and his fingers brush the wetness off my cheek. The touch is feather-light and so tender that a small sound escapes my throat. Not a word. Just the sound of my last shred of resistance officially leaving the building.
I walked away from this. From everything we shared. From him.
But he’s here now, and all of my fears, all of my insecurities, melt away as I look into his eyes.
He brings my hand up to his lips. He kisses my fingers, then holds our joined hands over his heart. “You are everything to me, Ella. I love you.”
Three words. The same ones he said in Brooklyn. Except this time, I don’t want to run from them.
I’m not afraid of welcoming him back into my heart. The truth is, he’ll always occupy that part of me. What I’m afraid of is the part that comes afterward. The part where he goes back home to his fourteen-billion-dollar life, and I stay here pouring coffee, and the distance does what distance always does.
“How is this ever going to work, Alec? Your life is in New York. Mine is here.”
He nods. “I thought of that too. And I wasn’t going to come here without a solution.”
A wry glint sparks in his eyes, and it wakes up his dimples as he lets go of my hand to pick up something that’s lying on the booth seat beside him. It’s one of those large, fold-up maps like they sell at the gas station down the street.
I watch, confused and admittedly fascinated, as he spreads the map of the entire United States out on the table between us.
“I don’t need New York. I can run HoloTech from anywhere with a laptop and a signal.” He says it the way he says facts. As though it’s already been decided. “I don’t care where I am, Ella. I only care that you’re there with me.”
Then he sets something beside it. A pad of sticky notes. Bright yellow.
“Now, I’ve heard the proper way to do this is with a red pin and your eyes closed, but I had to improvise.”
He remembers. One of my many rambling stories, random bits of my life that I relayed mainly as a way to fill awkward silences, yet he remembers. I laugh, caught somewhere between total elation and disbelief as he peels off one of the sticky notes and hands it to me.
“Wherever you choose,” he says. “I’ll go. Here too, if that’s what you want.”
I look at the map. At an entire country laid out before me and Alec’s solemn declaration that he’ll follow me anywhere.
I look down at the yellow paper in my hand.
I don’t close my eyes when I make my choice.
I look at him. And I know. The way I knew Sedona was home before I’d ever set foot in it. Leaning across the table, I press the sticky note to his chest. Right over his heart.
“This is where I want to be.”
He exhales, and his hand comes up to hold mine. “You’re already there. Forever.”
“I love you,” I say. My voice breaks around the words, and I let it. “I love you, Alec. I should have said it before I got in that stupid car two nights ago. I should have said it in Barbados when I felt it for the first time and I was too scared.”
He slides out of the booth and walks over to me, taking my hand in his and pulling me up to him. “With you in my arms, I’ll always be home, wherever that is.”
