That was Nora’s influence, he thought—maybe she held on to things too hard, but she did love an artifact, more like her parents than maybe she realized. Over at her place, she had an origin story for everything, and mentioning them brought a certain smile to her face, always. The teapot that had been an anniversary gift from her grandfather to her grandmother. The painted tile that Nora’s mother had made in third grade. The lamp that he’d seen her giving away last week, apparently from Italy.
So even though he didn’t much want to look at the book or the photograph yet, it comforted him, somehow, to know he’d held on to them; it gave him hope he could fix this with Nora. Still, for the first time in his life he thought it might be nice to have the kind of artifact lying around that might make him feel like she did—comforted and closer to someone she’d lost.
A thought hit him, and he set down his glass so quickly that water splashed over the back of his hand. He shook it off, wiped it on his shorts, and moved down his galley to the drawer where he always shoved extra pens or rubber bands or those garbage bag ties he never ended up using anyway. He yanked it open, heart hiccupping, and there it was, exactly what he was looking for: a scroll of paper, a number written lightly at the top.
He smiled down at it, the memory like a balm: in his mind was a long green dress, the line of Nora’s shoulders, her long braid and her flower crown, the look she’d given him when she’d handed this scroll over to him, mischief in her eyes.
He felt a smile spread over his face.
He took it with him to his bedroom, for the first time in days not dreading the thought of lying down without her. He propped his pillow up against the wall (something to be said for his furniture-arranging) and sat back, tapping the scroll against his palm and thinking about that night—not only Nora, but also Mrs. Salas and her Solo cup, Mr. Salas’s food and Benny’s beer, Jonah calling him “Beanpole” and Marian and Emily sitting in the front row, their hands joined together. He thought about himself at that microphone, determined to win over the crowd.
When he first pulled it open, it didn’t strike him as much more than what he saw that night: a name he recognized, a soothingly short number of lines. “Sonnet 98.” Spring, summer, flowers, that sort of thing. He remembered Nora saying it was sad, and Jonah, too. He didn’t know if he was up for sad, but he was up for starting somewhere, and a poem that meant something to his story with Nora, that seemed as good as any idea he had so far and definitely better thanGood luck.
So he started to read.
At first it wasn’t easy: words he recognized but that he struggled to make sense of in this context, laid out in an order that seemed unnatural to him. He read it silently twice, all of it swimming together, before he tried it out loud again. One line at a time, making sense of punctuation marks like he never had in his life. He read it and read it, until it got easier, until it got to be like breathing.
“‘From you have I been absent in the spring,’” he read, again and again.
A poem about missing someone.
About moving through the world and missing someone all the time. A few days, or maybe sixteen whole years. Living every spring and summer of your life without really noticing it. Everything you looked at that was beautiful you couldn’t see quite right:figures of delight, all of them an imitation of the person you were missing the most.
“‘Yet seem’d it winter still,’” he read, the phrase like a cold wind across his skin, “‘and you, away, / As with your shadow I with these did play.’”
Jesus Christ, thatwasa sad poem.
But also . . . also it felt like a start.
He looked at the clock, realized he’d been reading for a long time. Where Nora was, it wasn’t so late. He could have typed it all out right then, probably from memory by now. The next time she checked her phone, she’d find it—this memory of one of the first nights they’d spent together, this written expression of how he’d felt all the time without her. Not since she left.
Since before, since before.
But as he reached for his phone, he had a passing thought for the morning, for the golden hour when Nora would be waking up in California. By that time, he would have already started his day. He’d send it then, he decided, so that she’d know how much he missed her, thought of her, while she was gone.
So she’d know how glad he was that she was coming back.
That, he decided, would be exactly the right start.
Chapter 17
“He’s going to fight for you, Nora.”
Sitting crisscrossed on Deepa’s jewel-blue velvety couch, Nora sipped her wine and shrugged, affecting a posture of nonchalance that did not, perhaps, entirely match the range of feelings she’d wrestled with over the course of this long and stressful week in San Diego. Surprise and frustration, excitement and anxiety, certainty and also a fair bit of sadness. Inside her, it all swirled, a soaking-rain sort of thunderstorm that somehow felt welcome for all the things it was washing away.
“He might,” said Nora. “But it won’t change my mind.”
As of today, Nora had made the decision: she was leaving Verdant, too.
Not right away, not until she’d wrapped up work on all her current build-outs, and not until she’d helped Austin bring on someone new.
But soon.
It wasn’t that being back in the office had been awful. In a way, it’d been comforting: friends she hadn’t seen in months other than through videoconferences, favorite snacks from the cafeon the building’s first floor, two in-person bathroom mirror meeting debriefs with Dee, who was taking all the news in happy stride, given that she had already found a new and better gig at a marketing firm back in Berkeley. Even the time Nora had spent with Austin had been comforting: however frustrating he could be, it was good to remember how well they’d always worked together, how he trusted her expertise and valued her input, even on projects she wasn’t all that enthusiastic about.
But it had also been clarifying. In person, there was no denying the way Austin had changed, the way his priorities had shifted. And now that he’d revealed the full extent of his plans—the move to LA, the shift away from sustainability alone, the pivot to celebrity and influencer brands—Nora had known there was a reckoning coming for her and Austin. After the full team meeting in the afternoon, he’d pulled her aside and practically begged her to come back to California. “More money,” he’d said. “A new title, whatever you want. But this will go smoother if you’re with us in person.”
He’d left thatifthere as a concession—not quite telling her that remote work was off the table, but definitely not pledging his ongoing support of it, either. Certainly not if she wanted more money, or that new title.
