Whatever it was going to be.
“As you can probably see, Caleb Miller isn’t here today. But I am, because I felt like I should tell you all what we should have done from the start. Or at least tried to explain why he said what he did in a way that doesn’t hurt you all,” she started. And that felt good. It felt right.
Until she realized they were all listening with bated breath. Waiting for her to say,Everything you believed in is a lie, a big joke, a grand old hunk of nothing. And she just couldn’t. She couldn’t do it.
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams, she thought.
Then lifted the microphone again.
“The thing is, I know why you love romance novels. It’s the same reason I do—they make you feel like everything could be okay. That all those shots you missed,they’re being made in some other world. All those loves you lost, you didn’t lose them there. The person you longed for loved you, and they loved you so much, with all of their soul. And you know it, too. In a better world than this one, you never have to doubt it. But the thing is—”
She stopped there. It was necessary, because her voice was on the verge of breaking in a way she hadn’t believed it would. She had kind of thought, when she stepped onstage, that something inside her had died a little bit.
But somehow it didn’t feel like it.
There were tears in her eyes. Then she looked up to try to make them go away, and saw a girl in the upper tier of the audience. Dark hair, dark eyes, an off-the-shoulder jumper. She had one of his books clutched in her hands, and for some reason there were tears in her eyes, too.
And she knew how to finish.
“I’m so sorry that it doesn’t. I’m so sorry that all we have is this. I think I wanted you all to have something more than some thin and miserable thing, but I don’t know how to give it to you. All I can say is: whatever you see happen between people in the dreams you imagine, don’t stop hoping for something else beyond this. Hold on to love in your hearts. Never let anyone think it’s silly to be passionate, to be soft, to say you adore something with everything in you,” she said, those tears spilling down her cheeks now. One last thing to get out, without completely breaking down. One last thing she wanted them all to know. “And never forget, no matter what, that youdodeserve to be loved. Even if you’re not perfect. Even if you make mistakes. Even if you’re too much,or not enough. Don’t lose things because you cannot imagine better foryourself. Reality is harsh enough without you believing that. The dream of something more is in you, all of you, always.”
Twenty
There was a lot to deal with after Minnesota.
The plane ride home, of course. Which most likely would have been more hell than it was, if Caleb hadn’t paid for business class. A couple of people stared, but couldn’t really say anything to her. Whereas they definitely would have if she’d been crammed into economy. She could almost imagine someone next to her, poking her in her side.
Hey, aren’t you that woman who cried onstage at the Minneapolis Center for Business Excellence?she thought, and then was grateful that she got to shut the little door between her seat and everybody else’s. It made everything just a little bit more bearable. Though if she were being honest, that didn’t mean a lot.
The journey back to her flat through drab, gray London still felt draining. And of course the internet was dissecting absolutely everything. Some thought she had been trying to explain that they were no longer together. Some thought she had been attempting to ask people to leave them alone. Others decided it hadall been a ruse; many more thought it meant nothing at all.
She just wanted to show us some love, she read on the Reddit forum dedicated to his books. And that was enough to keep everything afloat, on the restoring-his-image front. In fact, if anything, it seemed to deepen his mystique. It added to the lore of Caleb Miller.
But it didn’t really feel like a victory.
In fact, she almost turned Beck down when he suggested a celebratory dinner. She was running on fumes, severely jet-lagged, still in her pajamas at four in the afternoon when he called. And he just sounded so overwhelmingly chipper. She couldn’t imagine sitting through two hours of joy when she’d never felt further from it. It felt like throwing herself into a pit of prickly things.
But her stomach was growling.
And Beck was strangely persuasive.
And that was how she found herself in clothes, outside, with a brave face on. Instead of in pajamas, indoors, with her eyes all puffy from crying about things she was barely letting herself think of. Half of her sure she’d made the wrong decision, until she saw Beck darting between plants and tables and fish tanks, in the jauntiest way she could imagine. Bow tie enormous, hair in an impressively luxurious almost pompadour, already beaming from ear to ear.
It somehow lifted her spirits just seeing him.
And again when he bear-hugged her.If I learn anything from this, she thought, as he squeezed her so tightly,it’s that I shouldn’t tell myself that nobody wants to be my friend. That I don’t fit in, that I’m always too much. Too much is okay. Too much is this lovely, lovely man.
Because, god, he really was.
“Here’s to you and Emmett Solutions,” he said, as he raised the only thing currently on the table to her. A salt pot shaped like a meatball. “A one-woman whirlwind of brilliance, who single-handedly brought a whole book career back to life with a bunch of pretend love. Now returned, entirely unscathed.”
Then he gestured with his eyes to the pepper pot.
The one shaped like a swirl of spaghetti.
She couldn’t oblige him, however. It felt kind of wrong to lie to a man that earnest and kind. “Well, maybe a little less pretend. And a little more scathed,” she said, and he lowered the raised pot. Put it down. Pushed it away, deflated.
“So you secretly fell in love with him, then?” he asked, in a tone that suggested he had kind of known this might happen. After all, it was practically a disease between them all, spread from one to the other. A really deadly one that made your heart try to eat itself.
