“Right!” Cricket said with a satisfied sigh. “Well, welcome to the building, Freddie! And call if you need anything!”
He nodded to her before he looked at Anne again.
A million different words ran through Anne’s mind, along with a million different ways to put them together. She could ask how he was, what he had been doing, tell him how much she had wondered about him over the past eight years. But in the end, none of that mattered, did it? Because, from the way he was glaring at her, she knew he didn’t care either way.
“It was really good to see you, Freddie,” she said, forcing yet another smile. One that would mask how her heart sank with the realization.
Then she closed the door.
CHAPTER 5
Fuuuuuuuuuuuck.
Freddie was dreaming. Or hallucinating. Maybe both.
But as he stared at the dull gray paint of the front door to apartment 4B, he didn’t wake up. And if Anne had looked out the peephole right then, she would have seen him standing there, waiting for his brain to reboot. He wasn’t even sure if it did, only that he eventually found his way back into the elevator and pressed up.
The doors closed and when they opened again, he half expected to wake up in a cold sweat and realize this was all a dream. That the last ten minutes hadn’t actually happened at all.
He didn’t, though. When the elevator arrived on the eighth floor, he was left staring out into the hallway, still trying to process it all.
He hadn’t recognized Anne at first. When the apartment door had swung open, it hadn’t even registered. Her clothes were different from anything he had seen Anne in before—the carefully pressed shirts and pristine sweaters had been replaced by a baggy sweatshirt, and her blond hair was in a messy bun instead of blown out and pulled back, like she used to wear it. But thenhe saw her eyes. Those blue eyes were the same, clear and large and locked on him.
There hadn’t been any time to figure out how it was possible, why she was standing in a doorway of his new building. Ellis’s assistant had interrupted before he’d had an opportunity to say more than hello. Then she shut the door before he could say goodbye.
The elevator dinged, warning that the doors were about to close again, and he finally stepped out. The keys were still in his hand, and he was only half-aware of sliding them into the lock, turning them until he heard the dead bolt echo in the empty apartment beyond. Then he swung it open and stepped inside the hollow foyer of his ex-girlfriend’s childhood apartment.
What. The. Fuck.
Was this some kind of twisted joke? He didn’t believe in the universe sending him signs, but this was too close to some kind of karmic revenge. A chill ran through his spine as he felt his mental walls crumbling into a pile of dust.
He ran a hand down his face. Had he somehow known that this was the place Anne avoided taking him to for so long? He only knew about an old building in the East Village—she never mentioned the Uppercross by name—but now here he was, the owner of her former home.
He slowly walked through each room, looking for any details he might have missed before. But it was empty. Even worse, the painters would be arriving any minute to apply a clean coat of eggshell white. He had organized her erasure without even realizing it.
Wouldn’t you have done that anyway?a voice mused somewhere in his head.She did.
That’s right. She had.
We were at NYU together.That’s how she had described their relationship. Reduced to its most basic form. And suddenly the tinder of long-neglected pain had flared alive in Freddie’s chest. There was no reason the words should have hurt as much as they did. It was the truth. But a truncated version of it, one that left out the fine details, the messy, bleeding heart of it.
His wallet suddenly felt heavy in the pocket of his jacket. He let a moment pass before he reached for it, waited even longer to swallow his pride and open it to look inside.
There it was, slotted between his credit cards and a couple of twenties: the very first note to Anne, written on a flimsy bar napkin and folded into a triangle. He had scribbled it down after meeting her for the first time. It was during his first semester freshman year and he’d seen her from across the bar at the Half Pint. Once he built up the courage to introduce himself, they’d talked for hours, only pausing when the bartender announced last call. After he walked her outside to make sure she got a cab, he went back in, grabbed a napkin from the bar, and wrote her a note.
But he’d never given it to her. The plan had been that he would eventually, so he put it in his wallet for safekeeping, waiting until the time was right.
Obviously, it never was. He’d given up that dream years ago. But he never had the nerve to get rid of it. Instead, he’d carried it with him to Argentina, all while ignoring and denying what she had meant to him, painting over the cracks that Anne Elliot had left in her wake.
And now he was about to do it in the most literal sense with Benjamin Moore’s eggshell white. Except instead of feeling cathartic, he felt robbed of something. He had never seen this place, never known this side of her, and now it was gone.
But she’s not, that same voice whispered.
He ignored that, too. He couldn’t start down that road again. His heart had been broken before; he had no interest in it happening again.
No, right now he needed to clear his head.
He shoved his wallet back in his pocket and pulled out his phone, swiping open his contacts and pressing “call.”
