Jane smiled sadly. “I’m feeling all shiny and brand-new. In all my life, I’ve never felt like I do now. I’ve been emptied out and aim to reclaim my own self in the truest, best way I can, so I’m not sure yet what I want. When I was Miss Erstwhile, you were perfect, but that was back in Austenland. Or are we still in Austenland? Maybe I’ll never leave.”
He nodded as if she made complete sense. “You don’t have to decide anything now. If you will allow me to just be near you for a time, then we can see.” He rested his head back and turned to look at her. She did the same, their faces inches apart. He always was so good at seeing her. And it occurred to her just then that she herself was more Darcy than Erstwhile, sitting there admiring his fine eyes, feeling dangerously close to falling in love against her will.
“Just be near . . .” she repeated.
He nodded. “But if . . . you once told me that you had a dream of sharing a little house with someone who knows you best in the world, who adores you, and you painted a picture of a family, and a couple reading side by side after the kids are in bed. A quiet life full of love. That dream struck a familiar tune against my own heart, and every moment since, I’ve wondered if you were being sincere, and if so, if I could be that someone for you.”
Jane breathed in, taking those words inside her. She thought she might like to keep them for a while. She considered never giving them up.
Henry’s eyes squeezed tightly shut, and his whole body tensed. “Okay, the ‘just be near you’ sounded nice, but I had better admit up front that I don’t know how to have a fling.” He rubbed his head with even more force. “I’m not good at playing around and then saying goodbye. I’m throwing myselfat your feet because I’m hoping for a shot at forever. You don’t have to say anything now, no promises required. I just thought you should know.”
He forced himself to relax back again, his face turned slightly away, as if he didn’t dare to see her expression. It was probably for the best. She was staring with wide, panicked eyes. Slowly, a grin took over her face. In her mind was running the conversation she was going to have with Molly.I didn’t think it was possible, but I found a man as wildly intense as I was . . .
The plane started moving, that scatty slow motion that seemed to go both forward and backward at once. Jane kept looking from the window to the man next to her, checking to see if he was really there. Was this a better ending thantallyho?
“So,” he said, “is New York City our final destination?”
“That’s home.”
“Good. There’s bound to be work for an attractive and highly skilled British actor, wouldn’t you think?”
“There are thousands of restaurants, and those waiter jobs have high turnover.”
“Right.”
“Loads of theaters too. I think you’d be wonderful in a comedy.”
“Because I’m laughable.”
“It doesn’t hurt.” On impulse, she took his hand, rubbed his index finger between her fingers. It was an intimate gesture and yet felt natural. What did she want? This is so reckless . . . Stop thinking that. Maybe it could work . . . Oh, be practical, Jane. So what was she to do? She had worked to heal herself from her vulnerability to the fantastical idea of love, but if she could have something real . . . Was there anything real?
“You want to have kids someday, don’t you?” she asked, just to get that one out of the way.
“Did Mrs. Wattlesbrook tell you my story? I wouldn’t be surprised. The past few years I feared a family wouldn’t be in the cards for me after all, but yes. I had very good parents and always wished I’d had siblings, so I hoped for two or three children of my own. I thought I’d like to be called Papa.”
“Okay, that answer was too perfect. Are you honestly beingyou?”
“Wattlesbrook casts actors who are closest to the parts we play, since we had to stay in character so long. There are some exceptions, of course, like Andrews playing a straight man.”
“I knew it,” she said under her breath. “But wait, stop, it’s not supposed to end this way! You’re the fantasy, you’re what I’m leaving behind. I can’t pack you up and take you with me.”
“That was the most self-centered thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
Jane blinked. “It was?”
“Miss Hayes, have you stopped to consider that you might have this all backward? That in fact you aremyfantasy?”
The jet engines began to whir, and the pressure of the cabin stuck invisible fingers into her ears. Henry gripped his armrests and stared ahead as though trying to steady the machine by force of will. Jane laughed at him and settled into her seat. It was a long flight. There would be time to get more answers, and she thought she could wait. And then in that moment when the plane rushed forward as though for its life, and gravity pushed down, and the plane lifted up, and Jane was breathless inside those two forces, she needed to know now.
“Henry, tell me which parts were true.”
“All of it. Especially this part where I’m going to die . . .”
His knuckles were literally turning white as he held tighter to the armrests, his eyes staring straight ahead.
The light gushing through the window was just right, afternoon coming at them with the perfect slant, the sun grazing the horizon of her window, yellow light spilling in. She saw Henry clearly, noticed the pale indent of a scar on his forehead, read in the turndown of his upper lip how he must have looked as a little boy and in the faint lines tracing away from the corners of his eyes the old man he’d one day become. She realized that she had measured her past by her exes, all the numbered boyfriends like a line of dominoes, knocking the next one and the next, an endless succession of falling down. But maybe that wasn’t it at all. She’d been thinking so much about endings, she’d forgotten to believe in the possibility of a last one, the one that would stay standing.
The perfect light still spilled through the window and over Henry, over her own hands, creating a halo around a speck of floating dust. The light warmed her, absorbed into her skin, entered into her to illuminate her thoughts. She could plainly see how all those failed relationships, all those painful endings, had brought her here to this beginning. The pain was even now shrinking till it was no bigger than the dust speck. And into that newly vacated space rushed a tender feeling, athank-youfeeling. Her breath caught, her vision wobbled with tears, and her heart felt like it was racing to expand in her chest to make room for all this unexpected, magnificent gratitude.
