Have you ever looked back and asked yourself how you got here?
I have, so many times over the years. Sometimes I turn to trace the path behind me and can’t say how it led me to this place.
The funny thing is, I laid every stepping stone myself. I’m responsible for every crooked turn, every dead end I stumbled into, every blind alley I had to squeeze out of. And so I have no one but myself to blame for the fact that I didn’t end up where I wanted to go.
I sometimes wonder what the turning point was. With which choice did the road diverge? How many steps would I have to retrace in order to make it all turn out differently, to see what life would have offered you and me?
Too many, I’m sure. And of course, I can never retrace anything. But that’s the strange and beautiful thing about life: every once in a while,it offers us another chance. Even when we lose ourselves in the twisting detours and unmarked side streets, we sometimes still manage, miraculously, to stumble out in exactly the place we belong.
That’s what reconnecting with you has felt like.
I’m sorry I didn’t get it right when we were younger. I hope you’ll forgive me for that, and I hope you realize I paved my path without knowing what I was doing. I put the stones down in all the wrong order, staked the signposts in mixed-up directions, then had the audacity to wonder how I’d managed to wander so far afield.
But the other day, seeing you again after so many years, I wondered if maybe I’d somehow reached my destination, after all.
All this to say... I hope you’ll give me a second chance. Or maybe a first one, a new one. Turns out, I’m a much better wayfinder than I used to be.
Gallant
During her second week back in Henderson, Aubrey buzzed with barely contained energy. She logged countless hours on what she’d affectionately come to think of as her manifesto, and did Pilates daily, but each night, she forewent her logic puzzles in favor of reading Gallant’s letter. Again. And again.
And again.
Days had passed since their date. As promised, he hadn’t contacted her, which relieved her. She needed the breadth of the week to absorb what he’d written. To accept that he was, in fact, far more skilled at putting things onto paper than at saying them out loud. Because, while his efforts to impress her at dinner had done little to pique her interest, the letter revealed a whole new side, one she found both vulnerable and arrestingly human.
Now she felt herself hovering, just like with Nick all those years ago. She stood on the cusp of something immense, something she both craved and feared. She only needed...
Well, who knew. A push, maybe.
On Thursday night, after even an extended Pilates session failed to quiet her mind, Aubrey ventured out her front door. Her ankle had healed, so she turned up her collar and let the chilled wind push her down whatever street it chose.
She wandered Henderson, Gallant’s letter like a burning weight in her pocket, and absorbed the scenery with eyes that felt both new and old. So much had changed. So much hadn’t. The corner of Ivy and Harkness sported an unfamiliar café with Edison bulbs and exposed-brick walls, but old man Sajak’s yard still had four rusted-out cars piled like checkers, probably the same ones that had teetered there when she’d been born. Five blocks later, she saw that the Siegels’ ramshackle bungalow had finally been torn down, yet the steel mill kept watch over the empty lot, as it always had and likely always would.
Aubrey memorized the changes, superimposing a new mental map over the old. Sometimes, things stayed the same. Other times—she fingered the letter—they metamorphosed.
Two blocks later, she rounded a corner and came face-to-face with a plate-glass window. The building looked newly constructed, the window offering a view of a gym-like space, complete with red floor mats and a cage-like structure at the back.
She stopped. Strange. The place didn’t have much equipment, just a few punching bags, plus lots of open space, and—
Oh.
Blood rocketed into her cheeks. Nick was in there.
She hadn’t seen him since that night at her house, and now she took an involuntary step back. A glance at the gym’s door revealedWilder’s MMA Academyin arched red letters.
Which made a strange sort of sense. She’d seen MMA fights on bar TVs over the years, and now had no difficulty imagining Nick involved in a sport that included blood and punching and sheer, unbridled intensity.
Thankfully, his attention was elsewhere, so she stood on the wind-scoured sidewalk and watched. Inside, Nick shared a mat with a broad-shouldered Black man, discussing something that clearly displeased him. Dark brows slashed over eyes like smoldering coals. The overhead lights accentuated the planes of his face, his tank top clinging to every line and ripple. He knocked gloved knuckles together, then said something that prompted his friend to clasp a compassionate hand on his shoulder.
Aubrey’s heart caved in. Nick Thacker had been beautiful in high school, but now he’d grown into something else entirely, some otherworldly being that shot fist-sized holes in her ability to draw breath. He hardly even looked real. More like some scowling warrior angel, or an errant god with a world to overthrow. And yet nothing about his glower intimidated her. It was so real. Sohim, enough that her belly turned a slow pirouette.
Skeletal leaves skittered past. God, had she ever been free of him? She’d thought so, but standing here now, she understood that part of her had never left this place. Her work in New York had meant the world, but it had also served as an escape. A way to ignore the fault lines along which she’d fractured long ago. So had her boyfriends.
Distractions, every one.
Because all this time, a secret sliver of her had been waiting. A last, starved hope had stowed away, whispering that someday, Nick would come for her. That she could pass her timewith mathematical men all she liked, but in the end, she would always belong to a dark-eyed tempest with words swirling in his bloodstream.
One glance through that window, though, and the depth of her foolishness became clear. Nick hadtoldher he didn’t have regrets. Straight to her face. He’d taken those words of his, honed them to a killing point, and skewered her with them.
