“Didn’t we have good times, you and I?” she said gently. “We’d stay up way past your bedtime, long after Clare had turned in. Sitting cross-legged on your bed upstairs, you telling me everything. About your day, your friends, your classes. From soup to nuts, as they say.”
The memories came rushing back. My throat closed, too tight to form a retort.
“You taught me words I’d never heard before. Cool. Rad. Whatever. As if. You said we were BFFs. You had me listen to Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Tupac, Blink-182. You told me how teenagers dressed. Showed me it was perfectly fine to walk out into the world in a cropped top and ripped jeans and not get arrested for indecent exposure. You called it, Rocking your life.”
Her voice caught slightly, then steadied.
“You made me feel that I was part of something real, something wild and messy and beautiful. That I hadn’t been left behind, after all. That I was finally living the life I never got the chance to finish.”
It was true. I did all those things Jo was talking about. We did all those things.
I told her everything back then, when I was just a teenager and no one else in the world seemed to really get me. She was the one I whispered to after turning off the lights. She was the one who heard about my first kiss. When my heart got broken the first time, Jo was the one who muttered something snide about boys being ‘not worth the price of shoe polish’.
Jo never seriously judged me, though. Not when I cried over someone who didn’t text back. Not when I doubted myself. Not when I said I hated my life and meant it, even if just for a minute.
She listened. She teased. She quoted Lillian Gish from some old movie and told me what lipstick shade went best with betrayal.
And somehow, dead or not, she made me feel seen. Understood. Loved, in that strange, impossible way only someone who’d lived an entire life before you were even born could love you.
She was glamour and grit. And also brutally honest in a way I didn’t get from anyone else.
Jo wasn’t just a ghost. She was my best friend. The person I ran to when everything felt like too much. The one I confided in, leaned on, counted on—for her wit, her old-soul wisdom, and her wild, 1918 flapper perspective.
The warmth of old memories softened her face. “And your friendship, sweetie, it mattered more than I could ever say. When you were here, I felt alive. As alive as a ghost, dead a hundred years, could ever feel.” Jo smiled. “What we had…what we have...still matters.”
Still matters, I echoed silently, holding the words close.
I thought of all those days and nights back in California, wishing I could talk to her. Wishing I could show her things, tell her about my life, hear her often snarky, usually brilliant take on it all.
I remembered when Ocean was born. I’d wanted Jo there so much. How I’d longed to share the experience with her. Tell her what it felt like. What I was going through. How terrifying and beautiful it all was. From our conversations years before, I knew she wanted to know. I was her link to a life she never got to experience.
Jo wasn’t just part of my past. Even though she was trapped in this house, she was the one I kept reaching for, no matter how far away she was.
“I waited for you to come home, you know. As much as your mother did, I think.” She pointed to Clare’s spiral-bound calendar that sat between us on the desk. “Even though she marked her daily scheduler with every little thing she did, every appointment, you’ll see that the days you were due to come to Harbor View were marked in bold red ink.”
I’d found it this afternoon in the drawer of my mother’s desk. It was true what she was saying.
Jo’s voice grew even softer, almost a whisper. “That calendar wasn’t just for her. It was for me too. I kept track of those red-letter dates.”
Oh my god. She was killing me.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell her. Not now. Not after this talk. Not after being reminded, oh so clearly, how much she meant to me. How much I meant to her.
But I was still worried—no, torn—about what Jo’s friendship could become for Ocean. Once they met. Once my daughter began to cherish her the way I had.
The tangled knot of love, guilt, and fear was swelling up in my chest, pressing hard. Love for this place. Love for Jo. Love for my own daughter and what it could mean for her if we stayed.
Guilt for not saying what needed to be said. For hiding, delaying, hoping time would decide for me.
And fear.
Fear of what it would mean to let go of California. Fear about closing the door on a life I’d spent years trying to salvage. Fear of making the wrong choice—for me and for Ocean.
There was no question that Rhys would never move to Harbor View. The few times I had even mentioned that maybe we could get out of L.A., move just south as far as Orange County, he’d gone ballistic. Didn’t I understand what that would do to his career? To him?
The consequences of the decisions I had to make were flat out terrifying. And at the heart of it was one thing. My marriage.
Was my marriage worth saving? More to the point, was there anything left to save?
