“Mhm. Goodbye.”
“Bye.”
After I open the next box, full of soap from a goat farm in Maryland that’s gotten a bit internet famous lately thanks to the hot tattooed farmer in their social media posts, I pause to enjoy the way the afternoon sun sneaks in through the beveled glass panes of the double wooden doors, creating rainbows along the parquet floors. It was the first thing I noticed when I came to check out the space, but one of so many things that made me fall in love with it. Sometimes I have to pinch myself when I remember that this is really happening. And all I had to do was spend a few weeks chasing a goose around Baltimore with a man that made me feel, however briefly, like I was enough. That feeling might not have stuck around in a romantic sense, but professionally at least I am still convinced. So there’s that. We’ll see how this little business venture goes for the first few months, and then I’ll decide if it was worth the heartbreak I had to go through to find the determination to go through with it or not.
The bell on the front door chimes while I’m searching for the box cutter I put down somewhere and promptly forgot about. Iassume the visitor is my nail tech’s teenage son, who I’ve hired to help me get the shop set up and running. “Hey, can you toss me that roll of tape on the counter?” I ask without looking up.
“Sure,” says a voice that definitely is not Caden’s squeaky tenor. Instead, it’s a voice I would recognize anywhere, because I still hear it most nights in my dreams.
I slowly raise my head and find Callahan Leitner standing there by the door, looking as handsome as he did that first time I saw him on my television, a look on his face that reads as tentative, uncertain. Nervous.
“Still want me to toss it, or…?” he asks, holding up the roll of masking tape.
I slowly shake my head. “I’ll come to you.”
I wend my way through the towers of cardboard boxes between us—boxes that were full of possibilities a moment ago but now feel like obstacles to overcome in order to get to where I’m desperate to be—until I arrive there, in front of him.
It takes all of my strength not to lean in, bury my nose into his jacket. Can’t get ahead of myself, though. First I need to ask…“What are you doing here?” It comes out softly, full of wonder, and I’m glad he doesn’t seem to read any hostility into it.
“Well, I heard from Beau’s contact at the American Museum of Natural History yesterday. And I thought you might like to know what good ol’ Jeff Carney discovered about our stuffed friend.”
“Oh. Sure.” I somehow doubt he traveled all this way just to give me an update on the goose situation, but I do admit, I’ve been curious. I wanted to search for an answer to how it all wound up, but every time I started to type the terms into the search bar on my phone late at night, I thought about thepossibility of seeing Cal’s face staring back at me from a news article and lost my nerve.
“Apparently, the man who claimed credit for the specimen actually stole it from one of the first female ornithologists at the Smithsonian. Her name was Dr. Ora Belmont Worthy. She’s been best remembered for her work on hummingbirds. A professor at NYU specializing in women in the biological sciences around the turn of the century saw a press release the museum put out about the goose’s return and remembered reading about a very similar goose in Worthy’s field notes in the course of her research for her next book. She contacted Natural History and the Smithsonian and, after some archival digging, they were able to confirm that it was actually Worthy who discovered the goose, and that Ledford—the guy who’d taken credit for the find—shot it and claimed it as his own as a way to keep her from getting the recognition for it.”
“Wow. That’s shitty,” I say.
“Silver lining to all of this, though, is that now Worthy will finally get the credit she deserved, however belatedly. The museums’ records have been updated to reflect that she’s the one who found it.”
“That’s good.”
“It is,” Cal agrees. “Also, once they figured out the connection to Worthy, I did some cursory digging of my own and discovered she married twice. The second time was to an illustrator named John Morse.”
I stare blankly, wondering if this name is supposed to mean something to me.
“Morse’s great-niece was Nicole’s mom’s aunt,” he explains.
“So there’s a family connection, which I guess sort of explainsthewhy, but I still don’t understandhow. Who stole the goose? Why did they give it to the aunt?”
“That’s all still a mystery. Doubt we’ll ever know the whole story.”
Cal and I stare at each other for a long moment. He looks like he wants to say more. I want him to as well.
At last his lips part and he says, “I have been on fifty-two dates in the last four months.”
My eyebrows shoot up. Okay. Well. I was absolutely not expecting him to saythat.
“In the letter you left me,” he explains, “you said I needed to do more ‘shopping around’ before I could say for certain you were what I wanted.”
“So you decided to approach it likeSupermarket Sweep?”
He straightens the collar of his coat. “It was Mindy’s idea, actually.”
“As in coffee shop Mindy?”
“After you left, she noticed I was looking a bit rougher than usual and begrudgingly asked if I was okay, so I told her what had happened. Well, most of it. Not about the goose. Anyway, she offered to help me out, as long as I agreed to schedule all of my dates at the coffee shop, in full view of the register, on days when she was working. She said it was to help coach me, but I’m pretty sure she just thought it would be funny to watch.”
“And was it?” I ask, my stomach gurgling with anxious anticipation. “Funny, I mean.”
