Page 59

But that maybe if they could meet⁠—?

“I’ll come right now. Give me forty-five minutes,” he’d said so intently she was afraid to negotiate. But her mind protested. He was going to drive over one hundred miles an hour in the middle of the night?

The fractured orange light from the parking lot was the only illumination, but more than enough for her to fully see him. The streaming water on the windshield reflected onto his features, moistened from the rain. She compared him to the king in her vision. His jaw was unshaven and it would feel rough against her lips. No overgrown hair curling around his ears that she could thread her fingers through. The sinews of his neck that she imagined burying her face in were covered by his jacket, zipped to his chin.

“I have this dream,” she started and paused to keep her emotions from seizing her voice. “It happens over and over, more times than I could ever count. It’s always the same. In it, I’m a queen. I wear a white dress with a crown on my head, and I dance with a king, but I never recognize his face. I don’t know where we are, I don’t know why it feels so real. I don’t know why I called you in the middle of the night, and I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.” She lowered her hands and stared at her engagement ring.

Taylor’s breathing matched the pace of hers. The rain continued quietly.

“Yes, you do,” he finally said.

She looked at him.

His mouth parted, speechless, but he said it all with his eyes.

“We were more than friends, weren’t we?” she said.

“Yes,” he cried. “Yes.” He held her face and pressed their foreheads together. “Yes,” he repeated against her mouth, the word falling into their kiss.

Analise kissed him back, shockingly with no resistance, the impulse driven by the strength of countless kisses that must have come before this one. Countless kisses that surely led to so much more⁠—

Penelope.

Analise broke free and cupped her mouth.

“I’m sorry.” He turned his face away, putting a hand to his lips.

“Don’t be,” she said, becoming emotional. Of all the possibilities, of Penelope’s father someday revealing himself, it was never this. “What happened to us?”

Taylor turned to her again, and their embrace this time was one of shared grief, and yet an immense release. He rested his face in her hair, and she felt him walk his fingers delicately to where her scar was, as if he knew exactly what had happened. “It was my fault.” His voice broke, shuddering against her. “It was my fault. I lost my mind when they took you from me.”

Analise pulled away, so confused, as he groped to relay the story of what was clearly and horribly traumatic for him to revisit. Taylor paused, met her perplexed eyes, and catching his breath, he said, “Give me your phone.”

“What?”

“Log into your phone and give it to me.” He didn’t sound demanding as much as desperate.

Analise fumbled for her phone, found it on the dashboard, and unlocked it. She handed it over.

Taylor’s thumbs tapped furiously on the screen that lit up the fragile hope in his eyes. He returned it. “The username is kingandqueen, all one word, and the password is lowercase, initials of my name followed by yours, and the years we were born, t-b-i-b-8-8-8-7. It’s all there. Everything. Us.”

With her mouth ajar, Analise looked at the phone. He’d opened a Gmail account. There were hundreds of messages, many unread. She scrolled through to see who the sender was.

They all displayed: ME

“We had an email account together,” he explained. “It was just for fun, I guess, I don’t know. And then I kept writing in it after you were gone. You never wrote back. I don’t know why I kept—promise me you’ll start at the beginning. It won’t make sense otherwise.” He acknowledged it would take her awhile, and she didn’t need to do it now.

“Taylor.” Analise gathered the right words. “I have to tell you something.” She worked to regulate her tears and went into her photo album on the phone. She found a few silly selfies that Penelope had taken, many were of her playing soccer. Analise chose the one on her eleventh birthday in August, and she handed him the phone. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she? Her name is Penelope.” Analise didn’t even wait for his reaction, hers was so messy and apologetic, and she only cried harder at the way his expression caved, as if he wanted so badly to reach into that photograph, to hug his daughter.

Several moments passed. Analise watched him absorb this life-altering revelation, how he pinched his eyes, the way his shoulders shook, restraining his cries. She begged him to believe that she never would’ve kept Penelope away from him.

“I know,” he gasped. He hugged her tight and reassured her. “I know. Our mothers have a lot of explaining to do. But all I want right now is to meet her. Can I meet her?” he asked. “Would you let me be—?” He stopped short of what she knew he was truly asking.

“Yes.” Of course she would let him into their lives. Emptied of doubt, stripped of the fear Ulla had sown, she was filled instead with disbelief and outrage that her mother had made a lie of her past

Part V

The memories live they cannot be buried