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“Why did you?” Jack called after her.

Greer stopped by the driver’s side door of her little blue car. “I just…” Finally, she turned to face Jack. “Is it done?”

Jack cocked his head. This was somehow more baffling than being cornered in a bathroom by The Eagle. “Is what done?”

“This…this thing. The job. The list. I’m assuming you’re done with it now, right? It’s not happening anymore?”

Jack tried to find pockets in which to bury his hands, but the pencil skirt swaddling his lower half offered no such comfort. Instead, he folded his arms over his chest. If Greer had turned up that morning and asked him that question, the answer would have been an easy yes. He was done. With everything. But after The Eagle’s mysterious message and the hint that his afterlife might be taken away, he suddenly wasn’t sure about anything. It was a dizzying roller coaster to ride.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly.

Greer just nodded. Her movements were sharp, bordering on panicked. She was desperate. It was a side to her he had rarely seen, and it ripped an ache through his heart.

“You really love him,” Jack said before he could stop himself.

“What?”

“Nothing, forget it.”

“My husband?”

Jack said nothing, a second ache in his heart picking up the slack from the first.

“Of course I love him.”

The pain was sharper now, a hammer replaced by a knife. Now it was Jack’s turn to nod as words failed him.

“Jack.” Greer took a step toward him, then seemed to think better of it and locked herself where she was. “You know me better than that, don’t you?”

“Than what?”

“Than to think I’d get married for anything less than love.”

“Yeah, but the way you ran off with him like that, in the middle of everything…”

“Eloping gave me an opportunity to get away and I took it, I won’t deny that. But the love was already there. It’s the reason I didn’t tell you. Why I couldn’t tell you.”

“I don’t understand,” said Jack. “You always told me the things that mattered most to you unless they were bad. I thought that meant he must be a bad thing too.”

“Right,” said Greer. “Because that’s what you wanted to think. Because that was what was easier for you to think, and that’s always what you choose.”

“I don’t understand,” Jack said again. He could feel himself loosening from Margaret’s body, floating just above it, an untethered balloon on the verge of being swallowed by the sky. This conversation had played out over and over again in his mind throughout the years in a million different permutations, and as each possible outcome was eliminated, it felt as though the weight of all that potential had been the only thing keeping him earthbound.

“We’re actually going to do this?” Greer sighed.

Jack had to swallow down the urge to say he didn’t understand for a third time. In truth he wasn’t even sure he still had enough control over Margaret’s tongue to form the words.

“Jack, I’m not a complete idiot, okay? I know you. Sometimes better than you do, I think. I know how you felt when we were growing up, and maybe even now.”

This sent Jack plummeting back to earth. His stomach dropped, heart quick to follow, and he had never quite felt so decidedly in a body before, so raw and vulnerable and easily bruised.

“What?”

Greer turned away, whether out of embarrassment or frustration or something else, Jack couldn’t be sure. “It was obvious. Not to the guys, I don’t think, and not to Jules—she hated that kind of thing. But to me. That’s why I couldn’t tell you when I eloped. I didn’t want to hurt you. And it’s why I couldn’t tell you who the money was actually for. Because I thought—because I feared—that you’d change your mind about the job if I did. I need that money, Jack. Curtis needs that money. I didn’t know what else to do. He’s the most amazing man I’ve ever known. I don’t want the girls to live without him. I don’t want to live without him. I don’t think I can.”

As she spoke, Jack had hit earth and kept going. Now he felt as though he was somewhere deep below the dirt, rotting with the worms and beetles. Greer knew. All this time, she knew. Of course she knew. She knew and she didn’t feel the same. She knew and she hid it from him. She knew…and she still let him in. She still let him be her friend. She still let him be a part of her life. She let him love her even if she didn’t want it, because at the end of the day, she still wanted him, in her own way.

Jack climbed out of his own grave and back into the body standing in front of Greer, and without a second of doubt or hesitation, he finally, finally said it. “I love you, Greer.”