I don’t believe you could ever be so cruel. I may not be serious, but you have always taken me seriously. Did you feel what I felt when we bumped hands? Did your skin cry for mine with every touch? It must have. Mine could not burn so hotly without there being a spark in return. I am passion and I am fire, and all of it is yours, if you’d come find me.
Unless…and remember what those dots represent, my darling…unless I don’t send this at all. Unless I fold it up and tuck it to my heart and keep you there instead, the only way I can guarantee that I can hold you close to me forever. What do I do? What would you do, my love, my only, my life, my
There was no final page, an agonizing analog version of your DVR cutting off the last three minutes of your show. I had yelped when I realized that was all I was going to get; I’d opened up nearly every book in the library and shaken them to see if the rest of the letter had been tucked away somewhere, and had no luck. (Instead, I found a receipt proving that shortly before her death, Georgina had spent two hundred pounds at Pizza Express.) I’d been so tempted to ask Marta about it, but the letter thrummed with forbidden ardor, and mentioning it to Georgina’s mother—even sixty years later—felt like violating a confidence. So tonight, I held the letter metaphorically to me, as I’d held it physically to my heart on that Christmas night, and repeated her words like they were my own mantra. I am passion and I am fire, and all of it is yours, if you’d come find me.
Who knows when I actually dozed off, but my Champagne bottle had suffered a serious depletion, producing a vivid dream that Nick was shaking me awake while wearing a tiara.
“Bex,” he said to me. “Come on, let’s get home to bed.”
I peeled open my dry eyes. My mascara, which I’d applied in a misplaced fit of holiday spirit, had turned to glue. Nick was standing before me, his shirt askew, a New Year’s crown atop his head. He smelled like a brewery.
“You’re here,” I said, grabbing at him as if trying to make absolutely sure he wasn’t an illusion. “You’re alive. Are you drunk?” I blinked. “I’m drunk.”
“Popeye drove me back,” he said sloppily. “Happy New Year.”
He bent down to kiss me, and I moved my face. “No. We don’t get to kiss. I’m mad at you,” I said.
“What do you mean?” He frowned.
“I am going to tell you,” I slurred, holding up some shaky fingers. “First, when I told you to go to your mother’s, I didn’t mean that you shouldn’t come home. Third, you’ve been gone a week, and you barely texted me. And second”—I waved another finger in his face—“you went to a New Year’s Eve party and left me at home to spend it with your grandmother. Who is in a coma, Nick. A coma.”
“I am a prat,” he agreed.
“Thank you.” I crossed my arms. He leaned toward me. “Nope, I’m still annoyed.”
“The party was awful,” Nick said, “and I realized it was a mistake and all I wanted was to come home to you. Does that help?”
“Yes,” I said. “It does.”
He knelt by my chair and laid his head in my lap. “I am so sorry I stayed away,” he said. “And I’m sorrier that even when I was here, I wasn’t really here at all.”
“You had a lot on your mind,” I said, unable to resist stroking his hair.
“Bex, am I a…runner-awayer?” he asked. “That cannot be the right word. I wish I hadn’t drunk that last ale.” He sat up to look at me. “We ran away to Scotland. I ran away to Cornwall. I don’t want to be a person who keeps running away from things. But I got spooked. Everything those kids said about their feelings that day at New Mentality are things that I feel, too, sometimes. I couldn’t stop thinking about how they couldn’t stop thinking about whatever they were anxious about, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about how maybe everything I was going through meant that I was headed toward…wherever my Mum is, and then I couldn’t stop thinking that if it happened to me, too, then maybe…” He gulped. “Maybe you chose wrong.”
“Oh, love,” I said, scooting down to the floor with him. “A lot of people are depressed or have anxiety and it doesn’t go to that place. All those kids were doing so much better! That was the whole point of that visit. They were getting help, and it was working.”
“Exactly.” Nick looked serious. “After I spent a few days with Mum, I thought, No. This won’t be me. She didn’t have a choice. But maybe I still do,” he said. “I don’t have the answers, but we are the problem like Maria that I want to solve, and I don’t know how I thought I was supposed to do it alone.”
“You know I can’t resist you when you quote The Sound of Music.”
He sat back on his heels and nearly tipped over. “I miss you. I love you,” he said, steadying himself. “You’re the one thing in my life that I want to choose again and again. We do better together.” He smiled broadly. “And on that tip, I’ve had a brilliant idea, Rebecca.”
“Do tell, Nicholas,” I said, plucking a very sticky eyelash out of my lower lid. “Is my mascara amazing right now?”
“It is all under your eyes. You look like Batman,” he said. “And you might remember from our first Halloween how sexy I find Batman.”
“You were Batman. I was Darth Vader,” I said.
“Yes, and if you recall, I was very sexy,” he said. “But listen. Mum and Father went on a tour
