The curve disappears, and his brow furrows again.
“It’s going to be hard for a while, Meg. For me, it’ll be hard. I don’t know how I’ll keep you out of it, now that your name is in this.”
“Reid, I’m trying to tell you. You don’t have to keep me out of it. If you’re in it, I’m in it. We’re in it together.”
It’s going to be such a fight, I already know it. The trial, the press. The gossip. It’s going to be so uncomfortable. It’d be so much easier to leave.
“But,” I add, and his hands tighten immediately, briefly on mine. I rub my thumbs over his skin, soothing him. “You need to know, I’m not leaving New York. I ran away from one home because of a scandal. I’m not doing it again.”
There’s a long pause.
“Good,” he says finally, a firm tip of his head. “I’m not leaving New York, either.”
“No?”
He shakes his head.
“But you ha—”
“I love it here,” he interrupts. “You’re here.”
I furrow my brow, remembering our night in Maryland, remembering all of Reid’s frustrations with the city—the noise, the crowds, the gray, the dirt. There’s all that, and now this—this spotlight on him. This reputation that will follow him.
“I don’t know if that’s enough,” I say. “For you to stay.”
“It’s enough,” he says, immediately. “It’s everything.” He leans in, kisses me again. “But there’s also all those numbers in my letter to you. Every place we ever went to together. I love those places. It’s like I said, Meg. I would’ve kept those places close to me forever. Even if you’d never wanted to see me again.”
He pauses, wipes another tear—this one, happy—from my cheek. “And also, still the food.”
I smile, looking into his not-sad eyes. “You made a joke,” I say.
He gives me a real, fully formed, honest-to-God swoonsh.
I press my thumb to it, and for these few borrowed minutes, a break in the storm we both know we’re going to have to weather, Reid and I feel perfectly like each other’s shelter. The only two people in the world who understand each other this well. Letters, numbers.
The perfect code.
“Reid,” I whisper to him. “It wasn’t a mistake.”
“No,” he says, resting his forehead against mine. “It was a sign.”
Epilogue
It wasn’t part of the plan, to return to the wedding business.
In the back room of the shop, I sit in the same seat I’ve sat in so many times before, a gallery of pages set out in front of me. It’s all there, mockups for each part of the job: save the dates, invitations, place cards, and even—oh, yes—a program. Across from me sits a couple who for weeks has been poring over ideas and suggestions, a couple who came in today hoping to see all of those ideas transformed into something special. Something unique, cohesive, them.
It’s so familiar.
And yet.
“Oh, Meg. This is perfect. It’s all so . . . it’s so . . .”
“Whimsical?” I say, grinning across the table.
Sibby looks up from the sketches, her eyes bright and her grin matching mine. “Yes,” she says. “That’s exactly it. Whimsical! Isn’t this whimsical, Eli?”
“Yes?” Elijah says from beside her, looking back and forth between us. I’m reasonably sure he doesn’t really know why anything he’s looking at qualifies as “whimsical,” but he looks happy nonetheless, as he has through every one of the preparations having to do with his wedding to Sibby.
Over the last year and a half or so, as Sibby and I have worked on the new version of our friendship we found ourselves in after that day she came back to the apartment, part of the work we’ve had to do—in addition to the long, sometimes painful conversations, in addition to establishing new routines and new traditions—is to learn about the parts of each other’s lives we missed during the time we weren’t close. For me, that’s included getting to know Elijah better, and the best part about that is how much I like him, and in a way that’s more than “at least he picks up after himself” or “at least he doesn’t eat any of your food out of the fridge without asking.” He’s soft-spoken, content to let Sibby shine, but he’s got a sly sense of humor and good taste in music, and whenever I go over to their place to watch The Bachelorette, he makes the popcorn.
“Now on the program,” I say, moving that to the center, “I think with the metallic accents you’ve chosen for the illustrations, you should keep the information to a minimum. Your names, your parents’ names, the—”
“Your name here, right?” Sibby says, cutting me off. She taps her finger beneath the lettering that spells out Wedding Party.
“Right,” I say, looking up at her and smiling. She moves her hand from the program to squeeze mine briefly, her eyes welling with tears. I’ve seen it before, of course, emotional brides—those flare-ups of sentiment or stress or simple, pure happiness. But with Sibby I know the emotion of this moment is different. It’s taken us a while, after all, to get here. A new version of being best friends, one that’s not so rooted in our past—and past patterns—together.
I squeeze her hand back and go over a few more elements of the job, offer some suggestions for some additional changes. Then I stand, the same as I would have were this any old wedding job. It was always a good idea to step away for a few minutes, to give the clients some time to really see the work, without my presence looming.
I let them know I’ll return shortly, taking one final look at the treatments from this more distant angle. I’m proud of how they turned out—the sleek, upturned serifs reminding me of Sibby’s favorite winged-eyeliner look, the extra-tall ascenders on the complementary cursive reminding me of Elijah’s height. Anyone who looks closely would see the hidden message here, the only one that matters:
Someone who knows Sibby and Elijah—someone who loves them—created these letters.
“They liked it?” Lachelle says when I come up to the front desk, taking in what I’m sure is my relieved smile. She’s got three supplier catalogs open in front of her and a red Sharpie in her hand, her tidy X’s of interest marked next to the items she’s considering for the shop.
Six months ago, Cecelia announced that she wanted less day-to-day involvement in the shop, since her kids would be headed off to college soon and she and Shuhei wanted to spend as much time with them as possible. After that, they planned to travel more, and so the timing seemed perfect. She wouldn’t sell, but she would reorganize, shutting down the retail part of the store so that she could run it as a custom invitation business only, everything by appointment with either her or one of her contractors.
To Lachelle—and honestly, to me, though it wasn’t quite my business—that idea had been outrageous, and she’d put up a big fight. A couple of times, in the weeks following Cecelia’s initial announcement, I’d come into the shop, hunting down supplies, only to find the two of them orbiting around each other in strained politeness; excuse me this and can you pass me the ink that. Once upon a time, it might’ve made me nervous and uncomfortable enough to avoid the place altogether, but by that point, deep into the aftermath of Reid’s revelations, I’d felt almost fireproof against life’s petty confrontations.
And anyway, soon enough, they’d come to a solution—Lachelle would buy in, taking over retail and operations, and Cecelia would manage the contractors and the custom service. Mostly, the shop runs the same way it always did—a steady stream of visitors and regulars, the usual upticks in custom services during wedding and holiday seasons. But Lachelle is changing things, too. A switched-up floor plan means more space for the new retail, more evening classes taught by some of the contractors, and—of course—a brand-new window display every month, all of them the likes of which this stretch of street has never seen.
“They love it,” I tell her, and we both glance up at where Elijah and Sibby sit, their heads bent together, still smiling dreamily at my work.
“Young love,” Lachelle says, shaking her head. “He probably still puts the toilet seat down.”
I nudge her. “He’s nice. Anyway, what are you ordering? Those samples I tried from—”
“I’ll tell you what I’m not ordering,” she says, capping the Sharpie and crossing her arms before facing me.
“I knoooooow,” I groan, pulling my phone from my pocket. “I’ll check again.”
I refresh my e-mail, watching new messages stack and stack, until I’ve got to scroll through to search for the name I’m looking for.
“Oh, wait!” I exclaim, straightening as I quickly scan the message from the print supplier I’ve been working with for the last few months. A smile spreads across my face as I see the good news. “Two weeks, they say. A full restock.”
“Whew,” Lachelle says. “Things are getting desperate over there.”
She gestures toward the somewhat empty-looking table at the front of the store, the special placement Cecelia and Lachelle have reserved for me since the new line launched three months ago. I may not be part owner of this shop with my two friends, but the sign that proclaims this store the “birthplace” of the new Meg Mackworth line makes me feel warm with contentment, included in the most perfect possible way.
Despite this evening’s sojourn in the back of the shop, I’m not really back in the wedding business. Instead, I’m back in my own business, a new version of it that I’ve had to rebuild, somewhat, in the aftermath of the Coster Capital fallout. With a lot of determined, difficult work—and the occasional character reference from everyone’s favorite princess—I’d managed to keep most of my clients. But there’d been costs to having my name in the news—time spent fending off the press, reconsideration of my website and social media, the realization that I couldn’t keep up with enough new clients to make up for the losses.
So in the end, I didn’t really have a choice. I’d needed to pivot.
I’d needed to find a way to do my work the way I’d wanted to do it. The way that I’d broken through my block for.
Lachelle and I both drift over to the table, and I start straightening the products that are left, a burst of pride going through me each time I see the logo I designed.
Harbinger, I’d called it, my new product line. Journals and planners, stickers and stationery, no hidden messages necessary. These pieces, they’re the right kind of signs—letters that remind you of a place, a season, a feeling, an ambition. Letters that say more than the words on the page.
Lachelle can’t keep them in stock.
“These are still my favorite,” she says now, fanning out a diminished stack of soft-cover notebooks, part of my New York Parks series. Botanicals—they’re always going to be popular, but I’m pretty proud that there’s not a single Bloom Where You’re Planted in sight. “But right now it’s that pink houndstooth I can’t keep in stock! I wonder why?” She grins over at me.
“She’s the best,” I say, smiling as I think of Lark, who’s made sure to be photographed with her new Harbinger planner twice since she’s gone back to LA—without Cameron—where she’s started filming a rom-com series for a massive streaming platform. But even beyond those supposedly candid paparazzi shots, whenever she posts something on her social media from the set, she makes sure that planner is somewhere in sight—on the small banquette table inside her trailer, resting on top of the crinkled, marked-up pages of her script, on her lap while someone touches up her makeup, her hair up in huge, bright purple velcro rollers, or tucked under her arm while she and one of her costars pose for a goofy selfie.
she always texts me, right before one of these posts goes up.
We stay in touch, texts and phone calls and twice, her visits back here. Secretly, I think me and Sibby and Lachelle all hold out hope she might come back to the East Coast for good. But each time I see her big, toothy smile in the California sunshine, I get the sense that maybe Lark is in her true home.
“What I’m thinking,” Lachelle says, “is that it’s time for coloring books. Exclusives, for this shop. I know you turned it down before, when all the trial stuff was happening, but now you could—”
We’re interrupted by the door to the shop opening, and I sense him even before I look up to see him.
Still, I like to look up and see him there. Tall, lean, triple-take-face Reid, his eyes lighting on me immediately, not a trace of sadness in them.
“Good evening,” he says seriously, always more formal when there are other people around.
“Oh, here he is,” says Lachelle. “Listen, I need your help with this payroll software. Now there’s this whole section about allowances for—”
“Lachelle,” I say teasingly. “He’s not a small business consultant.”
“What’s it matter?” she says. “He knows the numbers. So anyway, I need . . .”
Reid hasn’t said anything beyond his initial greeting, but still he steps farther in, listening to Lachelle with a serious expression on his face, offering her the occasional brief nod of understanding as she recounts a long list of grievances about the tax code. This is, in fact, the primary way Reid and Lachelle had bonded, back when she’d first met him. She calls him Robin Hood most of the time, a tribute to his heroic whistleblower status, even though most of the time he also sees fit to clarify for her that he didn’t steal from anyone.
“I only tried to point out the stealing someone else was doing,” he says, usually with that slight flush on his cheeks.
I’m finishing my tidying of the display when I hear Reid offering his suggestions to Lachelle—the same steady, assured tone I’m sure makes him excellent at his new job. Within seconds she’s thanking him, letting us know she’s going to go “handle this” right now, before she forgets every single thing Reid said to her.
“Looking sparse,” Reid says, nodding at the table.
I smile at him. “Quite,” I say pointedly, and he swoonshes.
The startup at Harbinger had been something of a fight between me and Reid. I didn’t have the funds on my own to get it going—the contract with the supplier, the more sophisticated software and scanning equipment I’d needed. But Reid—practical, numbers-minded Reid—definitely did, and all he’d wanted was to give me some of it.
“Think of what you’ve done for me,” he’d said, practically begging me. But I hadn’t really seen any of what he’d been referring to as something I’d done for him. It’d been for us. Away for us to start our lives even as we were weathering the storm. After a couple of months, it hadn’t made sense for Reid to stay in his apartment. It’d made better sense to move into mine—farther away from the chaos of the Coster fallout, farther away from the job he’d used to have. Closer to the job he’d hoped to have.
Anyway, it wasn’t as though he didn’t pay rent.
Still, Reid said it was more—more I’d done, more I’d had to face for him. All the times I’d come with him to meetings, depositions, days in court, my head held high when reporters would shout questions at the both of us. All the Let’s walk around Brooklyn games I’d distracted him with as he’d struggled with worry over Avery, who had—not long after her father’s arrest—reconciled herself to the depth of his crimes. All the evenings I sat quietly with him after some other random “source” connected to Coster claimed anew that Reid was nothing more than a hack, a guy with an ax to grind. All the days I never gave up, even when it seemed as if the attention was never going to go away.
“We’re not keeping a balance sheet here,” I’d said to him once, trying to keep my temper in check, trying to reason with him in a way he’d understand.
It hadn’t always worked, of course. There’d been a few slammed doors, a few brooding, silent meals. A few days when both of our nerves were strung tight, worn-out, where we couldn’t communicate with each other at all.
But we’d practiced. We’d stayed.
In the end, it’d been a compromise. Not a gift, but a loan, one I’ve almost already paid back. Reid’s feathers had been ruf
fled, and my pride had been stung, but we’d made it work.
And sometimes—like right now, when he comes over to lean down and give me a soft kiss of greeting—I think it’s my best work.
“How was today?” I ask him, smoothing his hair back from his brow. He’s never so polished coming from work anymore—Wall Street Reid is long since gone. In the morning, he still leaves the house early, ready for his daily swim, his work clothes ironed and placed carefully in a hanging bag. But by the time he’s finished for the day, they’re always more than a little rumpled.
“Difficult,” he says with a smile. “They test me.”
“They” are Reid’s students, and we both know that the truth is, he enjoys being tested.
In the months immediately after Coster’s arrest, it wasn’t really possible for Reid to work. He was too tied up all the time, too hounded by press inquiries, interview requests—none of which he ever granted. But it was possible to quietly reach out to many of his graduate professors, to make connections with area colleges and universities who might be looking for lecturers. To Reid’s surprise—but to no one else’s, really—many of those colleges and universities were extremely interested in having a crack at a famous analyst who could boost the profile of their departments with special lectures about Wall Street whistleblowing.
But as with the dreaded press inquiries, Reid had passed, opting instead for a couple of sections of Advanced Calculus at a community college. The pay is garbage and the grading so far seems endless, but Reid only ever says it’s a “valuable” learning experience. As near as I can tell, Reid is only being “tested” insofar as the following he’s developed—students who want to stay after class, playing more of the games Reid has designed for them, students who ask the kinds of questions that can only mean they’re interested, students who press him about whether he’ll be teaching any other classes in future semesters.
Still, at night, Reid comes home and prepares for another path, studying for his New York State teaching certification—hoping, eventually, to land in one of the STEM schools here in Brooklyn.
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