I don’t understand anything anymore, but I want this conversation to be over, so I say, “Yes, I understand.”
“You must give yourself a chance to adjust. You must give yourself a chance at a prosperous life, Amelia. It’s what Jenna would want.”
His voice breaks when he says her name, and now he’s sobbing into the phone.
“I’ll go,” I say. Anything to stop the crying and the net of anxiety that has dropped over my head. “I’ll go to school in Montana. I’ll do it.”
I hear him blowing his nose away from the phone and I wonder if he’s standing in a hallway surrounded by colleagues watching him blubber.
“Amelia, hon, I only want you to be happy.”
“I understand,” I say again. “I’m sorry.”
“I only want you to be happy,” he repeats. “There’s no reason to throw everything away, okay? Not everything has to change all at once, Amelia. We’re going to help you. It’s going to be okay, Amelia. It’s all going to be okay.”
When the line cuts off, I want to scream. I want to take every journal from Nolan’s secret office and drop them into the lake to watch the pages darken and disintegrate. I want to watch the lost princess lose herself in the forest, and again in the water, until all that’s left of her is a disembodied strand of long, pale hair. I want to watch Orman crumple and drown beneath the waves of expectations and adulthood and right and wrong that eat away at my life, my choices. I want to take my library back from the clutches of Nolan Endsley’s wildfire, along with his searing kiss, and douse it in lake water until he’s too scared to ever approach me again.
I want to go back to a time when he was no more than a picture on the back flap of one of my favorite books.
I want to have never met him.
It’s N. E. Endsley’s fault, and every author that came before and will come after him, for making me believe that I have a choice, that magic could be real.
But Nolan’s right. Magic isn’t real. The books lie.
I’m tired of pretending they don’t.
chapter seventeen
Nolan isn’t waiting for me when I come out of his secret heart, so I walk downstairs to tell Valerie I’m leaving for the airport.
She doesn’t stop bustling around the register when I tell her. The cash drawer keeps popping out, no matter how hard she shoves it. I count at least three sighs of exasperation before she gives up, slipping the glasses on the end of her nose to the top of her head.
“So soon? You’re welcome to stay as long as you wish,” she says casually. “Should you find the company too engaging or the store too pleasant, I’m sure I could find some work hours lying around, if you need some petty cash to convince you to extend your visit.”
She says this like I planned to come here, like it has always been a summer getaway. I stop absently polishing the counter with my sleeve long enough to entertain the possibility of this place being my snow globe. I could live here, among characters and beloved plots and people with stories in their hearts and at their fingertips. Lazy days could be spent photographing the tourists, the locals, learning their favorite stories and trying to catch the gleam in their eyes through a lens. I could tell the tale of stories themselves and watch words on a page mold the people who read them.
I could stay with Nolan.
This thought is the most dangerous of all. I’m still living out the consequences of aligning my life so carefully with another, so I shut Nolan’s name out of my mind with the avalanche of Mark’s words and make myself say, “Thanks for everything, Valerie. But I really have to get back to Dallas. I have a college prep seminar to attend.”
“You’re really going back?”
Alex appears from the office behind the counter, his eyes watching me even as he bends beneath the stubborn drawer for two seconds and extracts a calcified piece of dog kibble before slamming it shut. The register pings happily and Valerie mumbles something under her breath that sounds an awful lot like a curse, while Alex stares me down.
When I don’t answer right away, Alex turns to Valerie and says, “Is she really going back?”
“I’m right here,” I say.
“Why can’t she stay for the summer?” Alex asks, ignoring me. “Everyone else does.”
“I can’t stay here,” I say. “Jenna … her parents … they want me in Dallas. It’s where I belong.”
The words sound like tin cans kicked across gravel, hollow and repetitive.
“You have to stay,” Alex says. His eyes are pleading with mine, drowning on behalf of another. “At least a little longer. If you care about him at all you’ll—”
The door jingles open as Nolan ducks in behind an eager Wally, who does not pause to greet us as he races up the stairs. I can hear Mr. Larson cooing in Wally-speak from here.
Alex, Valerie, and I stare at Nolan silently, all of us waiting for the other to speak first.
“What’s going on?” Nolan asks. I pretend not to notice the way his face lights up when he sees me.
“I have to go,” I tell him without preamble. A single pebble rolls down a mountain and the earth shudders, knowing more will follow. “I can’t stay.”
The light behind his eyes immediately shutters as his smile falls flat. It’s like I’ve shoved him, taken all of my strength and pushed him into another dimension, where I’ve drowned every whale beneath the waves just because I could, just because I wanted to watch him suffer.
“I thought maybe you were changing your mind.” His voice is steady, a bridge over a barely contained river. “You were calling to tell them—”
“I wasn’t,” I lie. “I mean, I can’t.” I beg him with my eyes to understand. “I have to go.”
His face flickers from disbelief to anger to pain to anger again. Even now I can’t help but wonder how I ever thought he was anything less than gorgeous just because he looks nothing like his author photo. I drag my eyes from the top of his head to the long fingers that I can as easily imagine tangling in my hair as typing Orman. They are not clenched but hang limply at his sides, forgotten.
He appears to be burning from within, and he is beautiful, but I tell myself not to notice, because otherwise I will not leave.
“After I told you about the girls,” he says. “And this morning. After the bazaar and the photos? After everything I told you, you’ve decided that you’re just going to keep doing what you’re supposed to?”
Customers are starting to float in and out the door in search of lunch. We must make quite a sight, Nolan and Alex and Valerie and me, standing in a square of angry whispers and misunderstood feelings that move between us like poisonous vapors.
Valerie exchanges a look with Alex, but I can’t read it because Nolan is refusing to break eye contact.
I wasn’t wrong to think the forest behind his eyes was dark. I wasn’t wrong to think he was hiding. But as we look at each other, I see what I couldn’t make out a few days ago. He isn’t only hiding himself from the world; he has used the branches to protect his sisters, to protect his family from the prying eyes of those who would mishandle their memory and poke holes in Orman for sport. He has grown himself a wall of thorns to hide any shred of vulnerability, but last night he flicked his fingers and the thorns receded to let me into his inner sanctum. This morning, he gave me access to his very heart.
And now I’m betraying him by shoving it back into his chest.
He won’t be able to forgive me, so I give him one more reason to hate me as I break our connection, turning to Valerie. “I need to go upstairs and pack my things.”
“I will assist you,” she says, her voice unreadable.
I don’t look at Nolan.
When we’re in the elevator, I am shocked by how Valerie says nothing. She was my top choice for supernatural guardian, the helpful, wizened godmother with a staff made of books and sheet music that would steer me toward my fate. But at a time when she might issue counsel, she is silent, focused on the layering of her long necklaces. I find the
piano music coming through the elevator speakers intensely annoying.
As she unlocks the door to her apartments, I hear my mouth say, “You aren’t going to say anything?”
Valerie inclines her head and looks at me, key paused midturn.
“What would you like me to say?”
This makes me angry. Supernatural guardians are supposed to have the answers, not ask the questions.
When I don’t speak, Valerie says, “I believe you are at a crossroads, dear. And there is not a soul in this world or the next that can make your decision for you.”
“That’s it? That’s your sage advice? I’ve got two choices and you won’t help me?”
She turns the lock and opens the door and we’re in the guest room and my shaking hands are unzipping my bag and only then does she say, “I was married at the age of twenty-one, in my third year in college. We met when I accompanied one of his opera performances as a final for my piano courses. He was wonderful and went on to sell albums and give performances all over the world.” She sighs, her eyes closed in a way that I recognize as trying to drag concrete memories from the unreliable past we carry in our heads. “We traveled the world, he and I. We ate every kind of food imaginable. He used to say it was because opera singers weren’t supposed to be so skinny.”
This makes my stomach hurt, because I am desperate to travel the world with Nolan like this but I must be lava and wind and fire. I must be immovable, so I concentrate very hard on folding clothes into my bulging duffel.
“I was a widow by thirty-two,” Valerie says, like it’s a history lesson and it doesn’t hurt her to think of it. “He died in his sleep. A brain aneurism that led to a stroke. It was all very quick and there wasn’t much to be done about it. Highly unusual for his age, but there you have it, dear. We are all victims of unlikely statistics at least once in our lives. We had a great deal of money stored up by then, enough for me to spend the rest of my days holed up in our too-large home in the big city with our only baby, Alexander, for company. I’m an orphan, you know, and George’s family did not care much for my lack of high breeding.”
This I find completely absurd, but I say nothing.
“I could have hidden, Amelia, and really, that’s what the world lets you do if you wish it. It lets you hide from anything that hurts or might remind you of your pain. It’s too big and too unwieldy to expose you at every turn if you truly want to conceal yourself. But I wanted to face the hurt and discover new hurts and rupture old ones. I wanted my George to know that I lived in his stead in a way that he could not have foreseen when he was alive, one that would have delighted him if he could see me. I opened a store that sold our two greatest passions, music and books, and I continued to give others the gift of playing music. It has not always been easy, but I did not want an easy, acquiescing life, the life many expected I would choose after George’s death. I couldn’t stomach it.”
Again, I say nothing. My bag is packed, so I sling the handle over my shoulder. I am stone. I am lava. I will not be deterred.
Valerie is looking at me levelly, like she knows what I’m going to do and won’t try to stop me. But she isn’t going to stand silently by, either.
“You must choose, Amelia, what you want your life to be. Only you can provide the courage necessary to tirelessly pursue your choices, and therefore it must be you who decides the path before you.”
If this were a different story, I would drop my bag and hug Valerie. I would announce my intention to stay and would race downstairs to kiss Nolan Endsley until he forgot about my ever leaving.
But this is the story of Amelia Griffin, who must now learn how to live in the wake of her best friend’s death. She must decide what she wants her forever life to be, not just her immediate life or the life she has pretended to possess for the past few days. She must be brave and strong and determined.
No matter how alluring, no matter how much my heart aches at leaving Nolan, I can’t impulsively upend my future to pursue something so uncertain. Maybe this was Jenna’s plan, to have me realize she was right all along. She and her parents have only ever wanted the best for me.
I breathe in, out, and will my eyes to remain empty pools. “Thank you for everything, Valerie,” I say. “I have to go.”
If she’s surprised, she doesn’t show it. I make myself ignore the disappointment I see in her eyes and walk to the elevator, leaving her standing in the abandoned guest room.
I don’t need a godmother anymore.
When the elevator opens to the first floor, Alex and Nolan are sitting on the mismatched chairs, the mood of the room humid and too close, like the air is angry with me, too. Alex looks up, but Nolan stares resolutely at the water bottle he holds between loose hands.
I ignore Alex and come to stand before Nolan. I owe him this much. I owe him a good-bye.
“I have to go,” I say. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t understand, but this is something that I have to do. I was wrong. I need to go back to school and become what I’m supposed to be.”
He refuses to look up or speak. I talk to the downward curve of his neck and am furious with myself for the tears that come bubbling up to cool my hardened heart.
“I don’t expect to hear from you,” I say. And because I will never be truly volcanic in my resolve, I add, “This has all mattered to me. You’ve mattered to me. Truly.”
Still he says nothing and doesn’t look at me.
“Good-bye, Nolan,” I say.
Some historic version of Amelia would ask him to call or write or visit or something, but New Amelia knows it is best to leave everything where it belongs—here, in Lochbrook, by the waves of the lake that never was and never will be an ocean.
I give a halfhearted wave to Alex and Valerie. I should offer gratitude for their kindness but I am out of explanations and good-byes for today. I walk mechanically out of the bookstore, the bells above the door mournfully chirping their good-bye.
I’m halfway down the path to the parking lot where my rental sits when he calls my name, and though the lava inside me says to bolt, my legs refuse to move. He has anchored me to the spot with the Old Magic of only my name, and I am frozen.
“Amelia,” he says. He stops a few yards away from me. “Amelia.”
It’s just my name, so why does it sound like everything I ever wanted to hear?
“Nolan,” I say. What else can I say? I have to go.
“This isn’t you,” he says. “This isn’t what Jenna would want.”
“But it is,” I say. “I have to go back.”
He is panting from the run, from distress—I don’t know. It’s no longer my business to know. He’s dragging his hands through his hair and pacing in front of my car—drowning on land—and I make the ground between us crack and splinter to keep him and his misery at a distance.
“There’s a photo,” he says suddenly, eyes shining. “There is a photo of a girl curled in a chair. She isn’t looking at the camera and she has headphones on. She’s—” His voice cracks and he pauses. “She’s the most beautiful girl in existence. She makes everything brighter around her because she is filled with stories, and even when she thinks she can’t take any more, she lets in another chapter and another. Because it’s who she is.”
I make myself open the hatchback and throw in my bag.
“She sees whales in the sky and has stories to tell, too. She’s not exactly sure how she wants to tell them, but she will.”
I slam the trunk closed.
“I love her,” Nolan whispers, and my heart stops. “I know it’s too soon, and unrealistic, and stupid, but I love Amelia Griffin, and if she will let me love her—in whatever way she wants to—we could tell each other stories forever. Of pictures and whales and … anything you want, Amelia.”
I ignore the wonder in his voice, the hope. If I were stronger I would kiss him good-bye, but I’m not strong. The sooner I go, the sooner we can forget. The sooner everything can go back to normal.
I leave Nolan
Endsley standing thunderstruck and more broken than I found him, his face growing smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror. I wait to feel the thread between us sever and wonder if it will be like a rubber band snapping back to leave an angry welt on my arm, one final retaliation.
But it doesn’t.
I shouldn’t have come here.
There are no whales in the lake when I drive past. There is nothing hiding in the trees, promising adventure or peril. It’s just a lake. It’s just some trees.
chapter eighteen
Everything is back to normal. Well, the new, Jennaless normal.
It’s my new mantra, what I tell myself every morning when I wake up to the sticky Texas heat and the sound of my mom watching TV.
Everything is back to normal.
I go to the college seminar and take careful notes. It’s actually useful, full of experts in life coaching and nutrition, teaching us things like how to make a cheap salad taste good and how to have a part-time job and still be social while taking a full course load.
When it’s over and I’m packing up my stuff, one of the instructors thanks me for coming and asks where I’m going to school.
“Missoula,” I say.
“That’s such a great school.” She beams. Her smile is huge and genuine, as if I told her I won the lottery twice in a row and want to split the winnings with her. “You’re going to love it. Do you know what you want to study?”
My mind is busy collecting my pens and notebook and checking to make sure I have my cell phone and I wait too long to answer, so I blurt out the first thing that lands on my tongue.
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