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“You have a flight to catch,” he said, smiling down at me. “And a world to conquer.”
I smiled at him. “Well—maybe I’ll see you in a few months? Or not.”
“Jesse bus station. December twenty-first. Six o’clock.”
“I’ll see you then.” I kissed him one more time, then stepped away. We were still holding hands, and I gave his a squeeze, holding it for one more beat before I let it go.
“It’s not a goodbye,” Russell said, shaking his head. “It’s a see you later.”
I smiled at that. I wondered if he felt like I did—suddenly a little bit lighter. I knew that this plan wasn’t perfect, and a million things could—and probably would—happen before December. But for now, it felt like the right thing to do. It would mean I could move forward, not feeling like I’d made a huge mistake or committed myself too quickly. But like we’d actually have time to figure out what we wanted. “See you later,” I echoed.
He gave me a smile and a nod, and I gave him one back.
And then there was nothing left to do… but go.
I turned and walked back up the stairs toward the security line, tempted to take them two at a time, feeling a buoyancy in my step, still tasting Russell’s kiss on my lips.
When I reached the top, I turned around. I could still see him, but barely, through the glass doors. They were sliding open and shut. I saw him, through the crowds and the doors and the distance, meet my eye.
He raised a hand in a wave and I raised one back.
I stood there for just a second longer, memorizing this moment.
And then I turned and walked forward, toward whatever the future would bring.
CHAPTER 25 Friday, December 21st
5:45 P.M.
I pulled into a space in the Jesse Bus Terminal lot and shifted the Prius into park.
As I’d gotten closer to Jesse, and the temperature had dropped, I’d seen that the mountains that surrounded the town were now snow-capped and stunningly beautiful—making it both familiar and completely different.
The lot wasn’t hugely full—a smattering of cars and trucks, the occasional van, and a motorcycle parked right by the entrance. I looked around for the Bronco, before I realized a second later that of course Russell wouldn’t have been driving it. But I actually had no idea what he would be driving.
I tilted the rearview mirror down and ran a brush through my bangs. Chloe had been right—they worked on my face, and I really liked them a lot—but it was the highest-maintenance haircut I’d ever had, something I was still getting used to. But Didi and Katy both loved it—I’d FaceTimed them right after I’d left Visible Changes, the salon in Stanwich that Gillian had recommended.
In the first few days after I’d gotten to the Stanwich campus and met Mirabella, my very flaky roommate (she would go on to drop out after twenty days, leaving me with the enviable position of being a freshman with a single, even though I was assured by the housing office that this would not be the case second semester), I found myself checking my phone a little too often, always hoping to see a message from Russell, that he’d decided to forgo our agreement and reach out. And at first, the silence did bother me, in a low-hum kind of way, in the background but still present. But this really didn’t last long—because there was a lot going on.
I had to get my class schedule and navigate the campus and try to make friends and sort out the dining hall etiquette and get a handle on my hair, which was encountering sustained humidity for the first time ever.
And more than anything else—I was figuring out what a relationship with my mother looked like. For the first time since I was quite tiny, we were in the same place at the same time. And it wasn’t like things had been easy—the ride when she’d picked me up from JFK had not been a great start. I’d been exhausted from barely sleeping on the plane, in addition to my emotional hangover from the previous twenty-four hours with Russell. We were stilted and awkward with each other until, unprompted, Gillian pulled off the highway and into a McDonald’s drive-thru. I got a sausage, egg, and cheese McMuffin, she got a McGriddle, and we both got hash browns and coffee. We drove the rest of the way with the bag on the seat between us, eating in silence. But not super-strained silence. More like we were just getting our bearings.
We started with a once-a-week coffee date on campus that then grew to include a standing Sunday dinner at her house. “That’s so Gilmore Girls,” Didi had groaned. “You’re even in Connecticut! On the nose much?”
These dinners meant I was also getting to know my half-siblings, and even Anthony a little (though he still seemed to travel a lot for work, going back to the UK pretty frequently, so he was only there around half the time). It was a strange concept, essentially meeting three people that I was related to. We were easing into what our relationship could look like—so far, it involved watching a lot of animated movies and playing a needlessly complicated board game about building railroads. We didn’t yet have the kind of relationship that Russell had had with his half-siblings. But it was a start—and for now, that was enough.
I knew what Gillian and I had didn’t look like a traditional mother-daughter relationship, and maybe it never would. But we were finding out what it looked like for us, and maybe that was all that was needed. We were just taking it one coffee date, one dinner, one conversation and text exchange at a time. Rebuilding our bridge slowly, so that it would be strong enough to withstand a storm if the weather got rough again.
And it wasn’t like my dad had been absent from all of this. My first day on campus, we’d had a very long conversation in which I told him everything—the bus station and Russell and the helicopter and Wylie Sanders and staying in the guesthouse and the road trip home.
He had not been happy about this, to say the least. But he did seem somewhat mollified when a huge box of Nighthawks merchandise had shown up at the house—including a note from Wylie that was addressed To Ted. My dad wrote him back a thank-you—which led, in a twist I truly hadn’t seen coming, to my dad and Wylie becoming friends. They’d started hanging out whenever Wylie was in California, going on hikes and to baseball games, and there was talk of my dad going out to see him at the Wynn.
I heard from Montana occasionally—she was always sending me Connecticut recommendations and funny memes. She was supportive of our dads becoming buddies, telling me that her dad needed a friend his own age. And when I pointed out that my dad was twenty years younger than Wylie, she’d waved this off, calling it “rock-star math.”
And not only did my dad have a new, burgeoning friendship with Wylie—he was also no longer alone in our house.
He’d sent me a picture in late September, him holding up a yellow-white puppy with a squashed face and huge paws. It turned out the dog had been a rescue hired for one of my dad’s ad campaigns, and he’d fallen in love with him on set, especially when the dog refused to take any sort of direction and ended up toppling the craft services table, then joyfully eating the spoils that hit the ground.
