Kind and lovely.
Would help me achieve my life goals.
Excellent masseuse, therapist, and personal trainer.
Exceptional manners.
Endlessly knowledgeable—knows all the British prime ministers, in order.
Makes me feel safe and cared for.
Cons
Not John.
She wanted to call him.God, she wanted to call him. But what was she supposed to say?Hey, John, I sent my robot boyfriend back to the shop, so I’m single now, how about it?This was uncharted territory. There was no blueprint for navigating the fallout of an emotionally charged love square involving one’s former writing partner, a magical stone imp, and an android.
She typed and deleted a dozen messages. She even started to call him, before locking her phone and tossing it across the bed.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to speak to him, it was that she knew she wasn’t quite ready. She had waited ten years, what was another few weeks? And whatever did or didn’t happen with John, she knew she needed to be okay on her own.
So she got to work. The next few weeks were a whirlwind, as Chloe began to put her house, and her head, in order. She marched into McKenzie’s office with more conviction than she’d ever shown before and told him calmly, clearly, that trying to sidestep Sean’s agent had been a mistake. That it had soured a relationship she valued and that going forward, she needed to have more autonomy, more opportunities to learn.
“If you don’t think I’m right for this role, I’ll resign,” she said, heart thudding in her chest. To her surprise, McKenziedidn’t scoff or argue; he agreed. More than that, he listened. “And I want Wednesdays off,” she added, feeling flush with success. “Because I’ve enrolled in a writing course at UCL.”
“Okaaay,” McKenzie said, scratching his scalp.
“AndI want to wear colorful clothes in the office, and hats if I’m in the mood for hats. And I want to have plants on my desk. Plants everywhere.” She gesticulated wildly. She was on a roll. “And, Mr.McKenzie, I mean this in the kindest possible way, but I think you should just accept that your hairline isn’t going to be where it was when you were twenty-five, and maybe that’s okay.” She leaned across his desk, looked him dead in the eye, and said gently, “You are not your hairline.”
She could see from his expression that she shouldn’t have mentioned the hairline. She’d taken it too far, and she quickly backed out of the office before he could change his mind about the other stuff.
Next on the agenda was Akiko. She bought a train ticket to Edinburgh and spent the next weekend holed up in her friend’s flat, holding baby Elodie while she forced Kiko to sleep. They watched bad rom-coms and ate great dim sum, while Chloe filled her friend in on a slightly redacted version of what had gone down at the reunion weekend.
“John was the Imp?” Kiko asked, eyes wide at the revelation. Chloe had imagined she would be as surprised as she was, but then Kiko swiftly shrugged. “Yeah, now I think about it, that makes total sense. Poetry and treasure hunts were never Sean’s bag.”
“Nowyou tell me!” Chloe said, laughing. “Where was this analysis ten years ago?”
“You never asked me whether I thought it was Sean or not. You just told me that it was,” Kiko said indignantly, and this, for some reason, made Chloe cry with laughter.
On the long train journey home, Chloe pulled out the notebook Rob had given her and carried on writing her new play. She should shift to a laptop, it would be neater, but something about the notebook felt charmed. Whatever it was, it was working, and she could feel there was something here.
When she got back from Edinburgh, she found a serious-looking letter from Perfect Partners on top of the post pile. It reminded her, in no uncertain terms, that she was still bound by a nondisclosure agreement, and they expected her to attend a debrief next week. She sighed and tucked the letter into her bag. She wasn’t relishing the prospect of facing Avery.
Letter in hand, feeling reborn after a weekend away, she looked around her bedroom with fresh eyes. It was a shrine to her childhood, to her youth. There were gymkhana trophies, LAMDA certificates, a graduation photo with beaming parents on either side—all lovingly framed and displayed. She took them all down, one by one, and packed them away in a cardboard box. It wasn’t about forgetting; it was about making space. The walls felt bare when she was done, but that was the point. She wanted a blank canvas, ready for the next chapter, whatever that might look like.
Gazing at the empty wall, she realized there was another canvas that needed wiping. She unlocked her phone, opened her photos, then scrolled back to the year before. To her photos of Peter. There were snaps of them smiling on holiday, his arm flung around her at a fancy restaurant, the selfies they’d taken together in bed. How many times had these photos popped up, or she stumbled upon them when looking for something else? She’d see the joy in these pictures and doubt herself anew. But she knew the pictures didn’t tell the whole story. She selected them all, then pressed delete.
Next, she went up into the attic to find the dusty trunk that she’d taken to Oxford. It was full of printed-out essays, old play posters and scripts. She unfurled the poster forA Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the center was a photo of the cast in costume gathered around Oberon’s wicker throne. Chloe was standing to one side, dressed as Puck in a green jumpsuit, ivy woven through her hair, balancing in a bizarre ballet pose. In the photo it all looked less impressive than it had in her memory. The wicker throne was lopsided and too small for the actor playing Oberon, her hair looked crazed rather than whimsical, and the actor playing Lysander was scratching his crotch. How had they not noticed that when they chose this photo for the poster? She smiled, took a photo, and sent it to Sean, then rolled the poster back up. This was not what she came up here for.
As she searched through the trunk, she started to worry she hadn’t kept it. Maybe it had been lost? But then, at the very bottom, there it was, a binder full of sheet music. On the front were the words “Back to Brideshead—a musical. Words by Chloe Fairway, music by John Elton.”
The paper was dusty, the binder moth-eaten and stained brown in one corner, but the notes, written in pencil in John’s spidery hand, were just legible.
“Darling, I’ve made a cottage pie, would you like some?” her father called up the stepladder into the attic.
“Just coming,” she called back, tucking the binder under her arm.
In the kitchen, she stepped into a familiar, comforting scene: her mother fretting over a lost jigsaw piece, her father laying cutlery with quiet precision, peas boiling over on the Aga. She paused for a moment in the doorway, taking it in. Because she knew that at some point in the future, when the table was nolonger set for three, it would be simple nights like this that she was nostalgic for. Just as she had been longing for her university days, at Oxford she had yearned for a rose-tinted childhood of treasure hunts and daisy chains with her grandmother. Perhaps there was no cure for nostalgia besides anchoring yourself in the present.
