“I’m trying to remember this,” I said. “So I don’t romanticize it later and get it wrong.”
“You romanticizeeverything.” She laughed. “Didn’t you once write a paragraph about a laundromat?”
“It was a good laundromat,” I said on a snort. “Very moody.”
We clinked glasses. The wine was too acidic. I drank it anyway.
Thirty-six hours. That’s what we had left. Frankie would fly back to the States, back to New York, back to her boys and her college classes and her impossibly full life.
I would stay. Alone. On purpose.
That part still surprised me when I said it in my head.
I’d told everyone this move was about school. Which was true. Mostly. Paris for photography made sense in a way Texas never had and New York no longer did.
Faces were my thing. Always had been.
Not landscapes. Not architecture. Not the grand sweep of a skyline. Faces. The small, flickering betrayals. The way someone’s mouth tightened before they lied. The way their eyes softened when they forgot they were being watched. I liked the quiet honesty of them. The moment right before a performance reassembled itself.
Fashion and advertising were just the cleanest excuse I’d found to get close enough to look.
A camera made staring legitimate. A campaign made obsession marketable. No one questioned why I lingered over cheekbones or the slope of a collarbone or the way someone’s expression shifted when they thought no one important was paying attention.
It was never about the clothes.
It was about closeness.
It was about wanting to understand people without having to risk being understood back.
But I was also running. From my family’s expectations, from the version of myself that existed too comfortably in other people’s narratives. From Dominic Walsh, who wanted a future I couldn’t see myself in without feeling like I was holding my breath underwater. Even as he raised his head in my memories, I shoved his ass back out.
Not now.
Not—
Just not now.
Yes, I was running from all of that, but also from Frankie herself.
She knew about the “scholarship.” Or rather, she knew thatI knewit was her. The whole myth was thin and polite and mutually agreed upon, like not naming the thing because naming it might make it heavier. I needed to believe I’d earned this. She needed me to take it without drowning in gratitude.
Independence was such a strange thing. You can want it desperately and still feel guilty when someone hands it to you wrapped in a bow.
“You don’t have to keep thanking me,” Frankie said suddenly, like she’d read my mind. She slid pasta into a pan, steam rising. “I want to do this. I want you here. Doing this.”
“I know,” I said. “I just?—”
“Rach.” She finally looked at me then. Soft, serious. Those green eyes were so damn sober. I swore there was even a gleam of tears hinted in them. “Let me be good at this.”
I could almost hear the words she didn’t say.Let me let you go.
No way in hell could I tell her no.
So I did. I let her.
We ate standing up because I hadn’t bought a table yet. The pasta was too salty. The bread was perfect. The wine went down smooth and fast. We talked about everything except the goodbye. That was what she asked for, and honestly, it was what I needed. We danced around it like it might bite.
She told me the new songs she and Bubba were working on. I told her about the girl I saw smoking on a fire escape and that looked like she belonged in a Godard film. She brought up Jake’s flying lessons and I snorted. Putting that hot head in the cockpit of a plane didn’t seem like the best idea. Frankie disagreed. Because of course she did. She was so crazy about them.
