“You’ll write to me, right?” she had asked.
“I’m a journalist,” he had said, like that was answer enough.
But she knew better. He would write. But maybe not to her.
They had talked on the phone a few times, voices stretching across the distance like a thread that kept fraying at the edges. But knowing they lived on opposite coasts of the country—how different their lives were about to become—Nora had done the one thing she swore she wouldn’t. She didn’t call him back that last time.
Maybe that was its own painless farewell.
Because now, goodbye to him too.
And hello, Yale.
Nora stepped out of her dorm and onto campus, where the air had that crisp, academic kind of coolness. Somewhere between intellectual superiority and a late-September breeze. The Gothic buildings loomed, ivy curling up their stone facades like they had been here before history itself. Students shuffled past, notebooks tucked under arms, backpacks sagging under the weight of knowledge—or, at least, really heavy books. The boys wore blazers with turtlenecks like they were auditioning for future roles as professors. All of them looked significantly more confident than she felt.
Unlike them, she wasn’t just starting college; she was stepping into history. As one of the first women allowed to attend Yale, she could feel the weight of that settling over her like an unspoken challenge. Noticed the glances from some of the older professors, the way a few male studentsstill seemed to shilly-shally when they saw a girl walking on campus with a stack of books in her hand, their brains struggling to recalibrate. It wasn’t hostile, exactly. Just…uncertain. Like no one had quite figured out yet if they were supposed to welcome the change or resist it.
The girls had long, straight hair, parted in the middle, or curls held in place with careful indifference—an indifference they worked hard to perfect as if it could offset the weight of history pressing down on them. They were the first. The first women to walk these halls, to sit in these lecture rooms, to take up space in a place that had never been meant for them. And they knew it. You could see it in the way they held their books a little tighter, their expressions schooled into effortless cool, their laughter never too loud, their presence never too demanding.
If they acted like they belonged, no one would question if they did.
She squared her shoulders. Let them stare. She hadn’t come here to blend in.
She took a breath. This was it.
She adjusted the waistband of her stiff new bell-bottoms and smoothed her blouse, the fabric light and airy, chosen to make her look effortlessly put-together. Her hair curled just right—the result of an entire can of hair spray and a silent prayer.
She checked her schedule. First class. No idea where she was going. Which was frustrating because she had practiced walking the route yesterday, memorizing landmarks, convincing herself she had it all figured out. But now, as she stood in the middle of this overwhelming, ancient, book-filled kingdom, her brain had gone completely blank.
But she was here. And if she could survive saying goodbye—to her town, her home, her past, and him—she could survive this.
Maybe.
Nora drew in a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and walked in the general direction of somewhere.
When she came back from the concerts, sunburned and half dizzy from a freedom that only existed in the spaces between songs, she packed up her room. Folded her old life into boxes. Got ready for college. But before she left, she did one more thing. She called her adviser at Yale and told them she wasn’t going to minor in English; she was going to major in it. No more playing it safe and going into marketing. She was going to be a writer.
She had a few people to thank for that. Herself, most of all, because, in the end, she had to be the one to make the choice. But also her parents, who had always believed she could do anything, even before she believed it herself. Her grandmother, whose stories had been a kind of alchemy—turning ordinary afternoons into adventures, filling quiet moments with whole worlds waiting to be discovered. And Joe.
Joe, who had held up a mirror and made her see that the life she had planned wasn’t the same as the life she wanted. Who had asked the right questions, made her think, made her wonder if maybe the “responsible thing” wasn’t about playing it safe but about being brave enough to chase what set her soul on fire.
And she had learned something: Art was a responsibility too.
It was an artist’s quiet, relentless obligation to put something into the world that hadn’t existed before. To take what was inside and shape it into something real. And for her, that meant words. Sentences. Stories. Meshing them together like brushstrokes on a canvas, letting them form something beautiful on the page.
This was her path. And for the first time, she wasn’t afraid to follow it.
Nora smiled, striding in the direction she hoped class was. She had about a fifty-fifty shot of being right, which, statistically speaking, was not terrible.
“Let me guess,” a voice drawled behind her. “You’re the kind of girl who likes Coca-Cola.”
She stopped dead in her tracks. That voice. That impossible, infuriating, unmistakable voice.
Her head snapped up, and sure enough, there he was—Joe Dumas, grinning like he had just gotten away with something. Which, knowing him, he probably had.
“What—” Her brain short-circuited. “What are you doing here?” She glanced around, half expecting some sort of elaborate prank, maybe a camera crew, or worse—some stranger in a lab coat ready to inform her she had officially lost her mind.
Joe shrugged, completely nonchalant, like he wasn’t supposed to be across the country. “Funny thing, they had an opening in their journalism department. And what do you know? I just so happened to be on the waitlist.”
