“You don’t regret Jonathan?” I asked, invoking her ex-husband, the year of hell that had come at the hands of someone who’d once vowed to love her through all trials and tribulations, only to reveal himself as the source of them.
Dahlia smiled wistfully, as if she were recalling a sweet memory.
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
“But he made your life miserable,” I said, stunned by her answer. “You were functionally homeless, Dahlia, what—”
“Make no mistake, I hope that man gets a paper cut every day for the rest of his life,” she said. “But I don’t regret marrying him because I don’t regret the person I amnow.” She sighed, popped an edamame bean into her mouth. “Leaving him was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. No one supported me. But because of that experience, I can live freely now.I might never have come to terms with my sexuality. Definitely wouldn’t have covered myself with all these doodles.” She snickered, holding out her decorated forearms. “And my approach to dating is so different now, so much clearer. I don’t get lost in the what-ifs anymore. I’m not planning a future with every person I meet. I just focus on what I want in the moment. I let myselflive.”
It was moments like this one when I remembered that, despite appearances, Dahlia was almost six years older than me, with the experience that came with it. I squeezed my eyes shut, then pulled out my phone. I could feel Mal’s arms around me again, feel the warmth of him against my back, the rumble of his voice against the hollow of my neck. How, that day, sitting on the grass in Millenium Park, I’d asked myself what it would feel like to be nestled in the comfort of his hold every day. Imagining what it would be like to free-fall.
“What are you doing?” Dahlia said.
I ignored her, gathering my nerve, and called Mal. The phone rang once, twice, thrice, and I tapped my foot, violently overcome by a need to act, to undo the damage I’d already wrought.
Just when I thought it would go to voicemail, he picked up.
“Hey, Jo,” Mal started, his voice obstructed by a din. “Sorry, I’m a bit—” Another voice, high, feminine, interrupted him, and Mal cleared his throat. “Yeah, I know, honey, one second...” He sighed, then said to me, “I’ll call you back later.”
Then he hung up.
Stunned, I looked down at my phone until I saw the time.Shit.It was almost five. Mal’s event at Em-Dash Books forShe Blooms at Duskwas starting any minute now. My annoyance at myself for losing track of the time was the only thing that overshadowed the raging curiosity at hearing him address another woman ashoney.
“That was a very one-sided conversation,” Dahlia observed, watching as I stood up and gathered my purse.
“Do you need any more footage?” I asked Dahlia.
“Other than what you already showed me?” Dahlia said. “Nah. I think I’ll be set.”
“Great,” I said, waving Daniel over to our table to announce our departure. “Because I need a ride.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Mal
Mal’s first event as a published author had been subpar. He’d hosted it, at his mother’s behest, at a local Barnes & Noble, who set him up with a small table in the corner of the fiction section and provided twelve books, of which he sold nine, most to family members. Despite rehearsing with Amelia, he’d fumbled when a customer, who was shopping in the section and stopped to listen out of curiosity, asked him what his book was about. A girl in the front row kept picking her nose and wiping it on the cushion seat, which distracted him so thoroughly that he misspelled a reader’s name during his brief signing. Afterward, his dad had clapped him on the shoulder, told him he was proud of him, and emphasized that he needed to “learn to make better eye contact.”
And then, magically, things fell in line. Paloma Padovani, pop star turned cultural curator, readDuskand named it one of her favorite novels of all time. A famous book blogger described it as “a Studio Ghibli movie with spice,” and before he knew it,Duskwas going viral. Every other day Kelechi sent him videos, many of them with hundreds of thousands of views, of readers celebrating the world he had created. After that, it was off to the races—features in theWashington PostandNew York Times, the starred reviews he’d received fromKirkusandPublishers Weeklysuddenly prominently displayed on billboards and internet ads that his marketing team initially told him they didn’t have the budget to fund. Even the video he posted on his newly made Instagram explaining his novel’s synopsis had gone viral the next day—mostly, to his chagrin, due to readers being shocked by his appearance. (As if I needed another reason to be obsessed,@lisapayne340 commented, to which @realhotgirlsheet responded,FR??? Why he look that? Come home babe, our children miss you.)
It should not have surprised him that his first in-person event since his disastrous launch would be more successful. But it was the extent of the success that shook him. The crowd was mixed gender (“Unusual,” Hani, the blue-haired bookseller who was running the event, observed.), an apparent side effect of Mal being the rare Black man successfully writing love stories since the late Eric Jerome Dickey. And it was packed, people filling every corner of the bookstore’s floor, visitors wedged between bookshelves and spilling out into the street just to see him.
He searched the sea of faces for the one he wanted to see the most, and tried to ignore the lump that formed in his throat when he couldn’t find it. The moment he’d gotten home after the picnic, he’d regretted how he’d handled his conversation with Jo. He’d been too wounded, felt too cast aside, to really articulate his feelings properly, and prayed that she’d heard a plea rather than a threat. What he should have said:I’m jealous. I’m worried. I feel like I don’t have the history with you that Ezra does, and that you going back to him is inevitable. I want to hear you tell me that it’s not. And when you’re finally ready to choose, I want you to choose me.
But then five o’clock came, and most of the gathered guests were seated, and Jo was nowhere to be found.
“She’ll come,” Kelechi had assured him. She was in her wheelchair today, settled in a place of honor in the front row.
“You ready to start?” Hani asked, tapping the microphone to test it. “There’s a big crowd here, so we’ll be efficient with signing—”
Mal’s phone screen lit up. The woman of the hour.
“One second, let me pick this up really quick,” he said, smiling queasily at the crowd of expectant faces.
“Hey—” Jo started, and just hearing her voice when her face wasn’t here to accompany it made his heart sink. Next to him, Hani was getting impatient.
“I’m sorry, Malcolm, but I think in the interest of time we need to startnow.”
“Yeah, I know, Hani,” Mal said, just a little irritated. Then, to Jo: “I’ll call you back later.”
