There were afternoons when we’d talk past the end of our hour without either of us mentioning it. Afternoons when I’dgone home afterward feeling the fragile warmth of someone who suspected they might have been seen and understood. I told myself I was just helping him pass English. I told myself that every time he stayed a few minutes past our hour, pretending not to notice the clock, asking one more question. Those were the moments that got me. The in-between ones. When the library was almost empty, the light through the windows had started to shift.
“What do you think she’s actually saying?” he asked once, tapping the open page. “About love?”
I’d hesitated too long before answering. Not because I didn’t know, but because I suddenly cared about saying it right. “I think she’s saying that love isn’t enough on its own,” I said carefully. “That you can love someone completely and still have to walk away, if staying means losing yourself in the process. And that real love—the kind worth having—waits. It doesn’t ask you to be less than you are to keep it.”
He looked at me in that still, considering way. “So it’s not really about Rochester at all.”
“It’s about Jane,” I said. “It was always about Jane.”
He was quiet for a moment, looking at the page. “And at the end, she gets both things. Herself and him.”
“She does.”
“But only after he loses everything first.” He looked up at me with a half grin that I had not been expecting and was not prepared for. “Bleak.”
I felt the heat move into my cheeks immediately and looked down at my copy of the book. “Maybe. But it’s honest and real too, don’t you think?”
He was quiet for a moment, and when I made myself look back up, he was still watching me with that half grin, like he’d noticed the blush and had decided not to mention it, which wassomehow worse than if he had. “So you have to lose everything before you get to keep anything,” he stated.
“I guess so,” I said to the book. “Brontë seemed to think so.”
He nodded slowly, like he was deciding something. The grin had faded into something quieter, more considered, and there was something in his expression that I kept turning over afterward—something that felt like it had been meant specifically for me and that I didn’t quite know what to do with for a very long time.
I let myself think I’d read it right. The way he lingered and how his attention changed when it was just the two of us. I was fifteen, and I had decided, with the absolute certainty of someone who had read enough love stories to recognize one, that something had to have been happening between the two of us.
Then he graduated. Enlisted in the Marines. Said goodbye in the hallway outside the library—not a quick or careless goodbye, but a real one, the kind that involved looking at me directly, hugging me, and holding on long enough to give me hope. He walked away without promising anything. I told myself that was okay.
A few weeks later, a letter arrived. I had read it so many times I could have recited it back then. It was warm—not carefully friendly, not formal, but genuinely warm. He didn’t say anything I could point to as declarative or conclusive. He just wrote as if I were someone he didn’t want to stop talking to yet.
I didn’t write back—not because I didn’t want to, but because I knew how it would feel if I sent something and nothing came back. The letter was sweet and friendly, and I needed it to stay that way. Writing back meant waiting for a reply that might not come, and I hadn’t felt like I could survive turning something that felt like a beginning into proof that it wasn’t. He didn’t write again either.
I’d wanted to tell my sisters during all of it. I’d thought about it more than once—sitting around the table at Grandma and Grandpa’s, surrounded by people who would understand. But I hadn’t. Partly because putting it into words would have required admitting how much it already meant, and I was fifteen and superstitious about things like that. Partly because my sisters weresisters—which meant they would remember, and hope, and check in, and I didn’t think I could bear them being part of something that might turn into nothing. And it had turned into nothing, or nearly so. I kept the letter. I’d moved it every time I moved—high school bedroom to dorm room to first apartment to the one above Pine & Pages. Not because I was still hoping. Just because setting it aside had always felt different from throwing it away.
I curled up on the couch with Wentworth claiming my lap immediately and Darcy pressing against my hip with the studied casualness of a cat who definitely hadn’t been waiting. Knightley draped himself across the back cushion and regarded me with calm, steady patience. I ran my fingers through warm fur and stared at the lamp and tried to be sensible about this.
Whatever had changed in Jasper tonight, it wasn’t nostalgia. Nostalgia looked backward. What I’d seen in his face when I walked through that door had been something else entirely. It was present tense, deliberate, unhidden. That was the part that frightened me. Nostalgia was a thing you could name and set aside. Possibility was something else altogether. And Jasper, who used to look at me like I was someone worth paying attention to, seeing me that way again was the most dangerous thing I could think of.
Chapter 4
Jasper
Iwoke to light filtering in through the windows, pale and cool. It was early enough that the day hadn’t decided what it wanted from me yet. I lay there for a moment, staring up at the beamed ceiling.
My knee made itself known as soon as I shifted. Not pain—nothing sharp or alarming. It was stiff, a reminder of what happened to me. I bent it slowly, testing the range the way I’d learned to do without thinking about it, waiting for resistance that never quite came and still managing to feel annoyed when it didn’t feel effortless.
“Functional,” I muttered under my breath. “Sure.”
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood. The cabin was quiet and orderly, everything where I’d left it the night before. Clean counters. Boots by the door. Coffee already measured out, waiting. I liked it this way—nothing surprising, nothing demanding more than I had to give.
I brewed the coffee and carried my mug to the small table by the window, easing into the chair as the river came fully into view. The far bank had been turning for a week now, gold and rust creeping in at the edges, and in the early morning light, it looked softer than it would later in the day, the colors notyet showing off. Morning mist hovered just above the surface, catching the light and drifting away as fast as it formed. I watched it for a while, letting the heat from my mug seep into my hands. The air coming through the cracked window was cold enough to mean it.
The mallards came around the bend about ten minutes in—four of them, working the far bank in their slow, methodical way, dipping and righting themselves with a patience that looked like contentment. I had started watching for them without meaning to. Some mornings they were there, and some mornings they weren’t, and on the mornings they weren’t, I noticed their absence, which told me something about what I had started to need from this place.
I wasn’t broken. I knew that. My body worked. My life worked. But I’d never be like I was before. If I was staying—for now, at least—this was what staying looked like. A river, four mallards, and a mug of coffee cooling from hot to drinkable as the mist burned off and the morning decided what it would be.
I picked up my phone and scrolled without much interest—bank alerts, a message from Paige about a shift swap—until I saw the name I wasn’t ready for yet. I didn’t open it. Didn’t even tap the preview. I could already guess what it said. Checking in. Seeing how I was holding up. Maybe offering something that looked like help and felt like pity if I thought about it too long.
I locked the screen and set the phone face down on the table, finished my coffee, and decided a muffin and better coffee were reason enough to go into town.
