“It’s coming,” she said. Then her hand found his. Had she meant to? Their fingers intertwined like they had so many times before. Rose held tight, and he could feel their hearts synching up, practiced as they were in latching on to the same beat. “Don’t blink,” she said, squeezing his hand and sending his heart rate rocketing past hers. He wouldn’t have blinked if he’d been offered a kingdom on a silver platter.
Slowly, the light came. Purple turned to pink, then gold, then yellow, like the gorse that would once again flourish in the hills come springtime. Rose gripped Landon’s hand tighter. “It’s like I’m seeing it for the first time,” she said. “How does it always feel I’m seeing it again for the first time?”
“Because we’re lucky,” Landon said. Tears pricked the corners of his eyes. He rolled his shoulders, begging his body to stay in control a few minutes longer.
“Can I tell you something awful?” Rose asked. Landon froze.
“Sure,” he said. “Try me.” But inside, he was a hurricane. Inside, all he could hear was the whoosh of the wind and Poppy’s voice, high and shrill, whistling in his ears. How many times had Rose asked him that same question, with just this intonation? How many times had he been her safe space, holding feelings too big for her to hold on her own?
“I don’t ever want to stop feeling this way.” Rose took another long swig of champagne, then pointed at Landon to pass her the orange juice. “I’ve already thought about what I’ll do when the side effects wear off. And I know I can’t predict the future, and maybe things will change, but right now I’m sure I would take the pill again.”
Landon’s heart conspired to beat clear out of his chest. “That’s not so awful,” he lied.
“I’d forget everyone,” she said. “I’d forget Graham.”
Graham, who she’d only been dating a few months and already allowed to try out a word likesoulmatein front of a man she’d just met. “Do you feel like you really know him?”Clang, clang, clang.He was playing with fire.
“I’m starting to.” She stared off over the city. “But I can’t imagine waking up and not feeling like this. I just can’t imagine feeling so…” She held out her hands like she might find the word on the wind, flexing her long fingers this way and that. Landon tried not to stare but couldn’t stop himself in the end. His Rose had turned her hands like that once before, to get a better view of the star inside his grandmother’s ring. It would have looked beautiful here in the day’s first light. “Burdened,” she finally settled on. “I don’t want to feel any weight at all. I want to be so light I could fly away.” Rose stretched out her arms like a bird.
Landon envied her. Jamie understood her. He stretched his arms out, too. “I’d be sad if you forgot me.”
Rose laughed and took a long drink from the dwindling champagne bottle. “You could just take another pill, too.”
“Sure,” he said. “Good point.” What would it feel like, he wondered, to owe nothing to anybody? The last time he’d felt that way, he’d been a child. Though Landon had to admit that there, right then, he didn’t feel quite so heavy. Maybe it was just the champagne, or maybe he’d breathed in so much thin, cold air that he was no longer thinking straight. Regardless, it felt good.Hefelt good. And he had Rose to thank.
Chapter Sixteen
“I swear to you, it is one hundred degrees outside,” Poppy said, waving both hands in front of her face for dramatic effect. Though she now pulled in a six-figure salary in marketing forMarie Claire—a job that, to her credit, she openly admitted her father had helped her get—she could never truly leave behind the cutthroat theater queen she’d once been. “I still struggle to understand the psychology of someone who deliberately books a wedding in August.”
The girls lay in a deep soaking tub square in the middle of Rose’s hotel room—the very room she and Landon would share as husband and wife in fewer than twenty-four hours. They’d swapped their rehearsal dinner garb for swimsuits and had hardly bothered to mix any hot water with cold before sinking in, a bottle of bubbly perched on the side of the whirlpool. Rose took a sip from the thin champagne flute and bit down on the tip of her tongue, her understanding of where that common expression had come from always somehow magnified in Poppy’s presence. She and Landon hadnotdone it deliberately. Rose had always dreamed of a fall wedding in Vermont, the week before peak season, when the leaves were yellow with promise. But when the venue gave them a quotefor September, Rose nearly dropped the phone, only at the last second letting it linger somewhere around her hip. Landon had smoothly picked it back up and asked, in his Landon way, whether they had anything actually affordable for the average millennial. “August twentieth,” they said. So August 20 it was. It still felt like a dream to Rose. Albeit a dream that required cool water, copious sunscreen, and bug spray that was at least 7 percent DEET.
Poppy splashed a little water in her direction, perhaps regretting her bluntness the tiniest bit. “I still can’t believe that you agreed to this. You and Landon are practically joined at the hip.”
Though the premise of spending the night before the wedding apart was archaic, it had taken very little for Rose to agree. Through seating plans, flower arrangements, and wedding dress shopping, Poppy had been a magnificent partner: exacting, uncompromising, and supportive. But more than that, she’d been a magnificent friend, and the closest thing to a sister Rose would ever have. Rose had couched the night to Landon like a concession, but the truth was, it was a gift. “Are you worried about your speech?” she asked.
“No.” Poppy drained the last of her champagne. “I’ve had this speech written in my notes app for years.”
Rose hadn’t meant to stumble upon this bit of lore, which felt like it belonged to the big day itself, but now that it had been placed in her lap, it was impossible to ignore. “You’re joking.”
“I don’t joke.” That was mostly true, much to Landon’s chagrin.
“When did you start?”
Poppy thought a moment, as though weighing whether she wanted to give away a secret that lent her such an air of mystery. “Ugh, fine,” she said. “You getting married is making me soft. Do you remember when you called me from the Finger Lakes, the morning after Thanksgiving?”
“Yeah,” Rose said. “I do.” She’d been surprised to be the first one up, though it wasn’t like she’d risen at some ungodly hour. More surprising was that Poppy had been awake when she’d called.
“I know I was probably kind of bitchy on the phone, but that’s just because I thought it was, like, an emergency. I mean, your dad had just died.”
“Fair,” Rose said. “Though you know, Iwasplanning on just leaving a voicemail.”
“Anyway, that’s not really the point. Point is that after we hung up, I couldn’t go back to sleep because I couldn’t stop thinking about what you’d said about Landon. If he could make you feel like that a few days after your dad’s funeral, I started to wonder whether he might be a little more permanent than I’d been thinking. And if he was going to be permanent, I wanted to be prepared. I hate being unprepared, and I hate when speeches sound like the person wrote them on the plane ride. So I literally opened my notes app and typed what you said, basically word for word where I remembered.”
The heat and the champagne had made Rose more susceptible, but she was sure tears would have pooled in her eyes regardless. “You did?”
Poppy shrugged. “I thought you would outgrow Landon in weeks. I saw you with someone less quirky, smoother, a little shorter—someone who would fit in anywhere you might want to go. But then he goes and invites you into his family right when you need it most, and I heard in your voice what that meant to you. I’m tough, but I’m on your team. Always. And you were telling me hewasyour team.”
Poppy’s short fuse with Landon had always baffled her, but Rose had seen her giving him more leeway these last few years,even if she wasn’t openly warm. “So you approve?” Rose said it like a joke but there was some truth to the question.
