The lights of High Street were a glorious sight. Landon considered dropping to his knees in gratitude but stopped himself, mostly because Rose was watching. “I get the sense I may have some damage control to do,” Rose said.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he lied.
“Let me take you out for a drink. There’s a great cocktail bar through a close halfway to the castle. It’s not a secret, but I promise it’s not filled to the brim with tourists.”
“I’ma tourist,” Landon said.
“I don’t think of you that way. And anyway, you won’t be one for much longer.”
Landon was an expert at not getting his hopes up. He was so practiced it felt antithetical to his entire being to feel the hope he did now, with her encouragement. But she wanted him tostay. She’d said it loud enough that even through his thick skull he could hear her. “You really think I belong here?”
“I do,” she said. “There’s just something about you I can’t put my finger on. I don’t really know how else to say it, you just…” She paused and looked up at him from beneath the black eyelashes he loved so much. “Fit.” Then she reached her hands into the pocket of his raincoat.
“A drink sounds nice,” he said.
Her right hand flew out of the coat, clutching a bit of crumpled paper. Landon should have taken the receipt out of the pocket the day he’d found it, but outside of his home, in this magical city where anything was possible, Rose’s handwriting on the back had turned it into a talisman of sorts. A reminder of all he could have again if he just kept moving forward.
“‘Dentist appointment—1:15,’” she read. Rose turned the crumpled paper over in her hands. “‘Two coffees and two croissants.’ Why do I remember this?”
Landon froze. There had been no reports of anyone who’d taken the pill remembering anything. There were some people whose families and friends told them about their lives in such great detail that theyfeltlike they remembered, but that wasn’t the same thing. That wasn’t what this was.
“What does it feel like?” he asked, suddenly desperate. Could his Rose be closer than he thought? What would he say to her, ifshe appeared? He should have written something down; he should have—
Rose laughed. “Itfeelslike you told all of us about this at our last pill meeting. Took me a minute to put my finger on it.”
Landon tried to disguise his deflation, but the punch to the gut was hard to walk off. “Right,” he said. “Yeah, I completely forgot.”
Rose tilted her head, looking at him like she didn’t quite believe his reply. “Why did you hold on to this?”
“What do you mean?” Landon asked, trying to buy time to think about how Jamie might answer the question.
“I mean, I’m always curious when people hold on to things from their others. Do you ever want to remember?”
Landon couldn’t puff himself up enough to answer definitively one way or another, so he settled on an equivocation. “Sometimes.”
“That’s interesting,” she said. “I never, never do.” And because this time Landon was looking her dead in the eyes and not sitting side by side, leg to leg, on a chaise lounge readingMoby-Dick, he saw the nosebleed start.
“Hey, I think you—” he began, but Rose was faster this time.
“Fuck,” she said, flinging her head back. “I need to find tissues.”
“Use that receipt,” Landon said, “and I’ll find you some.” She brought the crumpled paper to her nose, and it was immediately clear it wasn’t designed to absorb. “Hold tight.” Rose waved him off with one hand, as if to sayWhere the hell am I going to go like this?
Mercifully, the shops on High Street were open late, preying on tipsy tourists they could entice to buy miniature castles, toddler kilts, and commemorative whisky drams. He ran into a souvenir shop and asked if the large, bearded man at the register could spare some toilet paper. Landon must have looked as alarmed as he feltbecause the man pulled a box of tissues out from under him and gave him the whole box, sparing only a grunt of acknowledgment.
Rose’s face was streaked with red when he returned. “Here,” he said, all but flinging her the box. It was an effort not to ask if he could help clean the blood from her face, especially the thick, dried-on marks she would need a mirror to rinse.
“Thank you,” she said, the words muffled by the tissue. “I must be getting sick or something. Or maybe my other got horrible nosebleeds all the time, too.”
Landon couldn’t remember a single nosebleed his Rose had ever had. “Or maybe it’s the cold,” Landon supplied. “Or the wet. It’s so damp here.” And dark. But not boring. He and Rose had been wrong about that.
Rose pressed her right hand to her nose and used her left to pull tissues. “I don’t think this is going to let up. It really doesn’t feel like it is.”
“How long did the nosebleed last the other day?” Landon asked.
“Most of the walk home.” Rose tilted her head back a little farther.
“Do you want me to call Graham?” It pained Landon to ask the question, but in a strange way, he also felt it gave him the upper hand.
