Page 83 of The Twelve Dates of Christmas

That’s their true beauty. Their resilience, their potential. They remain exactly what they are, regardless of where they’re planted, and even when the timing is wrong. And they’ll bloom again.

The last thing I do before I leave for the airport is top off the water in the vase. It makes me feel like I’m leaving a home behind, and in a very real way, I guess I am.

* * *

I’m sitting in the terminal when my phone rings, and I’m convinced its Jake.

But it’s not. Of course it isn’t. Jake Frost—walking green flag, boundary-respecting consent king—does as he’s asked. And I’d asked him to let me go.

It’s Maddie. “Ready to come home?” she says as soon as I answer.

“Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”

“Claudia has been sleeping in your room. I think she misses you.”

“Well, I guess even cats don’t know what they’ve got ’til it’s gone.” My voice cracks on gone, and I have to swallow hard past the lump in my throat.

“Oh, Evie.” Maddie hesitates. “What happened?”

“Never made it to the mess phase. Took a calculated risk. I’d forgotten how shitty I was at math.”

“You fell in love with him, didn’t you.” It’s not a question.

I can’t answer. There are too many people around, and if I try to talk about it more right now, I’ll unravel completely.

“Oh, honey.” Maddie does the thing where she puts her face so close to the camera that she turns into a blurry, peachy blob. It’s her instinctive way of trying to get closer to me from 3,000 miles across the ocean. “Come home. We’ll figure it out.”

* * *

I see Maddie before she sees me in the arrival hall. She holds a handmade sign that reads “WELCOME BACK TO THE PAST, EVIE,” riffing on my stupid joke about London being five hours ahead of New York. In her other hand is a sack from my favorite bagel joint in Queens.

When she finally spots me, she bounces in place, and I can’t suppress my tired smile. She drops the sign and crashes into me, wrapping both her arms around my head in a suffocating hug.

And I’m home.

* * *

Maddie gives me a bit of time alone after we get to our apartment. It’s dark in my room, and I’m cycling through the stages of grief like a roulette wheel. When I finally unzip my bag, most of my clothes smell like Paperwhite. Some of them smell like Jake, but at this point I’m too numb and too tired to cry. I leave the luggage open on the floor. I can’t deal with it right now.

I guess I’m a masochist, because I pull out my laptop and search for Jameson Kiernan Frost, Jr., desperate to see his face in something other than the grainy Polaroid Quinn took.

One of the first results is a press conference photo from a story The Juniper did about Frost, Acton, and Isaacs. That tiny flicker of recognition I had one of the first times I saw Jake was because of this photo. When I’d been preparing to apply for a staff-writer position at The Juniper, I’d devoured as much of their content as I could get my eyes on. Even then, Jake stood out to me in the photo. So achingly beautiful, so young. And so deeply, unmistakably miserable.

Based on what I know now, this article and this photo would have happened around the time Jake started trying to separate himself from his father’s firm. I touch a fingertip next to his face on the screen.

I think I made a mistake.

I was so intent on finding a reason to distrust, a reason to leave, that I clung to the first difficult thing that happened between us. Right after I’d resolved to stop treating love like a test that could be failed, we were tested, and I struck through what we had with metaphorical red ink. But ultimately, would it have even mattered? We were a perforation on a journal page. Designed to eventually come apart.

Maddie knocks on my door, peeking around the edge. “You OK?”

I answer with a deadpan “Never better.”

Maddie sits next to me on the bed, and I set my laptop aside. “What are you doing here, honey?”

“Um. Do you not remember picking me up at the airport earlier today?”

“That’s not what I mean. You fell in love with a beautiful man in beautiful London. And now you’re here in Queens.”