Page 135 of Smoke and Glitter

Her answer is simple.

Autumn: Tomorrow at three.

The phone stays quiet after that.

I set it on the nightstand and finish the sandwich, which does not improve while I'm distracted by my personal life. When the tray is empty enough to qualify as dinner, I carry it to the desk and finally unzip my bag. The notebook is right on top. I take it out and open to the first page.

Autumn's name.

Then the sentence underneath it.

I love you.

It came out easily to Bex. It came out easily here, thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic with nobody sitting across from me who could decide she didn't want it.

Tomorrow is different. Tomorrow she can hear me say it and still leave. I close the notebook and put it back in the bag. That's the part I came here for.

Not the answer.

The chance to finally give her mine.

Chapter twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-Six

Autumn

Ichose the park because I wanted somewhere I could leave without having to make a production of it.

A coffee shop has a bill. A restaurant has half-eaten food and somebody circling with a water pitcher. A hotel lobby would have been worse for reasons I chose not to examine. Here, if I decide I've heard enough, I can stand up and walk toward the gate.

That mattered when I sent Sam the address. It matters slightly less when I see him.

He's already sitting on a damp bench near the path, his forearms braced against his knees while he watches a woman attempt to negotiate a stolen stick away from a spaniel. The grass is dark from last night's rain, and every few minutes a bicycle hisses over the wet path behind him. There is no coffee beside him, no phone in his hand, nothing arranged to make waiting look casual.

He looks tired. He also looks like Sam, which is a profoundly unhelpful thing for him to look like right now.

I stop far enough away that he hasn't seen me yet and get the reaction over with privately. The dark curls that never quite behave. The beard. The shoulders filling out a black coat I have never seen before. His hands loose between his knees.

I have missed him. The thought comes without permission and offers no useful guidance whatsoever.

Then he looks up.

Sam stands immediately, but he doesn't walk toward me. His hands stay at his sides while I cross the remaining distance, and I notice that because I've spent months noticing every way he makes space for other people without ever seeming to think about it.

"Hi."

His mouth moves like he almost smiled. "Hi."

I sit first. Sam waits until I settle before taking the other end of the bench, leaving enough room between us that neither of us could touch without meaning to. Across the path, the spaniel finally surrenders the stick only to steal a glove from the same woman thirty seconds later.

Neither of us says anything for a while.

This should feel awkward.

Instead, it feels frighteningly familiar.

Sam rubs his palms together once and looks out across the grass. "I bought a notebook at the airport."