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“I understand. I know. I’ve felt this way myself. You want to go home, but it isn’t even that you want to go home to your own bed, to walk down your own street. You want everything to be as it was, as it felt, when you think of what it means to be home. For me, it was the curry chips from the pub at the end of the lane where our country house was. I’d get off the train from London, walk to that pub, and get an order, sometimes, to carry home to Bea, but all of us would end up snagging them, spoiling our dinner. Home.”
“You can’t get back your home.”
“Maybe not. But curry chip takeaway wasn’t always my home. It snuck up on me. Some home is probably sneaking up on you right now.”
Allie kept her cheek against Winston’s chest but snuck her arm out to look at her phone. Delivered.
“Would you like dinner? I actually know the way, and never get lost, to a very charming Mediterranean deli.”
She made herself really check in with her body. If she ignored hunger, she would feel worse later.
She shook her head against Winston’s chest.
“If you’re a bit homesick, in the way that I was trying to explain, we could get a drink at Pulvermacher’s.”
She didn’t want a drink. Not at all. She snuggled closer, and he obliged by wrapping his arms fully around her.
“Listen, there are always jobs, and perhaps, even, it’s not as dire as that. I could call my father, who’s the controlling partner of the firm in London, and explain the situation such that I could call Justice. That would get us to your mother more efficiently.”
At first her heart stopped, a bit of hope in it. She wanted to nod, Yes, let’s do this. But even if it was true, and Winston could be protected from any professional fallout, it didn’t feel right to haul her mother in like that.
Allie remembered how May, last year, felt like she had run out of choices in her own life, was tied up tight to a role. No one really listened to her, no one ever really gave her the chance she deserved, and she ended up stabbing her boyfriend with a shrimp fork when he proposed, then road-tripping with a chef and moving to New York and trying to do her art. May would never have started living her authentic life if she hadn’t been apart from her family to make her own choice. To really think about the role they had all given her.
Allie didn’t understand, had never understood, why her mom left. Or why she came back. She did know that her mom had always returned on her own.
Maybe this wasn’t the time to make her mother come back—maybe making her come home wasn’t the way for her to fix her family. Maybe this was the time, after all these years of waiting in silence in Wisconsin, afraid, to be right here for her mother when she made whatever decision she had to make: to stay in New York once and for all, if maybe this Justice person had figured out how to make her happy—or to go home, if Manitowoc and Allie’s father really were her home.
Allie didn’t know what her mom’s curry fries were. She had never asked. Just like they had never asked May.
But she wanted to see her mother, desperately. She wanted to hug her and smell her Jean Naté. She wanted to sit in a dark booth with her in Pulvermacher’s and figure this out, and then call May and order a huge basket of fried cheese curds.
She just didn’t know if she was going to get to do any of that.
It made so much hurt, really hurt, where before all those places had only ached.
“I don’t want to go to Pulvermacher’s. At least, I don’t want to go with you.”
“No?”
“I think, right now, the only thing I want to do is number four.”
“Are you certain?”
Certainty, maybe, was for people who weren’t right in the middle of having their lives turned upside down.
The only thing she knew, right now, was that she’d shown Winston nothing but herself. That when he talked to her, looked at her, touched her, she felt like herself. She had no script for that, no practice with any kind of a relationship with a man who just authentically liked her.
Which was terrible, actually, to realize.
She wondered which of her mom’s two lives made her feel this way—elated and terrified at the same time? And if she wanted to feel that way for the rest of her life, or if it scared her so much that she kept running from it, over and over again.
Maybe she was the daughter of her mother’s elation and fear. A child of risk, flight, and indecision. But she could just as easily be someone else. She didn’t know.
There were so many things she didn’t understand about her own family. Too many. And so many things she didn’t understand about herself that she needed to figure out if she was going to do her job and bring everyone back together again.
The only thing she knew, tonight, was that she wanted Winston.
Chapter 11
