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“One,” Mac said.
Slowly, Charlotte leaned against him and rested her head on his shoulder. He put his arm around her and held on tightly, as if they were about to jump off a cliff.
“Two.”
Charlotte began to cry. She knew who Mac was saying goodbye to. But was she saying goodbye to Charlotte or Pepper? Her mother or the camp? Maybe she was saying goodbye to everything.
“Three.”
Mac opened his eyes. Watery morning light was shining through the gaps in his patio-door curtains. He squeezed his eyes to clear his vision, wondering what he was doing in the living room. He never slept here. It was nearly impossible to get the cornmeal that fell on him during the night out of the couch cushions, and Fig would track it all over the condo. He winced as he started to get up and go for the vacuum cleaner. He’d slept in an awkward position, his arm draped over something.
He lowered his chin and saw Charlotte’s blond head resting on his chest.
He first felt an overwhelming sense of happiness, lifting him as if he were feather-light. She hadn’t sneaked off in the night. She was still here.
Then the panic set in.
He’d convinced her to stay, but now what was she going to think of all this cornmeal?He’d told her he would let go.
He was trying to figure out how he could disengage himself from her and silently clean what he could before she woke, when he felt Fig, who had been asleep on the back of the couch behind him, jump down to get water from the bathroom now that he was up, per their routine. He watched the cat walk across the living room, and she wasn’t trailing cornmeal on the pads of her feet.
He slowly looked down at himself, then around.
There was no cornmeal anywhere.
For the first time in five years, the memory of Camille hadn’t snowed on him, covering him in grief.
He felt his eyes go wet as he realized what this meant.
He really did let go.
Chapter Twenty-two
The night before Zoey was set to drive the hour to school for her move-in day, she said a tearful goodbye to everyone at the party Charlotte threw her. It was a bit of an overreaction when she thought about it later, because she would be coming home in exactly five days for the weekend to tell them everything. But when her phone alarm went off in the morning, Zoey got out of bed and went straight to her balcony doors because there was someone she reallydidneed to say goodbye to. She might not ever get another chance.
She passed the refrigerator with Pigeon’s empty cage on top, and the menu and new photos tacked to the door. One new photo was of Oliver with a pink butterfly on his head. He’d recently gotten a job at the Mallow Island Resort Hotel as part of their ecotourism team, and he gave daily tours of the hotel’s Butterfly Walks. Zoey had gone on his very first tour last week, during which that butterfly had landed squarely on his head and stayed there. Oliver had just kept talking, unfazed. Everyone had loved that. He was still livingwith Frasier, but the two of them spent every weekend painting inside Lizbeth’s old place, reinventing it and, Zoey suspected, themselves a little, too.
Another new photo was of Mac watching Charlotte draw henna on a client’s hand on the first day at her new table at the Trade Street gallery. Mac and Charlotte were spending a lot of time together, often staying overnight in each other’s places and thinking Zoey didn’t notice. Whatever had happened that night with Charlotte’s mother had changed Charlotte. It was like she was settling into a version of herself that made so much more sense. One day she had come home from a salon, having had several inches of length cut from her hair. And she was in the process of selling her scooter on Craigslist and comparing prices on used cars. Maybe Zoey would never know Charlotte’s whole story, but she’d bet everything she had that Mac knew, and that made Zoey happy. It was one less story that would disappear.
Zoey stopped at her balcony doors, her hand on the knob, willing Pigeon to be waiting outside. She hadn’t come in again last night. She was hiding in the garden most of the time now, so distant that she felt almost gone.
She thought she heard something out there, so she put her ear against the doors. Was someone whispering? She threw open the doors to find Charlotte and Oliver on the balcony.
“Surprise!” they said in unison.
“What are you two doing here?” Zoey asked with a laugh, her eyes going to the garden, surreptitiously scanning for any sign of Pigeon.
“Four,” Charlotte said. “Mac and Frasier are down there. We were waiting for you to get up. We didn’t want to wake you.”
Zoey stepped onto the balcony and looked down. Mac and Frasier waved to her from Charlotte’s patio. On the table were a silvercarafe of coffee, cups, and muffins the size of small melons. “Is this a going-away breakfast?”
Charlotte smiled. “It’s a we’re-coming-with-you breakfast. We all took off work to help you. You said it was family move-in day, right?”
“Right.”
“So, we’re your family. Did you really think we were going to let you do this alone?” Charlotte looped her arm in Zoey’s and led her down the steps. “See, I told you she slept in her clothes,” Charlotte said over her shoulder to Oliver.
“And I told you I already knew that,” Oliver said as he followed. “I spent the night with her that night. You told me to.”
