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I laughed at the time, imagining myself as a little blue bird with a pointy crest on its head.
“What do you want me to come back as?” she asked me next.
“Nothing,” I say, “because I’m going to die first. Husbands always die before their wives. Men don’t live as long as women. It’s science.”
Emma rolled her eyes. “No denying you’re a smart man, but you can’t predict the future. If I die first, how do you want me to visit you?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. But it wasn’t that I didn’t know—it was that I didn’t want to think about it.
“Maybe a flower or a number or a color or an animal . . .” She rattled off a dozen options.
“If you tell me you’re going to come back as a marigold or the number twelve, then that’s all I’m going to see. It’s confirmation bias. I don’t want you to tell me what you’re going to be, and I don’t want to choose what you’re going to be. Surprise me. Make it unmistakably, undeniably you.”
“Hm,” she said as she rolled to her back and stared at the ceiling in deep contemplation. “Okay, then.”
It was the last time we ever discussed that topic.
Not long after, her insomnia passed, and we got pregnant with Adeline. Everything changed after that. Emma practically glowed with happiness, like it was radiating from the inside out, pouring out of her fingertips. She’d wake with a smile on her face, obsessively talk about baby names and family traditions she wanted to implement, and every facet of her being was drenched in sweet contentedness. She hadn’t even had the baby, and already motherhood was suiting her.
Anyone can reproduce, but not everyone appreciates what it means to be a parent.
Pulling out of my pensive reverie, I turn off my bedside lamp and recline against my pillow.
I never knew it was possible to feel numb and to feel everything at the same time, yet here I am. Feeling nothing. Feeling it all. Or maybe I’m somewhere in between those two things, if that even makes sense. Though nothing has really made sense since I lost my wife.
I suppose this is par for the course.
All I know is there’s no denying the fact that Margaux lives in the exact same building Emma lived in when I first met her. The steps outside her apartment—the ones with the black railing—that’s where we had our first kiss. And the streetlamp Margaux and I stood under tonight was where Emma and I had our first fight (which was over almost as soon as it started).
But it isn’t just the building.
It’s the key chain too.
One of only ten in existence . . . What are the odds Margaux has one?
If that wasn’t a sign from Emma, I don’t know what is.
I only wish I knew what it meant.
CHAPTER FIVE
SLOANE
“You survived,” I say when I find Margaux camped out in her bed, right where I left her.
She pauses her TV show, adjusts her blankets, and gifts me her full attention. A plate of half-eaten saltines rests on her nightstand alongside a mostly empty glass of ginger ale.
“I should say the same about you. How was it? Please tell me you bored him to tears.” She checks the time on her phone before tossing it on the bed beside her. “I’m going to assume yes because you’re home way earlier than I expected.”
“I don’t know if boring is the right word to describe tonight,” I say.
Margaux frowns.
“But I think it’s safe to say he won’t be asking for a second date.” I chuckle, rolling my eyes.
“Why are you laughing?” she asks, one brow lifted higher than the other.
“Because he’s weird,” I say. “The whole thing was a shit show. He’s still very much in love with his wife . . . who died years ago, by the way . . . he’s still in mourning. The poor thing had no desire to be out on a date. He was just trying to make his aunt happy. So you guys have that in common, I guess. But it was just . . .”
I struggle to find the right words to convey the incongruity of the evening, from the moment I sat down, to the clunky conversation, to the inadvertent walk home, to the bizarre exchange we shared outside my front steps.
“Do you remember when I worked at Brickhouse Gallery a few years back, and some jerk had me fired?” I ask.
Margaux scrunches her brows. “Yeah. It was a whole ordeal. You came home in tears that day and called out sick the next morning—which you never do. It was traumatic.”
I lift a hand. “Okay, you’re making me sound dramatic, which I’m not, but it was a horrible situation that I have no desire to relive in any way, shape, or form, but anyway . . . Roman Bellisario was the jerk who had me fired.”
