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When her mother, Rachel, disembarked from their Airstream, she swept Hannah into her arms and began a monologue about their travels that—as far as Hannah could follow—took up exactly where they’d driven off six months ago after Cass’s funeral.
“How are you, sweet girl?” her mom asked, holding Hannah’s face in both hands. Hannah looked down at her mom, trying to decide how much to say.
“Blue’s here” was what she went with, and hoped it was adequate.
When Levi left, Hannah didn’t want to bother her parents or make them feel obligated to come back to Carrigan’s to take care of her, so she’d made up a polite fiction about their breakup.
Her parents both adored and were exasperated by Levi in equal measure. She imagined them telling her she’d overreacted, that this was “just another Blue Shenanigan.” Most of all, since her parents made their life traveling the world, she’d been afraid they would take his side rather than understanding hers. She told herself she was being the bigger person by not poisoning his relationship with them, but that wasn’t entirely true.
She was rarely the bigger person where Levi Blue was concerned.
Her mom raised an eyebrow and patted Hannah’s cheek. “Oh,” she said.
She knew Rachel suspected a great deal, but they’d never acknowledged out loud there was more to talk about. Now—when they were surrounded by their entire family, in the hallway of her business—seemed the wrong time to break down sobbing in her mother’s arms because the boy who’d broken her heart had come back and she had more feelings about it than she wanted to.
As they walked into the great room, Miriam rushed forward to hug her aunt. Hannah smiled at them.
Her father’s voice boomed out over all the family din. “LEVI.”
She looked up to find Levi looking at them, frozen in place. Their eyes met and she had to plant her feet to stop herself from walking straight into his arms.
When he’d walked into the kitchen yesterday, her body had responded to his nearness, she’d been enveloped with his essence, but she had been too busy keeping her voice steady to really see him. Now she saw him.
He was exactly the same, but so much different. He was deeply tan, and unmistakably closer to forty than thirty years old (what was time, even). He was standing up straight. His shoulders were, if not relaxed, not hunched in on themselves. Sometime in the past four years, he’d stopped holding himself like he was always waiting for someone to stab him. She hadn’t even consciously realized that’s what he’d been doing until now.
She watched him do a mental inventory and wince almost invisibly. He touched his hair, which was so high it was almost its own zip code. When he ran his hands over it, her scalp remembered the feeling of his fingers in her own hair, and she shivered. He lightly touched his argyle sweater vest, then his leggings, and lastly his not one buttwooversized scarves.
She wished she couldn’t still read the smallest change in his face and posture. She wished she didn’t still find him so unrelentingly sexy. He’d always taken his clothes seriously, and he’d never dressed like anyone else in the little town of Advent, where he’d gone to school all his life. Black kohl eyeliner, leather jackets, an androgynous vibe thatwhen mixed with his beautiful face seemed to say he was vastly too chic for small-town life and belonged somewhere cosmopolitan enough to appreciate him.
She’d appreciated him, more than any boy she’d seen in any corner of the world she’d visited.
He’d been a prickly child, serious and easily bruised, prone to transforming into a cactus rather than be vulnerable around people he didn’t feel were worthy of witnessing his joy. She watched him mask his face now, put on a polite façade that was new. Blank, rather than scowling. Ironically, Levihadbeen mad at her parents for not giving her a more stable home growing up. For someone whose insatiable wanderlust had driven him from her life, she felt it was a precarious stance to take, but Levi lived on a knife’s edge of hypocrisy.
Having gotten his face under control, straightening his vest and poufing his hair, he approached her parents. Her father wrapped him tightly in his arms, perhaps squeezing a little harder than necessary.
“Daniel,” he croaked, from inside the hug. “Chag Sameach.”
“I’m glad you’re back,” her dad boomed, as if he himself had been anything that could, even generously, be described as “back” since Levi left. “You belong here.”
Levi stiffened. She remembered every rant he’d ever gone on, about how Carrigan’s wasn’t his destiny, that it was simply an accident of birth. About how he belonged in a city, in Europe, in a bustling kitchen learning from the world’s greatest chefs. Of course, he’d been a fourteen-year-old snob, but the twenty-four-year-old resentful about being “trapped” out here in the middle of nowhere and the thirty-year-old who’d wanted to see the world hadn’t been that different. All he said, though, was “You might be the only person who believes that.”
“Nonsense,” Daniel Rosenstein said, “Cass thought so.”
“How long do we keep making decisions based on what Cass wanted?” Levi asked, an edge to his voice. Ah, there was the Levi she knew, always ready to disparage Cass at any opportunity.
Cass, who had saved her life, given her a home, mentored her. Cass, whose last days she’d chosen to witness when it meant losing him. Cass, who she’d had to wake up without every day for six months now.
“Well, the girls moved the earth to make Cass’s vision happen for Carrigan’s,” her dad pointed out.
“Everyone always did move heaven and earth at the whim of the great Cassiopeia Carrigan.” Levi’s voice didn’t sound bitter, as she was so used to, just tired.
“We’re going to talk more about this,” her father told him, “as soon as I spend some time with my girls. Miriam and I have a lot of catching up to do.”
He clapped Levi on the back, then walked off arm in arm with her cousin.
She shook off the feeling she always had near Blue—that he was sucking all the oxygen out of her life and all she could do was watch from the sidelines. Since the moment she’d realized she loved him, a part of her brain had portioned itself off, assigning itself the full-time job of Thinking About Levi. The moment they’d gotten together, that portion had taken over the rest of her brain. Their relationship had swallowed her whole, consuming her selfhood in the hunger of their love.
When he’d left, it had taken her years to get her sense of self back. The part of her that Thought About Levi had spent four years wandering around like a gothic ghost and she didn’t have time for it right now. There was family to check into rooms and a Matzo Ball to throw. The Rosensteins, the big family she and Miriam came from, had invested in their idea for Carrigan’s All Year when it had looked like they would lose the business. She wanted to prove it had been the right call. They were throwing a seder like none they’d ever seen, and she needed everything to go exactly to plan. Which nothing ever did when Levi was involved.
