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I swallowed. “Of course not.”
Xavier without a kitchen was like keeping Picasso from his paints. The man was an artist—I’d never deprive the world of his talents or him of his passion.
“If you don’t want them, I’ll take them back,” he said. “But if you’re still interested—”
“I am,” I interrupted. “Interested, I mean. I don’t know when I’ll get to reading them again, but I’d love to. Eventually.”
He examined me for a long minute, like my response wasn’t quite satisfactory. He was looking for something, but I honestly didn’t know what it was.
Then he took the sack from me, put it back in the front seat, and closed the door. “Do you fancy a walk?”
I glanced at my watch. It was coming onto five o’clock, but Sofia was safe with Joni, probably having the time of her life over pizza and a giggle fest.
We had time. But what it would accomplish, I wasn’t so sure.
“I—all right.”
* * *
It was a relativelybalmy day for mid-October. The last vestiges of summer had disappeared weeks ago, but sunshine still speared the multi-colored leaves overhead as we zigzagged around the streets of the Village, eventually finding ourselves on the west side. The ones that had fallen still crunched underfoot before the autumn rains began in earnest. The air was crisp and chilled but not uncomfortable as the sun started to sink below the buildings around us. A perfect day for a stroll.
“I always loved this neighborhood,” I said after two blocks of near silence on Perry Street. “Aside from how beautiful it is, I honestly think literally every building within a five-block radius has hosted at least one literary icon.”
“Like who?” Xavier asked, almost a dare.
“Too many to count. Thomas Paine. Anaïs Nin. Dylan Thomas. Henry James. Richard Wright. Edgar Allan Poe. Shoot, literally every Beat writer. I could keep going.” I shrugged, well aware I was babbling/lecturing in that way my sisters couldn’t stand. He did ask, though. “It’s amazing, really, to think of how many of the world’s talents came to this little patch of earth to follow their dreams and make art.”
I grabbed a red-streaked maple leaf from a tree we passed under and turned it back and forth while we walked. This part of Manhattan was oddly peaceful despite being only a few blocks from Washington Square Park. A few cyclists passed us, as well as a pedestrian or two, but it was far enough from the subway and the traffic of downtown or Washington Square that we didn’t have to shout to be heard. Almost as quiet as Red Hook.
“Would you want to live here if you could?” Xavier wondered. “Join your writers. Follow your dreams, too?”
I snorted. “Who wouldn’t want to live in a West Village brownstone? It’ll only cost me, oh, a casual twenty million or so. Give or take another five or ten mil. Chump change, right?”
Xavier gave me a queer look. “How much do you think a penthouse in Mayfair costs?” He peered around us curiously. “It’s a nice street. We’d get on well, although I’d miss our view.”
I didn’t know what to say. It almost sounded like he was serious.We? Our?
“We could do it, you know. Live here if you wanted.”
He stopped in front of one particularly beautiful townhouse made of gleaming white stone that called back to some of the Georgian houses around Mayfair and Hyde Park. Still built like a brownstone, though—it was the perfect blend of New York and London architecture.
Now he definitely wasn’t joking. There was none of the telltale humor gleaming from his blue eyes. Just eagerness, maybe. But mostly a serious question.
“You could go back to school, too,” he rattled on. “Quit teaching and write the book on those journals, or whatever else you want. Isn’t there a university close by?”
“NYU, yeah,” I said slowly. “It’s a few blocks that way. But Xavier—”
“So you study there. Or Columbia, if you’d prefer. Get your PhD, learn more about all these writers. Live your own dreams, instead of always helping littles find theirs while you pretend to inhabit someone else’s story in your mind.”
He gazed back up at the white house, clearly entranced by the prospect. He had a look in his eyes that I imagined was similar to the one he probably saw in mine whenever I imagined myself an Austen heroine.
“Sof could have the run of a place like this,” he went on. “The little one too, once they’re born. Plenty of space for everyone. No more two to a room or sleeping on old couches or landings. It’d be perfect, wouldn’t it? No titles or estates or papers or mothers or anyone to interfere. Just us again. The way it’s meant to be.”
By the time he was done speaking, it felt like there was something very large and awkward lodged in my throat. He couldn’t know how many times I had imagined something just like that. Even walked up and down this very street, long before he’d ever come back, fantasizing about exactly that sort of life for myself. Right now, I was feeling an odd sense of déjà vu, of when I was pregnant with Sofia, letting myself pretend in my weaker moments that somehow Xavier would leave his betrothed, find me again, and we’d be a family.
But it was no less a fantasy now than it was then—for one very specific reason.
“It would be lovely,” I said. “If we were still together. But…we’re not.”
