Chapter Twenty Six

Jules' POV

He called on a Sunday evening.

I knew it was him because my phone had six contacts and I had saved his number — Adam C — sometime in the last two weeks without consciously deciding to. Eli was asleep. Madeline was at a gallery opening. The apartment was quiet in the particular Sunday way, all soft edges and dim light. I picked up on the third ring.

"Hi," I said.

"Hi." A beat. "Is it okay that I called?"

"You can call."

I heard him settle somewhere — the faint sound of him sitting down, the ambient quiet of wherever he was. I pictured his hotel room and then didn't want to picture his hotel room, because hotel rooms were solitary and I had spent enough time imagining him as a solitary person to have a complicated relationship with the image.

"I've been thinking about something you said," he said. "In the hallway. When you came to the hotel."

"I said several things in the hallway."

"You said you were running out of cities to hide in."

I pulled the blanket from the back of the couch and wrapped it around my shoulders. "I said that, yes."

"How long have you been running, Jules?"

I thought about it honestly. "Since I was twelve," I said. "Since my little sister went into the lake. Everything after that felt like — temporary. Like nowhere was somewhere you could actually stay."

He was quiet. Processing, the way he always had — not filling silence with noise, just sitting in it until he had something worth saying.

"I used that against you," he said. "In the fight. I said you used me as a way out of Fairview."

"You believed it."

"I said it before I believed it. I said it because Henry had been in my ear for weeks and I was already — I was already not thinking clearly and it came out of me before I had examined it." His voice was steady but careful, the way you carry something fragile. "But the reason I believed it, even briefly, was that I was afraid it was true. I was afraid you had married me the way people in desperate situations choose the most convenient available exit."

I thought about the farm. The fields. Nana's kitchen.

"Why were you there?" I asked. "At the farm that summer. The real reason. Not the restless-city-person answer."

A pause. "My mother had died eight months earlier. I had run the company for two years without a day off and I had not — I hadn't stopped. I hadn't let it catch up to me. And then one morning I was in the museum going through her collection and I put my hands on one of her records and I fell apart completely in the middle of a public archive and I had to go sit in a bathroom for twenty minutes." He breathed out. "I took a leave. I couldn't be in the city. I needed somewhere that didn't have her in the corners."

I pulled the blanket tighter.

"And then I met you," he said. "And you were — you were so there. You were real in a way that I had completely forgotten people could be. You talked about books like they mattered and you fed your grandmother's guests like feeding them was the point of the day and you were genuinely, completely unimpressed by me, which—" he stopped, and I could hear the edge of something like a laugh— "that was the first time that had happened since I was nineteen."

"You were a terrible flirt," I said.

"I was terrible," he agreed, and the warmth in it undid me slightly.

"You called me Julie Rose."

"You hated it."

"I hated it and you kept doing it."

"I kept doing it because your face when I did it was the most honest thing in the room." He paused. "You never hid what you felt. Not about anything. It terrified me and it was the most alive I had felt in years."

I sat with that for a moment. Outside, a car went past. Eli made a small sound from his room — the sleepy middle-of-night sound, nothing urgent — and settled again.

"I fell in love with you on the farm," he said. Not the soft, careful way — just the plain, clean way, like stating a fact he had done the calculation on and was certain of. "Not in the city. Not in the apartment. On the farm, in those three weeks, in the kitchen and the loft and in the field the night it rained. That man in the barn — that's who I am, Jules. I just forgot for a while. I let other things convince me I had to be someone else."

I pressed the phone against my ear and closed my eyes.

"You told me you never loved me," I said.

"I know what I said."

"You said it like you meant it."

"I was trying to make myself believe it." His voice had dropped, very quiet. "Because if I believed it then it was simpler. Then it was just a mistake I could walk away from cleanly. Loving you and not trusting you at the same time was—" A pause. "I didn't have a way to hold both of those things. So I chose the one that let me function."

I opened my eyes. Gerald on the windowsill. The lamplight. The familiar quiet of the apartment I had made into a home with nothing but willpower and Madeline's soup.

"I need more time," I said.

"I know."

"I'm not saying no. I'm saying I need more time."

"That's all I'm asking for."

"And you have more to prove."

"I know that too."

The silence between us was different from the silences we used to have — not charged with uncertainty, not loaded with what wasn't said. This one was something else. Something closer to understanding.

"Did he have a good day?" Adam asked, and the switch was so natural, so unforced, that something in my chest turned over.

"He spent forty-five minutes explaining the political situation between Gordon and a new engine called Spencer," I said. "There's apparently a complex territorial dispute over the outer track."

Adam made a sound that was definitely a laugh. "Spencer is trouble. I could tell."

"You couldn't possibly—"

"Spencer came out of the bag like he owned the room. That's the look of an instigator."

I bit down on a smile. "You're taking the side of a piece of painted wood."

"I'm taking the informed position based on available evidence."

"Eli will be very pleased to have your analysis."

"Tell him Gordon's going to be fine," Adam said. "Gordon's got history on his side."

We were quiet for a moment.

"Goodnight, Adam," I said.

"Goodnight, Starlight," he said.

He hadn't called me that in four years. He said it the same way he had the first time — in the barn, the evening before the rain, like it was a name he had found for me and not invented. Like it had always been there and he had only just recognized it.

I sat on the couch in the lamplight for a long time after.

I held the blanket around my shoulders and I let myself feel the exact shape of what I was feeling, without boxing it or qualifying it or measuring it against all the ways it could go wrong.

I felt it.

Then I went to bed.

I slept better than I had in three years.