CHAPTER 74: Home

POV: Maya Castellano

The last morning in Accra arrived too quickly.

She’d packed the night before. Properly this time not three versions of herself in a suitcase. Just what she’d brought and what she was taking back which included the finished novel and something else she didn’t have a word for yet.

Kofi drove her to the airport.

They didn’t talk much on the way but not an uncomfortable silence.

She checked in while he waited.

At the security line she turned around.

He was standing where she’d left him with his hands in his pockets watching her with that expression she’d been cataloguing since the Mission and had run out of ways to misread.

“Thank you,” she said. “For the everything”

“When I get  back,” he said.

“When you back,” she agreed.

She turned and went through security without looking back because she’d learned that looking back made leaving harder.

She slept on the plane.

She woke up somewhere over the Atlantic.

She thought about Kofi saying you’re remarkable and things happen accordingly.

She thought about page 247.

The brave thing done without drama.

Just done.

She picked up her phone, no signal over the Atlantic but she opened her notes app anyway and typed for twenty minutes. They were just thoughts arriving in the order they wanted to arrive.

She put the phone down and looked out the window at the clouds below.

Somewhere under those clouds was the Atlantic and everything was continuing.

That was the thing about life that she’d forgotten during the eighteen months of treatment. It continued with or without you. The clouds didn’t pause nor did the ocean stop.

You just had to decide to continue with it.

She looked back at her notes.

Added one line at the bottom.

Call Selene when you land and tell her you want in.

San Francisco arrived gray and familiar and exactly as she’d left it.

Selene was waiting at arrivals.

Standing by the barrier in a jacket Maya will borrow and never return.

Maya came through the doors and saw her and felt the feeling of returning somewhere that had been home before she understood what home meant.

Selene looked at her face.

“You’re different,” she said.

“Same person.”

“Different,” Selene said firmly. “But good different.”

Maya hugged her.

They stood there in the arrivals hall with people moving around them indifferently and Maya held on longer than she usually would have.

“I want to tell you about the school,” Maya said into her shoulder.

“Tell me everything.”

“And I want to talk about the foundation.”

Selene pulled back. 

“What about it?”

“I want in,” Maya said. “I’ve been thinking about what it needs that it doesn’t know it needs yet.”

Selene looked at her for a long moment.

“What does it need?” she said.

“Someone who thinks about how people actually move through spaces. How things feel rather than how they look.” She paused. “Someone who’s been on the other side of needing something real rather than something that photographed well.”

Selene was quiet.

Then she did something Maya hadn’t expected.

She laughed.

“Nene would have loved this,” Selene said.

“She brought you back to fix things,” Maya said. “Maybe she knew you’d fix more than she planned.”

Selene picked up one end of Maya’s suitcase.

Maya took the other.

They walked out into the gray San Francisco morning together.