Page 87 of Wreckage and Rain

"A month ago I couldn't even pick that question up. Now I can hold it without it leveling me. I still can't answer it."

"Holding it's the work. The answer comes when it comes."

We sit there. Floor hard. Backs against the cold glass. He's brought the house lights halfway up by now and they do nothing for either of our complexions.

"Sam?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm happy. Right now. Genuinely."

"Me too."

"Is that allowed? Being happy in the middle of everything?"

"That's the only place it happens. The middle."

I hold that.

***

I call Autumn before bed.

"You sound different."

"I sound like what?"

"Like you. Like the Summer who once convinced our entire seventh-grade class she was a Russian exchange student named Natasha."

"That was a great week."

"It was an unhinged week. Are you happy?"

"I am." And I mean it.

"Good." Her voice is thick. "You sound like you again."

"I sound like someone new. I think I like her better."

***

Chapter 24: Ghost

Summer

Something shifts.

I can't explain it rationally. I wake up and the air in my apartment feels different. Charged. Like the barometric pressure dropped and my body registered it before my brain caught up. I tell myself I'm being ridiculous. I go through the routine of the day. Drink coffee. Write. Go to class. Eat lunch. The feeling persists. Someone is here who wasn't here before. I know who it is. I would know him anywhere.

***

Flowers arrive at my apartment the next day. Not at the club. To me. Sunflowers. No card. I stare at them. My hands are shaking and I don't know if it's nervousness or anger. The muscle memory of a woman who received these same flowers from a man who didn't know what he was apologizing for.

Then a first edition of The Shining in perfect condition. The book I told Colt about on our third date. The one that made me want to be a writer. I told him at King's Diner with cheese fries between us that no book had ever put me inside a place like that one did, that I'd read it at thirteen with the covers over my head and the flashlight shaking, so scared of that hotel I could feel the cold of its hallways, and that I wanted to do that to someone someday. Make a place so real it kept them up at night.

He remembered.

I call Sam. "He found me."