Page 130 of Bad Words

“Oh, Jacob.” I felt a pang of sympathy. I couldn’t imagine Cassie’s disappointment. Even Jacob would have a hard time bouncing back from the prospect of Lunar New Year in a tropical paradise. “I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, thanks. It sucks.”

“It really does feel like forever since you two got to live your actual life.”

Jacob’s gentle smile made him look even more tired. “This is our actual life, Selina. Neither of us would trade it.” He fished around in the gift bag and drew out a Fresh Linens–scented candle in a frosted glass cylinder. His eyes brightened. “You know what, this is perfect. We can just light this tonight and lie in bed and watch a movie.”

“None of you can smell anything,” I pointed out.

“Don’t use logic on me when I have the plague. Rude.” He lifted the candle to me like a pint in a toast. “But thanks, seriously. We’ll see you when no one’s contagious.”

“Perfect. Let me know if you need anything.”

When he’d shut the door, I heard Cassie, muffled, calling to ask who’d buzzed. Jacob’s congested voice trailed back to her, into the quiet reaches of their home, and a moment later I heard them laughing. Of course they wouldn’t trade this, even for freedom.

That night, with a tight, repetitive ache in my chest like a muscular cramp, I spent two hours rereading my emails with Parker, and then our texts, all the way down to the end.

Selina, please pick up.

I have to talk to you. Please let me explain.

I pushed my phone under my pillow and lay in bed, watching the radiator. My eyes leaked, my nose burning. He had come over to fix things, and I hadn’t let him. No wonder that, by the end of the fight, he’d realized the truth.

I didn’t want to look at his social media. It didn’t sound or feel like him. Instead I rose unsteadily from my bed and knelt by the radiator. On the second shelf from the bottom were the N authors. Parker’s books sat wedged between Katie Navan and Curtis Nelson.

I tugged them out and let the new hardcover of High and Dry fall open in my lap.

My throat constricted when I saw the title page.

In his slapdash hand was written,

to my well-kept secret.

yours,

Parker

I touched the bleed of the ink and felt that pressurized pain in my chest again. When I opened These Extraordinary Times, I found the same inscription.

I hugged the books into my bed and turned on the reading lamp at the corner of my headboard. Shut off all other lights, so I was enclosed by a sleepy amber cone. Then I opened These Extraordinary Times and began to read.

I read fifty pages, then seventy-five, with increasing disorientation.

I could see the book I’d read four years ago. They were of course the same words in the same order, and I could identify the same lack of focus, the same jarring and evasive turns, that I’d criticized before.

But I could no longer tell what I thought.

It was as though I were standing six inches from an impressionist painting, gazing into the fine textures of the brushstrokes, too close to contextualize shapes or colors. In every sentence I could feel Parker’s care or his joy. During a scene I’d insulted in my review, where the grandmother loses her makeup case in a bucket of fish at a sea lion performance, I heard Parker’s voice reading to me, his low and smiling voice, like we were sharing a joke, and I imagined him awake in Daly City in his terrible studio apartment at six in the morning, squeezing in these words before his shift at the H Mart, cheap kettle gurgling in the background. I imagined the way his lower lip folded between his teeth when he worked. The makeup case toppled in among the fish, rouging their scales, and he overdescribed it, because he wanted to make sure I was right there with him. He was playing around, dreaming, toiling, feeling free. I couldn’t separate any of it from him.

I loved it, I realized.

I loved these pages just because they had him in them.

I closed the book and stared down at the messy scrawl of its cover art, feeling adrift, disturbed. What was I without my ability to see clearly, think clearly, judge clearly? How could I fix this? How to get my perspective back?

I let the book open to the inscription again.

yours, Parker