Page 479 of Face Off

Charm reaches beneath the remaining tissue paper and removes a small leather notebook. The brown cover is soft and unmarked except for a narrow band wrapped around it. She slides the band free and opens to the first page.

I know exactly what she sees.

The title of the novel. The date her package arrived in Milwaukee. Beneath both, I wrote the first page number and everything I wanted to argue with her about while four hundred miles prevented me from doing it aloud.

Charm turns the page.

Every entry begins with another number.

Page eleven. Page seventeen. Page twenty-three.

Some contain a sentence. Others fill both sides of the paper. I challenged the narrator, disagreed with the previous reader, and recorded every place where Charm’s interpretation would’ve annoyed me. I wrote down the questions I wanted to ask and the arguments I knew she would make before she had the chance to make them.

Her fingers slow as she moves deeper into the notebook.

The notes change gradually.

A complaint about the narrator becomes a memory of Charm arguing with me in the Book Nook. A description of a room reminds me of the first night she drank wine from my Great Lakes mug. One character’s refusal to say what he wanted turns into three pages about the woman I loved finally learning to ask for things without apologizing.

The book remains present, but Charm begins appearing beside it more often.

Then she becomes the reason I kept writing.

“I wrote the first entries for you,” I tell her. “I wanted to prove you were wrong about the narrator.”

“I wasn’t wrong.”

“You were generous. It’s different.”

Her wet eyes narrow briefly before returning to the notebook.

“The rest happened when I started missing you more than I wanted to admit,” I continue. “Every page gave me another reason to remember something. I couldn’t tell you yet, so I told the notebook.”

Charm turns another page.

There are memories of Michigan, Milwaukee, and every month between them. The carnival. Her asleep beside me while I read. The night she called my glasses cheap and wore them anyway. The wedding. Her letters arriving inside a life I had begun building without her. Every time I wanted to reach for my phone and stopped because missing her didn’t give me permission to break the boundary between us.

Tears slip down her cheeks without making her look away.

“You wrote all of this while we were apart?”

“Most of it.”

“Why didn’t you send it?”

“Because some of it was angry. Some of it wanted things I wasn’t ready to offer, and none of it belonged in your hands until I knew I could give it without making the memories into a promise.”

She continues until only one page remains.

The final entry contains no page number or argument. I wrote it after Thanksgiving, once Charm fell asleep against my chest and trusting the future stopped feeling like another way to lie to myself.

Five words sit alone in the center of the paper.

We keep choosing each other.

Charm presses her lips together, but the sob escapes anyway.

I take the book and notebook before they slip from her hands and place both safely beside us. She climbs into my lap without asking, wrapping her arms around my neck while I hold her against me.