Page 105 of A Novel Love Story

When the dance ended, we broke away. “C’mon, Eileen,” he said, mirroring the starling song, “they won’t miss us. There’s somewhere I want to show you.”

Then he took me by the hand, and pulled me out into the garden. The night was cool, and dark, and the fireflies flitted from rosebush to hydrangea to the oaks that lined the back of the garden. We slipped through the overgrown archway into a shadowy courtyard.

I knew where we were. The forgotten place, framed with those lost statues and half-deleted thoughts. Now that I could compare Anders to the statues with his face, I could see what they all had been missing. The parts that were already in Eloraton—the parts she gave other characters. The gravestones were drafts she buried into folders on her desktop or deleted or lost, thoughTHISDRAFT SUCKS_V4_FINAL.docxhad to have turned into something.

“Well, it’s not much of a surprise,” he went on, turning on his heel to walk backward and face me. He arched an eyebrow. “I believe you already know this place.”

“You aren’t very subtle at sneaking,” I pointed out.

“Neither are you.”

I smiled. “We’re a pair, then. What, oh what will you do once I leave?” I meant it as a joke, but his face grew somber.

“I think …” he began, sitting down at the fountain. In the distance, through the alleyway, the inn’s windows glowed brightly with life and laughter. “I think I’m going to leave, too. Do you have room in your car since I sacrificed mine for yours?”

My heart jumped into my throat. “You mean it?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think I’ve spent enough time lost in a book.”

“But … if you leave, what if you can’t come back?”

“I know. And when I first came here, I would have been very scared of that. But everything moves on. And I want to move on, too. I’m tired of living the same page every day. I want something new. I think Rachel would want that for me, too. I just stayed for so long because …” He chewed on his words, choosing them carefully. “I thought that if I stayed here long enough, I’d find where she wrote me into her books. I’d find a character like me, and I’d feel how much she loved me one last time. There are so many of our friends here, or at least large pieces of them. But …” He frowned, as if he was trying to hold back a strong emotion, and he wasn’t quite sure what it was. “But I’m only in this graveyard of ideas—I’m not even in the town. She put everything she ever loved in these books, all the way down to the French toast and the starlings, and I’m not here.”

That baffled me. Not that she hadn’t put him in the town, but that he couldn’t see it.

I reached out, and took him by the hand. “But you are.”

His eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

I cupped his cheek with my hand. “You’re everywhere in this town,” I said. “You’re in Jake’s stubbornness, his smile, and you’re in Thomas’s genius and his gait, long and limber like he’s always late for somewhere. You’re in Will’s dedication, and in the love in his eyes, and the scar on his lip,” I said, and traced that fine hairline scar, “and I’m sure you looked at Rachel the same way he looks at Junie,and Anders—Anders—it’s the kind of look that moves mountains. It’s the kind of look of someone who gave up their whole life to live in an unfinished story. She wrote you in all of it. You can’t see it because you’re too close, but believe me, she loved you. She loved you so much.”

His green, green eyes grew wet with tears. “I never realized …” He laid his hand atop mine on his cheek, and held it tightly, and kissed the palm of my hand. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I whispered.

And I knew Rachel was here, too. When she first died, I started to wonder what happened to the story she left behind. Would it just disappear when she did? Be forgotten? But I’d been here for long enough to know that when I finally took the only road in and out of Eloraton, and crossed Charm Bridge, I’d never come back. I was sure—but that didn’t mean the story stopped. It wouldn’t, because we kept it alive—by reading her novels, by imagining what came next—and so because her work lived on, so did she. In little ways.

In little ways, she stayed.

Even as the story moved on.

Anders leaned over and kissed me. His mouth tasted a little salty with tears, mixed with the bubbly champagne from the wedding. It was a bittersweet combination. It tasted hopeful. I pulled away. He felt it, too. The start of something, of a story, if we let it.

“Do you think they’re missing us yet?” I asked.

“Maybe. Idohave impeccable music t—Do you hear that?” He cocked his head.

“Hear wh—”

“Shh,” he muttered, pressing a finger to my mouth. “Someone’s coming.”

“Maya?”

In reply, he took me by the hand and pulled me back behind an overgrown hedge. Inside of it was a couple in an embrace, their faces covered by vines. We quietly parted the leaves as Maya and Lyssa came through the arch, into the courtyard. They were whispering, and giggling, and there was a new openness to Lyssa that I hadn’t seen before.

“I’m sorry that you waited so long,” Lyssa said, taking Maya by the hands and threading their fingers together.

“What changed?” Maya asked.

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