Page 76 of The Second Chance Cinema
“You bought your … I shouldn’t have assumed you saw the ring in those photos. Or brought you back to the cinema—”
“I shouldn’t have forced you there to begin with, Drake.”
“You didn’tforceme.”
“Well, I gave you a push in that direction.” Ellie hesitated, about to surface a thought that surprised her. “For someone who insisted we go there, I’m not sure it was the best thing. I mean,what if the details of the past are supposed to stay fuzzy for a reason? Maybe we should trust each other to share what’s important from our history and let everything else fall away.”
Drake considered this. “Maybe,” he decided eventually. “But I think it’s good we went.”
“It is?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know you mentioned that the cinema shows what haunts us. But I think it shows us what we need to see to move forward. And I want to move forward with you, Ellie. I want to move so far forward that we reach places most people never find—whether it’s a magical cinema or a precipice overlooking the ocean, or—”
“The precipice part sounds a little edgy for you.”
“I guess you’re changing me.”
Ellie nodded. “You should know that I wasn’t alone at the hotel, Drake.”
He resisted the strong urge to press on the statement.
“I got all dressed up earlier before I went to the hospital. I went to the lounge. And you were there. What I mean is, I sat— really sat—with the piece I wrote about Finn’s, the piece that’s actually about you. I hadn’t read it in a while. Sure, I wrote about the bar, but the reason people love that piece is that it evoked the feeling of new beginnings. Every word was charged with this excitement. And I kept thinking how you make my work better. And you make me better,” she said. “We just need to open up to each other more. I know that now. So let’s keep talking.”
“Okay,” Drake agreed, putting the fire out. “We can keep talking. But can we do it inside? It’s freezing out here.”
Back in the house, a fog had lifted; everything was more comfortable than it had been earlier that night. They made tea, lit the indoor fireplace, and took both sides of the couch next to Nancy.
“Do you ever think …” Ellie started. The cadence of her words slowed and softened. “Do you think that maybe the most significant moments in life aren’t cinematic at all?”
Drake knew what she meant. The best things in their life together weren’t sweeping, symphonic moments. The comfortable, quiet memories were the ones worth reliving. Watching a fire. Eating takeout. Lying on the couch where they were right then.
He loved their world.
Then, a loud sound interrupted his thoughts. Near the front door, Nancy was pulling a box apart with her teeth. “Nancy!” Ellie clapped without getting up. Nancy made no move to come over. Ellie got up to remove her from the box and peeked at what was inside.
“Are these …”
“Hundreds of Save the Dates,” Drake told her. “Yes.”
Ellie reached to try to pull the box away from Nancy, but it was too heavy to move. “I can’t lift the box,” she said. “Maybe we have too many people? I don’t know if I like this many people.”
Drake agreed. Ellie had pointed out the same thing he felt when he first opened the box and saw the stacks of stationery staring back at him.
“What if,” Ellie posed, “we scrap this plan and rent out a tiny old hotel instead?”
“I’m in,” Drake told her, even though he had a hunch the idea came from wanting to save another old place. Ellie never stopped fighting for what she loved. “We can get married anywhere you like. But I would prefer somewhere not haunted.”
The next morning, the music box was back on the shelf where it belonged. The outside was patched, and the doll’s arm and leg had been reattached with two ribbon casts.
“I sort of thought you’d want to get rid of this,” Drake said when Ellie came behind him with a coffee.
To be fair, Ellie had seriously considered getting rid of the box. But as she sat with it last night after Drake went to sleep, she acknowledged that she was in no shape to discard something with a past. Instead, she fixed the dancer’s injuries and twirled her inside the box, rediscovering the simple beauty of being able to make her dance. As she did, Ellie returned to the lavender note for the last time.
Find someone who makes you dance.
The words were never about Drake and Melinda, she knew then. They belonged to the dancer in the box. The ambiguoussomeonewas whoever was lucky enough to spin the key. In this case, Ellie.
Lately, they had been reading into the subtext of every little thing. Even innocent ones.
