WHILE I WAITED FOR CHRIS to get home, his mom and I talked about Carson and growing up there and how little has changed since she lived in that gray house. We talked about which teachers were still at the school and the creepy DairyLand Fairy logo, and a million other small-town girl things. We specifically did not talk about Chris. If she knew what I had done to him, she didn’t let on.
When he finally walked through the door, I braced myself for whatever was about to come my way.
He stood in the entryway and looked at me from across the room, his expression smooth and even, not giving anything away. He didn’t look surprised or happy to see me, not even angry; it was almost like he’d been expecting me.
“Well, I’ll leave you two alone,” his mother said, standing up. “Nice meeting you, Maia.”
I stood too, and thanked her for the soda she gave me. As she exited the room, I felt myself being pulled, once again, toward Chris. I took a few steps closer, but he remained in the same spot.
“So what are you doing here?” he said in a disconcertingly casual way, looking down as he wound the cord of his earbuds around his phone.
“I didn’t think you’d call,” I answered.
He looked up at me then, and there was the tiniest hint of a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. “So you drove seven hundred miles?”
I shrugged.
He took exactly two steps and stopped short like there was an invisible barrier dividing the room and we were on opposite sides of it.
“I’m not here to try to start over or pick up where we left off, but I couldn’t leave things the way they ended—we deserve better than that, after everything,” I tried to explain. “I mean, don’t we?”
He sighed, and then nodded in the direction of the kitchen, where his mother had disappeared, and said, “Come on.” Then he turned around and started toward the stairs. I followed him to the second story of the house, the carpet plush and soft under my feet, the handrail smooth and cool against the palm of my hand.
He led me down a hall and into his bedroom—his real bedroom, not the room at his aunt’s house where I had spent so many hours with him.
This room was completely different, his walls full of posters, and endless books on bookshelves and a desk with his notebook and laptop and pens and pencils and a huge lunar calendar pinned up to a corkboard on the wall in front of it.
There, propped up on top of the desk, under the calendar, was the envelope with my handwriting on it. It looked a little worn and wrinkled, but intact. Unopened.
He closed the door behind us and stood there, waiting for me to say something.
“You didn’t open it?” I asked. I walked over to the desk and picked up the envelope. I brought it over to where he was standing and held it out to him. He let me place it in his hands. Then he looked up at me the way he used to, and for a moment I thought we might kiss, I thought maybe things hadn’t changed so irreparably after all, but he looked back down at the envelope and went over to sit on the edge of his bed.
I sat down next to him, leaving an arm’s length between us, because I knew things had changed. I watched as he peeled back the sticky closure of the envelope and pulled out the photo. I’d wrapped it in a sheet of white tissue paper and placed it between two pieces of cardboard to keep it flat. He unwrapped it and carefully set the pieces aside.
“That was one of Mallory’s,” I explained as he examined the black-and-white photo of that place where I’d taken him, that place that had changed us both.
I watched as he turned it over in his hands and read the note I’d written on the back for him.
“What does it mean?” he finally said, looking at me once again.
“I think it means that there’s not one truth, not one way to love and be known, but . . .” I paused, trying to think of a word big enough to encompass everything I’d learned about him and Mallory and my parents and myself.
“Infinite ways?” he finished.
“Yes.”
“I like that,” he said quietly.
“And it also means I’m sorry,” I whispered. “And it means that all those things I said to you, all those things I did—they were about me and my stuff, not you.”
“I know.” He nodded, and then said, “Me too.”
• • •
As we stood in his driveway waiting for Hayden and Gabby to pick me up, I wanted to tell him how I thought he was the best person I’d ever known or ever would know, and that what we had had healed something in me I hadn’t thought could be healed, and that I didn’t have a clue how I’d ever get over him and, most of all, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to.
When the car pulled up, we looked at each other, and I hoped he knew all of those things already without me having to say them out loud.
I threw my arms around him because I couldn’t let this end without one last embrace.
He hugged me back, and as he released me from his arms, I felt the ground beneath my feet begin to shift. I held on tighter for just a moment, and he let me.
But nothing holds still that long; nothing holds that still long enough.
I let go.
I forced my feet to walk away from him. When I got into the car and looked back at the house, he was already gone.