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“I’ll sleep,” she conceded, and Ernie left her to do that.

Before she put on her pajamas, she finally texted her sister back. After the unanswered “Where are you?” text, there had been several more, increasingly worried, “What the hell is going on?” texts.

Holly: Hey, I’m still in Upstate New York… but I’m looking to head home. Help?

By the time she woke up the next morning, there was a plane ticket in her email. She didn’t know how her sister had done it—or how she’d afforded it—but she didn’t question it. She just got her ass in gear to make her flight on time.

She left Ernie a note, taped to the old TV:

I can’t thank you enough. Maybe I’ll see you again, someday, when you really need a waitress.

She left the keys to Gavi’s Subaru on the bedside table and ordered the town’s one Lyft to the airport.

And then she headed away from Advent, and Carrigan’s, without a backward glance. She’d finally found something bigger and badder to run away from than home.

Chapter 27

Tara

The Carrigan’s crew had insisted that Tara stay through the end of the year.

Elijah and Jason threw a hell of a New Queers Party at Ernie’s, they argued. Somehow, despite all the things she was supposed to be doing, she’d ended up agreeing. This place, once it had you, liked to keep you. She began to understand how people kept coming up for a visit and staying for a decade.

New Year’s came and went, and she didn’t leave. She had been thinking about Charleston every day for three weeks, but she kept freezing up and unpacking her bags again.

What was she doing with her life? If she burned herself out dealing with her family—which was inevitable, she had to admit, and she’d been doing it on purpose—would she be able to keep showing up for clients? What good would that be for anyone? It still wouldn’t prove that she’d been enough all along.

She was obsessing about this at every moment that she wasn’t obsessing about Holly, although she was good at multitasking, so she was often obsessing about both at once. After all these years of building a life brick by brick on the idea that she didn’t need romantic love—that falling in love would make her vulnerable and put any woman she loved in a terrible position—it had never occurred to her that maybe she should choose a less terrible position to put herself in.

Miriam had broken off their engagement because she’d realized she wanted love, not a marriage of convenience. Tara hadn’t understood what she meant. Why would anyone want a love story? She’d spent all her life putting up walls against everyone she could possibly imagine falling for, but she could never have imagined Holly, so she hadn’t guarded against her.

She hadn’t tried to call Holly. Some days, she wanted to demand an apology for all the horrible things Holly had said, and the next day she wanted to apologize herself for devaluing Holly so much that she’d actually tried to get her a “respectable” job so that she would be acceptable to the Chadwicks. She also hadn’t put on hard pants, or straightened her hair, for weeks. Noelle had told her, lovingly, that if she didn’t stop listening to Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart” on repeat, Noelle was going to lock her in the attic like Bertha Rochester.

“I should call her,” she said to Cole, a month after the wedding.

“Oh no.” He took her phone out of her hands. “You’re not ready.”

She snatched it back. “How do you know? And who put you in charge of making my decisions for me?”

“Well, you put me in charge, Tara Sloane, when you made me your best friend,” he said calmly, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world.

She breathed deeply. “I did not appoint you to that position. You were just there. Can you answer my first question, please?”

“You asked two. I answered the latter. That’s how conversations work. Anyway, I’m you, so I know you’re not ready.”

“What do you mean, you’re me?”

“I have a theory.”

Tara sighed. Cole always had a theory. “Tell me.”

“You know how in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the souls are split in two and then they try to find each other?” He pantomimed this.

“And also in Plato, the source of that story?” she reminded him.

He scoffed. “Whatever. I think our souls are actually the same soul and we didn’t have to look for each other because we were already together.”

Blinking, Tara said, “That’s a wild theory, Nicholas.”