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ZOE

Steve, sweetie, I think we might need to have a talk.

23

ROWAN

I WANT TO throw my romance novels into the Charles River. Drown my favorite couples. Watch the lies drip from waterlogged pages.

All those bookstores and garage sales, hundreds of paperbacks and special editions. Collections of tropes that brought me comfort and taught me what a relationship could look like. Yet not one single blueprint for what I’m supposed to do now, because those books are all about falling in love.

But staying in it? That’s a different thing entirely. They don’t give a fuck about that.

As I’ve learned over the past year, my life is not a romance novel. If it were, then I’d be able to see our HEA somewhere in the distance. Last June, when I realized Neil wasn’t the perfect-on-paper romance hero I dreamed of and yet he was everything I wanted, I thought maybe I didn’t need the kind of happily-ever-after in my favorite books.

Now I know that happily-ever-after is pure bullshit.

On the train back to Boston, I curl up in a window seat and hide my puffy eyes from fellow passengers. I managed to keep it together while I collected my suitcase from my parents’ hotel and wished them luck on their next tour stop, but then I broke down at a Duane Reade and bought several family packs of Kleenex.

I message Kait in full emergency mode. Because even if that party left me feeling uncertain about our friendship, I don’t know who else to talk to. Are you around? I text, and when she doesn’t respond right away, I figure she’s just busy. Swamped with homework.

He said he needed time to figure out what happiness looks like on his own.

Maybe I do too—because I’m suddenly not sure I remember how it feels.

More than anything, that sadness inside Neil, the one that’s been lurking there for longer than our relationship—it isn’t anything I can fix. No amount of talking it out will ease that pain, even if I desperately wish it could.

Even if I want us to figure it out together, whatever this new version of life looks like for him, I have to respect that he wants some time to figure it out for himself first, no matter how much it hurts.

I video chat with Kirby and Mara the next day. Their voices, their faces are a welcome balm, but it’s not the same as having them here in person.

“And then you had sad sex?” Kirby says. “My fucking heart. I’m too fragile for this! Neil being sad just doesn’t compute.”

“Right?” Mara props her chin on Kirby’s shoulder. “He’s just not Neil if he isn’t baiting you or making bedroom eyes at you.” Then she turns to Kirby. “Also, ‘fragile’ is not a word anyone would ever associate with you.”

“When it comes to Rowan and Neil, it is.”

“Whatever you need,” Mara continues. “We’re here for you. Just say the word, and we’ll have a care package of Seattle chocolate and coffee in the mail tomorrow.”

When we hang up, I lie back down on my bed and resume the ceiling staring that’s kept me busy most of the day. I gaze at the penguin posters on Paulina’s side of the room and then over at my bookshelves, where I’ve acquired a handful more romance novels since school started because Boston’s indie bookstores are amazing. Now I’m craving their reassurance, desperately wishing I could be a heroine who owned a struggling bed-and-breakfast in a sleepy beach town, or a journalist forced to host a radio show with her ex, or even a high-powered lawyer in the big city. All that daydreaming is back with a vengeance.

“I didn’t mean that thing about the Charles River,” I whisper, reaching for a Nora Roberts book and then a Delilah Park. Every time a couple breaks up, it’s so clear to me what they need to do to get back together. Sometimes it’s a simple misunderstanding, and others it’s a matter of proving they truly love each other. The common factor is that the other person always takes them back.

All this time, I thought Neil and I were the ones who were going to make it. I’d classified us as romance tropes, Neil the dashing rake with approximately zero rakelike qualities. We were enemies to lovers, rivals to lovers, forced proximity. Opposites attract, although I realized pretty quickly that we were never as opposite as I once thought. But there was one trope I never considered. Right person, wrong time—maybe that’s us.

With everything I am, I hope that it isn’t.

Despite how good it was to hear my best friends’ voices, I can’t shake the loneliness that keeps me curled up in bed. Kait still hasn’t responded, and I’ve stopped checking my phone, my heart too damaged to care. So when the door to my room opens and Paulina Radowski steps inside, AirPods in her ears and rain boots dripping water, I’ve never been more excited to see her.

“Hey,” she says in her breezy way as she hangs her jacket on the back of our door, until she spots me and then swiftly removes her headphones. “Rowan? Are you okay?”

I’m not sure what it is—the fact that she could instantly tell something was wrong or the urgency of needing a human being to talk to—but her question is all it takes for me to burst into tears.

“I—I’m sorry,” I say around a hiccup, pressing my face into my hands. “You should—you probably have somewhere to be. I don’t want to bother you.”

Paulina shucks off her boots and pulls her chair up to my bed. She’s been largely invisible since that late-night quest for Boston cream pie, but every so often, one of us will mention a food craving and the other will google whether Dunkin’ makes it in donut form.

“I don’t have anywhere to be.” Her soothing voice—have I never noticed what a naturally soothing voice she has? I probably haven’t heard it enough. “Do you want to talk about it?”