Page 139 of I Dreamt That You Loved Me

It’s a really beautiful song. You should listen to it.

“Well, fuck,” he said, scrubbing his hand down his face a few times. “Been there, done that. Good to know.” He looked embarrassed, which was not my intention.

But before I could say anything, he played a few more covers and the other new song he’d written. This one was about a man lost in the desert trying to find his way home while facing his own mortality and feeling alienated.

Thankfully, he packed up his guitar after that and we called it a night.

I’d had enough emotional whiplash for one day.

By the time I crawled into bed, I was so tired that I felt like I could sleep for a year. So, of course, I spent the night tossing and turning and only slept a few hours.

At six thirty in the morning, when peach-colored light illuminated the fog, I dug the notebook out of my bag and added a few paragraphs to the last page then capped my pen and ran my hand over the marbled cover.

This was Gabriel’s story as much as mine, and maybe that’s partly what compelled me to write it.

Didn’t we all deserve to know our own story?

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Gabriel

After a runon the beach with Otis the next morning, I showered in the outdoor shower and ran a towel over my hair as I rounded the side of the house.

I was expecting—hoping—to find Cleo in the kitchen.

No Cleo.

There was a fresh pot of coffee and a bag of bagels on the counter. Underneath the bag were three CDs and a black-and-white composition book with a hot pink Post-it note on the cover:

G—

I wrote our story. My side, anyway. How we met. How we fell in love. How we inspired each other.

If it makes you uncomfortable, you don’t have to read it. But it’s all yours. To read or to burn or to stuff into the back of your closet. That’s entirely up to you.

The CDs are, of course, yours. I brought them in case you were ready to listen. They’re part of your story too.

C.

Whereas before I’d had no interest, now I wanted our whole story, every little detail, from beginning to end. As for the music, I had no interest in listening.

I talked about it with Cleo’s mom last year after I was forced to listen to the songs I’d recorded. How it was hard to listen to my own voice and music without being overly critical. She said she understood. It was the same for her with the books she wrote. If she read them after they were published, she’d want to go back and change every word, so once they were out in the world, she never read them again.

I sat on a cushioned lounger on the deck with my breakfast and opened the notebook, eager to get started.

The first line:

I remember everything, like a movie that plays on a loop in my head, set to the soundtrack of his notes and lyrics with a haunting refrain.

Our story began a decade ago, two years before we’d ever met when Cleo found my notebook in the park and fell in love with my words.

In some ways, it felt a lot like reading a good piece of fiction when you’re so emotionally invested in the characters that you can’t turn the pages fast enough.

You need to know what happens.

Desperate to know how it ends.

But this was a true story, and we were the main characters, something I had to keep reminding myself.