Page 52

EPILOGUE

Six Months Later

“Saved your seat,” Raymond calls out when Alex walks into the Bluebird. It’s a beautiful Sunday morning and the diner is buzzing with activity. It is that wonderful moment in early winter when the city looks clean and magical. The department store holiday light displays sparkle in a coat of freshly fallen snow. Winter coats spill out into the narrow space as Alex squeezes past to get to the end of the counter.

“How’s it going, Alexis, or should I say Constance?” Raymond says, raising his wild eyebrows. “I saw your new column, quite the contentious one this week.”

Jonathan had texted her this morning. Apparently there is already a bit of an uproar in the comments section about her latest answer.

The young man from this week’s column had written to Constance despondent over the direction his life was headed. He had an unsupportive family, no real romantic prospects, and a relentless problem with a bully at work. He’d wondered if he could run away from his problems, start fresh in a new location. Of course, Alex knew the typical response would be to tell him to stay put. But she has more nuanced views about these things. Alex may have even been going against what Francis would have said when she wrote her response.

Dear Escape Fantasies,

You’ve probably been told that you can’t run away from yourself. Wherever you go, there you are, isn’t that the old adage? Though I appreciate the sentiment, I respectfully disagree. Because there are certain times you need to go someplace new to put your life back on course. I’m not saying it will automatically make you a different person. But it can be hard to change under the microscope of people we know, hard to stretch ourselves through the claustrophobia of the familiar.

Sometimes the only way to be able to see yourself clearly is through a fresh lens. So go forward toward your new beginning. It’s not often in life we get to start completely fresh. Savor it.

Alex smiles, thinking about her answer. It might be her favorite column to date.

“How are things with you, Ray?” she asks him. It had been touch and go there for a while. They had been admitted to the same hospital, so when Alex was allowed to walk around she’d gone and visited his room. Janice stopped by often as well, and they’d sit and talk over Styrofoam cups of watery hospital coffee.

“Oh, you know,” Raymond says, glancing at the crutches leaning on the counter. “Getting better. How’s the job going? Are you all still steering the ship without a rudder?”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you? We have a new boss, a woman this time, actually. She seems quite good.” Alex had a meeting with the new editor yesterday. Belinda Robinson, a journalist who came from magazine reporting and had a Pulitzer Prize under her belt. She’d been engaging and no-nonsense, and Alex had immediately felt at ease with her. Most important, they share a vision for Dear Constance. She was committed to it staying the way it was and to keeping Alex on in the role.

“Ohhh boy! You think Regina’s found out yet?” Raymond asks. “That’s gotta sting.”

“I don’t know if you get the news in prison.” Janice laughs.

“I don’t think they lock people that rich up in regular prison. She probably has the internet and fluffy pillows,” Alex says, trying to imagine Regina without her cashmere sweaters and designer shoes.

“They probably let her keep all her designer bags,” Janice says, “let her get some floofy white emotional support dog.” They all chortle.

“Shame about Howard though, always hard to see the higher-ups fall from grace. Even if they deserve it,” Raymond says, possibly thinking of himself.

Alex has seen Howard only once since he was released. He was no longer on trial for Francis’s murder since Regina’s accidental confession, but he didn’t have his job back and he never would. Regina’s father had made sure of it.

They met briefly at the coffee shop across from the office where she’d first run into Tom. Howard was pale and hunched when he came in, appraising the corporate signage at the counter with a kind of forlorn emptiness that made Alex worry he might suddenly tip over. They found a small table. Howard looked like a little kid when he sat at it and his knees scraped the top. He’d hunched his shoulders apologetically.

“I’m so sorry for the way things happened, Alex,” Howard said. “I was so preoccupied when I hired you. I thought I could find out what had happened to Francis myself if the police weren’t going to. Stupid, really.” He shook his head.

“Not as crazy as you might think,” Alex said. “None of this was your fault.”

He gave her a dry chuckle. “Oh no? It was, though. I wasn’t able to show up for you. I could have made sure you were safe in the office I helmed, for God’s sake. All of this is my fault, really.” Alex could tell he felt deep regret. “I told myself that if I worked hard enough, it could all be mine. The job I desired, the person I loved. I thought I could keep everything in balance,” he said miserably, his knee bouncing under the table. Alex noticed that he hadn’t touched his coffee.

“But I couldn’t.” He removed his glasses, pressing his palms into the corners of his eyes before continuing. “Looking back on it, I would have chosen a smaller life with Francis any day. I would have given up my career; what good has it done for me in the long run anyway? I would have let her take the lead; she could have kept her job writing the column. Now it all seems fairly simple, of course.”

“You tried to fix it, didn’t you?”

“It was too late then. I knew Regina was connected to it all in some way. From the day Francis died her confidence seemed to blossom. She became more demanding, emboldened. I was grieving, of course, but I wasn’t able to show it. There were things she began to say during that time, little digs she started making at me. I had a feeling then that she knew about the affair. I hired a private investigator to help me prove she was the murderer. Of course, her father would make sure his precious daughter was never touched. Even though Regina killed Francis, I still blame myself. If I had been honest about my feelings to Regina from the start, none of it would have happened. Francis would still be alive. The beauty of hindsight.” He gave a dry, humorless chuckle.

“Just so you know, before she died Francis read the message you sent her,” Alex told him.

“What?” He looked straight at her, shocked.

“I saw her email, the one you wrote. It was in a folder on her desktop; she’d tried to delete it but it was still there. She may not have been able to answer you, but I can promise you one thing, it had been read.”

He nodded. “Thank you, Alex. One thing I can say I actually did right in my tenure at the Herald was hiring the right people.”

“Yes, you can feel good about that,” she said. They finished their meeting and stood to leave.

“Oh, I almost forgot.” Alex reached down into her bag and pulled out the book of Yeats poems. He took it from her gently, his eyes already clouding.

“How did you…” he started to ask, but became overwhelmed with emotion.

“A gift from you to Francis, at least that’s what I’ve been assuming?” He nodded, paging through it until he found the dedication page. His chin trembled slightly as he read it.

Alex continued, “You changed my life for the better. I want you to know that I really appreciate it. I know you changed Francis’s too.” Tears pooled under his glasses as they said their goodbyes, Alex heading uptown and Howard down, both on foot.

“That was the only thing I could really give him in the end. Telling him that Francis knew he loved her,” Alex says to them now, thinking of the empty whiskey bottles in his desk drawer. “He didn’t care if he kept the job. I think he might have even preferred leaving in a way. He needs time. It’ll be good for him to have a break.” She picks up her coffee.

“God, what a mess,” Janice says. “I hope he can have a fresh start. He deserves that at least.”

“Don’t we all?” Raymond says ruefully.

There’s a flash of red at the outside window. Alex smiles as Tom pushes through the door of the diner, his headphones around his neck. His face is flushed when he walks in, snow sticking to his hair. He’s wearing a hooded sweatshirt from the Strand bookstore.

“Oh, is it casual day at the old Excelsior Building?” Raymond teases. He has been tolerating the added demands on Alex’s attention better than she expected. He even seems to like Tom.

“I quit last week,” he says, grinning at Alex.

“Oh boy.” Raymond rolls his eyes.

“Don’t worry. I’ve been overpaid for years. I have some money saved up. Plus some stocks and other things. And if that doesn’t work, I’m sure some horrible company will take me back in to do their bidding.”

Janice raises her pencil-thin eyebrows. “What comes next?”

“Well, thought I’d see about writing a novel,” Tom says. “I’ve always wanted to.”

“In my day you’d never quit your day job to write a book,” Raymond says, giving Alex a disapproving look.

“In your day there weren’t even child labor laws,” Janice says, sliding a coffee onto the counter in front of Tom. “I’m excited to read it, Tom.”

“Thanks, Janice.” He smiles gratefully. She blooms under Tom’s attention, her cheeks flushing and her posture growing straighter.

“Usual?” she asks. It’s taken Tom much less time to become a regular, Alex notes wryly. He already has a usual after mere months of frequenting the Bluebird.

“Yes, ma’am.” He grins.

“What about you, Alex?”

“I’ll have the blueberry pancakes.”

“Oh really? Branching out?”

She shrugs, hiding her smile behind her coffee mug. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m a very adventurous woman.”

“Mmm-hmmm,” Janice says, turning back to put the order up in the cook’s window. The truth is that Alex doesn’t need to follow as many routines as she used to for comfort. She feels strangely safer now that she is no longer hiding.

Her mom is coming up for the holidays. She’d burst into tears when Alex called her, and they both traded apology after apology. Alex had a massive pang of guilt until she remembered how invisible she felt all those years. It will take a while to repair what they’ve lost, but Alex has a feeling it will work out in the end. She has that feeling about a lot of things now, she thinks, smiling at Tom. He raises his eyebrows at her and smiles, the dimple forming in his left cheek the way it did when they first met all those months ago.

“Alex was the one who told me I should quit, so if it all goes south you can blame her,” he says, giving her a sideways grin.

“Oh well, not to worry. I hear she is some sort of advice expert or something,” Raymond says, taking a bite of toast.

Far up in the front of the restaurant someone pushes the door open, and a gust of cold air blows through the diner. People grumble around her, but Alex doesn’t even feel it. She is so warm inside she can almost see it from afar. She imagines the way the scene would look from the outside, how the camera would pull back from their perfect morning, out through the window and panning across the giant city, catching the blur of millions of people spinning dizzily toward their futures, doing the best they can with whatever they have been given.