Page 37 of Now That It’s You (The Can’t Have Hearts Club #5)

She led Meg down the hall, headed toward the last room on the right. Meg knew it well. It had been their office, too, back when she lived here with Matt.

They’d bickered for months over the perfect paint color, finally ending up with a pale mint-green he’d chosen when she left town for a weekend wine tour with her mom.

They’d jokingly dubbed it “the baby’s room,” their heads swimming with visions of rocking chairs and cribs and the possibility of starting a family someday.

In the interim, it had remained an office and a guest room and a catchall for clutter and extra furniture and the hovering ghosts of all their dreams.

But the possibility of children had always been there, right up until the moment Meg had walked away.

She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until she rounded the corner and saw the color of the walls. “You painted,” Meg said on an exhale. “The gray is really pretty with the yellow curtains.” She turned to look at Chloe, whose eyes flickered with a touch of pride.

“Thank you,” Chloe said. “He let me decorate it however I wanted. This was going to be our baby’s room someday. I was going to start stenciling little giraffes around the border when—” She broke off there, her eyes clouding with tears.

Meg hesitated, then reached out and squeezed Chloe’s hand.

“It would have been beautiful,” she said, meaning it with every ounce of her being. “I can picture it in my head, and it’s perfect.”

Two hours later, Meg sat cross-legged on the floor with an empty teacup and a distinct sense that she wasn’t going to find anything useful here. As if on cue, Chloe strolled in wearing a crop top and yoga pants Meg suspected were chosen for actual yoga, unlike her own.

She looked down at her own stretchy pants with a tiny bleach spot on one knee. She’d donned them that morning because they were the closest thing to wearing pajamas. Her T-shirt seemed appropriate, too, with its large bubble letters that read, Exercise? I thought you said extra fries .

“Any luck?” Chloe asked.

Meg shook her head. “Not really. I appreciate you letting me go through it all, though.”

“It’s fine.” Chloe performed a hamstring stretch that left Meg wondering if the other woman could put her ankles behind her head. Then she thought about her father’s mistress, the one who’d sexted him those photos, and she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to laugh or cry.

“I have to take off for my class in about thirty minutes, so maybe you could wrap things up?” Chloe said.

“Of course.” Meg got to her feet with the empty teacup in one hand. “Thank you for letting me stay as long as I have.”

“Sorry you didn’t find anything to help.”

“I guess I can’t feel too disappointed since I didn’t really know what I was looking for to start with.” She shifted the teacup from one hand to the other, looking down at it for inspiration. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Why are you being so open about this? About letting me come in here and sift through the file cabinet?”

“I have nothing to hide.” Chloe pulled up the other leg up for a stretch.

“All of my stuff’s in another room, so these are just Matt’s files.

I’ve already gone through it all, so I know there’s nothing dark and scary or threatening to my relationship with him. If it could give you closure, why not?”

“Closure,” Meg said. “I didn’t really get that, but I appreciate it anyway.”

Chloe nodded, studying her for a moment. “He really was doing well,” she said abruptly. “These last few months? He was happy. I know he was.”

“I believe you.”

“He was eating right, seeing a counselor, getting his physical and mental health in order.”

“I’m glad,” she said. “I could never even get him to go in for a checkup.”

“He left me this house,” Chloe said, her voice breaking a little. “And a life insurance policy that covers the whole mortgage. I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Congratulations,” Meg said, not sure what else to say.

“Thanks. Now I can pour everything I have into opening my kombucha company. He knew that’s what I wanted more than anything, so he made it happen for me.

” Chloe’s eyes filled with tears, and she looked up at the ceiling to hold them back.

Putting both feet on the floor, she swiped her thumbs beneath her lower lashes.

“Anyway, I guess that gave me the closure I needed. Knowing he was looking out for me?”

“I’m glad,” Meg said, meaning it. “He must have really loved you a lot.”

Chloe looked at her like she was trying to gauge whether Meg was being serious or patronizing. “Truly,” Meg added. “I know there were a lot of us over the years—lovers and girlfriends and flings who had some place in Matt’s life. But for what it’s worth, I think he really loved you.”

Chloe blinked harder, no longer pretending she wasn’t stifling tears. “Because of the life insurance?”

“No.” Meg said. “Because he let you paint the room gray. Because he cared about being healthy for you. Because he invested in your career. Because I’ve never seen him smile the way he’s smiling in that photograph right there.”

She pointed to the framed image on top of the bookcase, and Chloe’s gaze followed the direction of her finger.

She looked surprised for an instant, then thoughtful.

“Kyle took that the day we announced to the family that we’d gotten engaged,” Chloe said softly, turning back to Meg.

“Sylvia just kept saying, ‘Thank you for making him so happy,’ and I swear I didn’t stop smiling for a week. ”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Thank you.” Chloe stared at her, seeming to decide something. “Before you go, why don’t I have you take a look at one more thing.”

“What the hell is this?” Kendall set aside the top to a cardboard banker’s box and peered inside, a mystified look on her face. She lifted the box onto Meg’s coffee table as Meg peered over her friend’s shoulder.

“That would be the Halloween mask Matt made out of papier-maché roughly nine years ago,” Meg said.

“And a bunch of notes from a photography seminar he went to in Dallas the year after we started dating. And those look like movie tickets from—” she grabbed the stubs, frowning down at them.

“I have no idea who he would have seen Pocahontas with ten years ago, but it must have been significant.”

“Good Lord. How did I never know you were marrying such a packrat?”

Meg shrugged and pried the lid off another box. “It’s not like he advertised it. He was weirdly sentimental about stuff. He wasn’t very organized about it, though, so he’d collect all these trinkets and tokens and then just shove them in boxes and forget about them.”

“Where the hell did he keep all the boxes?”

“The garage, when we lived together,” Meg said. “Chloe made him keep them in the attic. Apparently she needed the room to store all her bikes and workout gear.”

Kendall shook her head as she scanned the boxes.“This is nuts.”

“We’ve got three dozen of them to go through, and I’m guessing they’re all like this.”

“Good thing I made Bloody Marys.”

“Amen.” Meg took a sip of hers and began pawing through her own box.

There was a program from a play he must have seen a year or so after they’d split up.

A pack of chewing gum with three pieces missing.

A tiny blue piggybank with a crack down one side, a relic from some other period Meg hadn’t been privy to in his life.

She spotted a printout she’d given him from a page on the Humane Society website, and she pulled it out, skimming more closely.

It was a cat she’d hoped desperately to adopt when they’d first moved into the house together, but Matt had insisted he was allergic to cats.

She couldn’t for the life of her think of why he might’ve kept these pages, creased and faded with age.

“There’s nothing in here but junk,” Kendall muttered.

“I know,” Meg said, setting the paper aside. “But look at it all anyway, just in case.”

“Here’s an electric bill from 2007.”

“I’m sure he paid it at some point. He was always good about that. Just not at throwing things out.”

She continued digging through the box, pushing aside broken pens, a bottle cap, a Tyvek race number he must have worn for a competition during the era he’d taken up triathlons.

Meg spotted a paperback of e. e. cummings poetry in the bottom of the box. Nostalgia washed over her, and she scooped it up, breathing in the familiar scent of the used bookstore she used to frequent before Matt bought her an eReader for her birthday.

“I didn’t fancy Matt as a fan of poetry,” Kendall mused.

“He wasn’t. I gave it to him when we got engaged. Thought maybe we could find a poem together to have Kyle read at our wedding.”

“Kyle,” Kendall said, smiling a little at the mention of his name, while Meg flipped through the book. “Did he agree to do it?”

“We never even asked him. Matt thought the poetry idea was stupid, so I dropped it.”

“Funny he kept the book.”

“Don’t read too much into it,” Meg said, dropping the book back into the box. “He also appears to have kept ticket stubs from the Joni Mitchell concert his mother dragged him to in college, and I know for a fact he hated Joni Mitchell.”

“Can I see the book?”

“Sure.” Meg picked it up again and handed it over. Tucking a curl behind one ear, she went back to sifting through the box. “Knock yourself out. I don’t even remember which poem I bookmarked for him.”

“Hmm,” Kendall said, turning a page as her eyes skimmed over the words. “‘A politician is an arse upon’?”

Meg laughed and pushed her box aside, reaching for another. She pried the lid off and began to sort through more junk. “That sounds like one Matt would have liked.”

“How about ‘sonnet entitled how to run the world’?”

“That definitely sounds like Matt.” Meg picked up a hand puppet made from a brown paper bag, wondering whether Matt or someone else had glued on the yellow yarn hair and the pink felt cheeks.

Why on earth had he kept this, and what had it meant to him?

She set the puppet down and picked up a matchbook, turning it over in her palm.

It was from the restaurant they’d gone to on their first date, and she wondered if he’d kept it all this time or if he’d gone there more recently with someone else.

Beside her, Kendall turned a page in the book. “The poem you chose,” Kendall said softly. “Was it ‘since feeling is first’?”

“Maybe,” Meg said, setting the matchbook aside and reaching for an unopened envelope marked with the name of the local cable company. “Why? Is that page dog-eared?”

“No. That’s not it.”

Something in Kendall’s voice made Meg glance up. Her friend wore an odd expression and sat holding something that looked like a stained cocktail napkin.

She looked up at Meg, then down at the napkin again. The book slid off her lap, but neither of them made a move to grab it as Kendall held the napkin out to Meg.

“I think I found what you’re looking for.”