Page 49 of The Heartbreak Hotel

Thirty-Seven

Six months later

There’s a lot to learn about someone, in the beginning.

That Henry drinks tea, not coffee. That the espresso machine was a gift from a client whose puppy he saved from parvo.

That he always keeps music on in the house.

That he can’t hold a conversation while he’s cooking, and that there’s a spot just behind his ear—soft and secret—that makes his whole body relax when I press my lips to it.

Each Henry I meet is my favorite Henry. Henry sleeping over, for the first time, at the house—his steady breathing in my dark bedroom, the way he tucked my body into his like armor.

Henry in snow pants, taking me skiing on my twenty-seventh birthday.

Henry in New York, holding my hand at Quinn’s preschool graduation.

Henry in the quiet at the end of the day—his low voice, his warm hands, our past lives falling away like ghosts.

And now, Henry sitting barefoot on the floor of our new house. Henry in worn jeans and a T-shirt. Henry passing me a carton of pad thai.

“I picked out the bean sprouts,” he says.

I dig in with my chopsticks. “My hero.”

“You hear from Nan today?”

“Yeah.” The sun’s just setting through the living room windows, sinking behind Longs Peak. It’s why we picked this place, for its view of the mountains. “She got back last night and said she’s already planning her next cruise.”

Henry smiles, shaking his head. “Nan Russo: Around the World in 80 Days. ”

Since leaving the Comeback Inn, Nan’s been on one trip after another.

Her time in Estes Park convinced her that she needed to find herself away from the house she’d spent all those decades in with Teddy, and when the inn closed last month, she went straight to Barbados.

We get dispatches from her at least weekly—photos of drippy caramel sunrises, off-center selfies of her familiar smile flanked by beaches or rainforests.

“I hope I’m like her, when I’m seventy-five.”

Henry nudges me with his foot. “I hope you’re like you, when you’re seventy-five.”

“Hangry and unemployed?”

Henry puts down his food and reaches for me, sliding me across the floor until I’m right in front of him, my legs wrapping around his waist. “Thoughtful and kind,” he says. “Funny and wise.” He kisses me, then hovers his lips right above my ear. “And desperately, hopelessly in love with me.”

I pull back to find his eyes, winding my legs tighter around his hips. “Desperately, huh?”

“Oh,” Henry says softly, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “ Desperately. ”

I smile, framing his face between my hands.

The room is full of boxes—his things, neatly organized; and mine, haphazardly thrown together in my hurry to get out of the house before the movers showed up.

It took months of discussion to wind up here: conversations between Joss and Henry, Henry and his parents, Henry and me.

It was the right choice, but—as is so often the case—not an easy one, to put the house up for rent.

The Comeback Inn had run its course: I passed the NCE in December, and spent the spring interviewing for a full-time counseling job.

I wanted to keep the house open through the rest of my bookings, which stretched to the end of February like we’d always planned.

I kept living there, afterward: when the rooms were only mine again, when Mei could come up on the weekend and take her pick—no Rashad or Nan or anyone at all ducking through a doorframe into the upstairs hallway.

The quiet was jarring, at first. But then it was good.

Part of me wanted to keep running the hotel, in that early part of winter when things with Henry were so new and euphoric.

In just six months I’d fallen into it all like an old pair of jeans: the seams of the Comeback Inn fit me right.

But when my guests trickled away—when the house became, again, what it had always been to me—I remembered the rest of myself, and I couldn’t ignore her.

There’s a version of Lou out there, on some other timeline, running a house for the brokenhearted until she’s wiry and wrinkled.

But this version—the one I am here with Henry and Mei, with Goldie and Quinn and my mother—knows her family is the splinter under her skin.

Knows it’s her life’s work to tend that wound, and to live with it, and to find acceptance in the aching.

It took a few months to figure it out: to talk with my grad school professors, to network with old classmates.

It was April when one of them connected me to an acquaintance of an acquaintance—a woman about to retire from her family therapy practice just down the highway in Loveland.

I start in August, a year to the day from that awful night with Nate in Denver.

When it all came crashing down, and I was broken enough that I had no choice but to put myself together into a better shape than before.

Henry was choosy with the renter. It’s only ever been you , he told me—and I told him my one condition was he wasn’t allowed to fall in love with his tenant again. He laughed at that. My favorite sound of all.

Grace’s application came in May. We were eating dinner on the back porch at the house, the evening cool and wet after rain. The sky was pink.

“Louisa,” Henry said—in his soft, rumbly way.

He held his phone out to me and I felt it like a zipper sliding into place: Grace, my very first guest at the inn, whose shower didn’t work and who barely spoke a word to me and who loved this place so much, it turns out, that she wants to move her kids up here.

You never know, is the truth—what people are going through, or what you mean to them.

“Two kids,” I told Henry. His eyes crinkled at that. “They’re going to love it here.”

I’ll always carry the house with me. Its cozy, familiar rooms; the soft landing it gave to me and so many others; Custard the dog and his gently wagging tail, still right there across the street.

Henry will carry it, too. It’s the right choice, to start new together somewhere else.

But the house will be there, if we need it—a part of us, without defining who we become next.

I was so scared to lose it, but I know now that home isn’t a place; it’s a feeling. It’s a rootedness that we make for ourselves. The deep knowing that no matter where we go, we belong. And I have that—it was never the house. It was Goldie, and it was Mei, and it was me. It was Henry.

“I have something for you,” I say to him now. Henry’s face is tipped up to mine, and I drop a soft kiss onto his mouth.

“Mm?” His fingertips grip into my waist before letting me untangle myself from him, get to my feet, cross our echoing house toward the kitchen.

There’s one box in the center of the kitchen floor, marked with a Sharpie star so I’d know exactly where to find it.

I slice the packing tape with a box cutter and pull out the tissue-paper-wrapped rectangle I packed very last.

When I hand it to Henry, he looks up at me with his eyebrows drawn together. I reach out to smudge away the line. “What’s this?”

I lower to the floor in front of him. “Just open it.”

He’s as careful with it as he is with everything else—animals, his words, my heart.

He peels back the tissue paper in neat layers and stacks them beside him on the floor.

When he gets down to the frame and turns it over, I watch his eyes flick across it—quick and unblinking, taking it in. He cradles it in both hands, quiet.

“Do you like it?” I whisper.

Finally, Henry looks up at me. His eyes are glazed with tears—extraordinary, winter blue underwater.

“Thank you,” he says, looking back down at the frame. He runs the pad of one thumb across it. I crawl toward him, wrapping my arm around his shoulders so we can look at it together. A torn square of Molly’s wallpaper: perfect, spotless sky; happy clouds; red bird singing into the morning.

Henry swipes a hand over his eyes, and I tuck my feet into his lap. He puts the frame down on the floor, facing us, and hugs my legs into his body.

“She’ll be here,” I say, resting my cheek against his arm. “With you. No matter where we go.”

Because that’s the thing, about hearts—broken or aching or otherwise. They don’t belong to any one time or place. We carry them with us: bruised and scabbed over, healing and changing, always and inherently our own.

“I love you,” Henry tells me. And there’s room for that, too. Every broken heart keeps beating, in the end.

So will mine; so will his.

So will yours.