“Really.” Jamie’s eyes moved to the bedsheets. He still wouldn’t look at me. I became acutely aware of my heartbeat. “I’ll tell you something else. The day you told me you switched to Whitney, I accepted my offer at Columbia. Only a train ride away.”
“I thought you went for the journalism program.”
Gently, almost apologetically, he shook his head. “Shay, when we were in middle school, I stopped going to that soccer camp in California… Remember the one by the beach? Because you couldn’t afford it, and I wanted to stay home with you all summer. Freshman year, when you wanted to come over every night to study, I dropped everything—piano lessons, extra soccer coaching—so I would be free. Got into a huge fight with my mom over it, actually. When we were juniors, I used to time my showers after soccer practice with the end of cheer, so I could drive you home.” He laughed. “My life revolved around finding ways to spend time with you.”
“We were best friends,” I said.
He looked at me but didn’t say a word. Just let me see the truth, plain on his face.
“For how long?” I asked.
This time, his smile was rueful. “Always.”
***
The air in the room had turned cool and crisp. Jamie lay beside me, breathing deeply, while I watched the dark seep out of the sky through the window.
Maybe it was the last story that did it, the last puzzle piece falling into place. Or maybe it was just a matter of time, all the talking and remembering catching up to me. Whatever it was, I finally knew what to do. From one second to the next, the knowledge was just there, as if it always had been.
“I’m glad I told you about the fire,” I whispered, simply for the pleasure of hearing it out loud.
“I’m glad, too,” murmured Jamie, in a sleep-drugged voice. So he was awake.
I turned. His eyes were closed, face creased by the pillow. “I think I know how my book ends,” I said.
Slowly, his eyes blinked open. “You still haven’t told me what it’s about.”
I smiled. “I was inspired by Scheherazade.”
He frowned. “From The Thousand and One Nights? The story you refused to talk about with Mr. Trevors?”
I settled deeper into the sheets. “You were right. I did have a lot to say. Just not to him.”
Silence stretched, but I knew Jamie well enough to know it was contemplative.
“Hey.” I closed my eyes. “Let’s go out, okay? I’ll wear a nice dress, and you can bring me a corsage, and we’ll get drunk and dance.”
“Why do you want to do that?”
“I want to do it over again. Tie things up clean.”
“Tie what up?” Jamie asked.
But sleep was already pulling me under.
Chapter Thirty-Two
It was a brilliant fall day, the trees and earth—the very air—shocked through with punch-drunk autumn color. Jamie, dressed in slender black, cut down the quaint Main Street like a palette knife, reordering the landscape. I watched him and thought, Now that’s a trick I never learned.
“Dougie,” Jamie said, pocketing his phone. “There’s one Rachel Rockwell in the entire state of New York, and she’s eighty-six. Last record of our Rachel is from 2014.”
“The year we graduated,” I said, mind spinning.
“In case you were wondering, she graduated with you, at least on paper. Then she disappeared. Records go cold the same year for Don. But the wildest thing isn’t when the records stop. It’s when they start. Both Rachel and Don seem to have sprung fully formed into existence five years earlier. The first bits and pieces Dougie can find of them are from 2009. Mostly documents related to Rachel’s Whitney application. There’s a social security number and a birth certificate that says she was born at Mount Sinai on October 15, 1992, but Dougie thinks it’s probably fake. One of my producers is going to call the hospital to check.”