“I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust what I was feeling.”
“Funny how you can live long enough, go through enough, and learn how to stop trusting yourself.”
“And by funny, I assume you mean terrifying,” Gary says. “Because I mean, I wasn’t happy, but I didn’t think that was a problem, because I was convinced happiness wasn’t real. Until I met you. But I didn’t trust that feeling, either. I just met you. It was my wedding week. And then your husband showed up, and so after I left you in your room, I waited for hours to see if you would text me. Like that would decide it. Like it was some kind of test of the universe. If she texts me, this is real. If she texts me, I’ll call it off. I’ll take the plunge.”
“But I didn’t.”
“I should have done it anyway.”
It is not an easy thing to do, walk away from what you’ve built and save yourself. Destroying Phoebe’s marriage felt like destroying herself. Walking out of the classroom felt like killing the twenty-two-year-old who tried to save her own life by applying to graduate school. It is so much easier to sit in things and wait for something to save us. For the past two years, Phoebe sat in the bad things the way she used to sit in the snow as a child. An hour would go by and it would be very hard for her to get back up. Eventually she looked down at her toes and became confused: Why are they frozen? It was her father who picked her up, said, It’s time to come inside. But now she has to learn when it’s time to come inside. She has to learn to check in with her toes when nobody else is looking. To care for them when no one else will.
The new bride walks out onto the pool deck.
“The rain is going to be a problem,” the bride says. “But the tent will be set up here for tonight?”
“Yes,” Pauline says, taking notes.
The bride gives the two of them in the tub a look, like she is suspicious of them—they are strangers in a tub who do not give a shit about her wedding. They have the power to make the bride’s wedding totally ridiculous with one glance, make the fuss of it all seem so unnecessary. Turn her into a queen or a fool, just like that.
But Phoebe smiles, and the bride smiles back. It’s too easy to turn the bride into everything we want to be or everything we once were and can never be again. Too easy to forget that she is brave, too, her heels clicking as she circles the pool, dreaming up a whole life.
“I feel like we’re supposed to get out or something,” Gary says.
“We still have twenty minutes until checkout,” Phoebe says.
“Good.”
Gary leans his head back against the edge of the tub to look up at the sky, while Phoebe looks around at all that is before her. She feels the wind against her cheek and the warmth of her toes. She feels excited about the rain that is going to come soon. She listens to the birds in the trees and the sounds of other people’s children swimming in the pool. Juice, who will one day grow up and forget what she ever loved so much about hotel pools. She will stay at beautiful hotels around the world and never once use the pool. She will look in the mirror and think, Who the fuck am I? Why did I ever want to be called Juice? My name is Melanie. She will have to practice saying her full name—all of them will. Because Gary is not wrong—becoming who you want to be is just like anything else. It takes practice. It requires belief that one day, you’ll wake up and be a natural at it.
“I’m going to become a winter keeper,” Phoebe says.
“Congratulations,” Gary says. “Though I knew Geoffrey was going to give you that job.”
“Because it’s classic Geoffrey?”
“It’s classic you,” he says, and it feels exhilarating to hear him say that. To talk about her like he knows her. “Who else would be better at living in a mansion with terrifyingly large gargoyles on the roof?”
“In theory, the gargoyles will be there to protect me,” she says.
“Is that in their contract?”
“Since the thirteenth century.”
“I like that you know when gargoyles were invented,” he says.
Phoebe laughs. “I like that you just used the word invented.”
“Well, that’s how it happened,” Gary says. “Some little boy in the thirteenth century had a dream that one day he’d grow up and invent gargoyles and he did. Don’t ruin this for me, Phoebe.”
“They were basically just the plumbing at first,” Phoebe says. “Just harmless, medieval gutters.”
“Medieval gutters that happen to be shaped like monsters,” Gary says. “How does that not scare you?”
“I don’t know—it might,” Phoebe says.
When they get out of the hot tub, Gary looks at her and she looks back at him. “You know I meant it about you calling me if you see a ghost.”
“What if I don’t see a ghost? Some in the scientific community might argue that there is no proof of their existence.”
“Call me anyway,” Gary says.
UPSTAIRS, SHE PACKS her suitcase. She likes her new luggage, how sturdy it is. When she leaves, she rolls it with ease down the hallway, past the copper sconce. By the time she’s in the elevator, she is convinced it will do everything the label promises it will do.
In the lobby, she stops in front of the bookcase. She puts Mrs. Dalloway back on the shelf, spine facing out. She is so good at predicting what will happen in books, so bad at predicting what will happen in life. That is why she has always preferred books—because to be alive is much harder. To be alive, she must leave this hotel, despite the uncertainty of everything. Walk down the long hallway of that mansion come winter, not knowing what will become of her, which is a thing that does scare her. But she also feels a thrill imagining the candles she’ll light at night. Frank, the nineteenth-century yellow dog, who will sleep on her bed as she writes. The snow dusting the ocean.
She walks through the marble lobby, and it feels like something huge is ending, but she knows it’s not. She knows this is a story that she will tell again and again for the rest of her life, and that one of these days, she’ll tell it as a beginning. Some of the details will be long forgotten by then, but some will live on each time she and Gary bicker over the most unimportant parts, like what exactly is coastal business casual and why were all the books turned backward and are coconut pillows really better than regular pillows?
“Thank you, Pauline,” Phoebe says, stopping just before the front doors to say goodbye. But Pauline is focused on the new wedding people, looking one of them so deeply in the eye, she doesn’t see Phoebe wave and walk out through the heavy velvet drapes and into the bright light.
“Your car,” the doorman says, and takes her luggage.
Phoebe pauses on the stoop for just a moment, tempted to see everything as she did when she first arrived, as if the people and the brick walkway and the trees are props in a play. But then she tips the man in burgundy and steps forward into the world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not exist without my agents, Molly Friedrich and Lucy Carson, who were guiding lights at every stage of its development, especially when it was a mere proposal. Thank you to everyone else who works at (or alongside) the Friedrich Agency—Dana Spector at CAA, who literally makes dreams happen; Marin Takikawa, whose sharp editorial eye saved me at the eleventh hour; Hannah Brattesani, who helped make this book exist in other countries and languages; and
Heather Carr, who patiently answers all my questions.
