Page 57 of The Rules of Magic

What Emily Flood had feared had come to pass. It all happened too fast and then they realized where they were and what they had done. Haylin backed away, pulling up his pants like a fool, pained by his own actions. He was not a disloyal man, yet he had just betrayed his fiancée. “I’m getting married,” he said, shaking his head as if puzzled by his own statement.

“I know. I read about it in The New York Times.” Franny tilted her chin up, ready to be hurt by whatever he would next say. She felt this was her last chance, and she was taking it.

“I have to marry her,” Hay told her.

“Do you hear yourself? Have to?”

Haylin groaned and said, “You always do this to me. You make me think I have a chance.”

The elevator alarm went off. Haylin did his best to stop it, but in the end he had to punch the up button for the sirens to subside. The elevator resumed, climbing back to the seventeenth floor. When the doors opened, Ethan Walker was there. Both Haylin and Franny blinked and looked guilty.

“I thought I made myself clear,” Haylin’s father said. “Get rid of her.”

Mr. Walker was utterly impossible to see into, closed as a locked vault. Franny, however, was completely transparent at this moment, a woman in love who had just been fucked in the elevator and clearly didn’t give a damn about anyone else’s feelings, certainly not those of the bride-to-be, who had gone off to lock herself in the bathroom to weep, terrified she had already lost Hay before he was hers.

“Don’t make an ass out of yourself,” Walker said to his son. “She dumped you and she’ll do it again. Do the right thing for once in your life.”

Franny saw the expression set on Hay’s face. When his father left them, she tugged on Hay’s sleeve. “Don’t listen to him. You never have before.”

Haylin looked at Franny. “It’s not about him, Franny. You know I don’t care about my father’s opinion. But all those years! You should have contacted me.”

“I didn’t want to ruin your life,” Franny explained.

Hay laughed bitterly. “But now you do?”

Franny recoiled, stung. “Is that what I’m doing?”

Hay appraised her coolly and she could see how she’d hurt him. “I don’t know, Franny. You tell me. Because I’m not sure I want my life ruined.” He shook his head, his confusion evident. “I keep thinking about when I was drowning and you didn’t come in after me. And when we were going to school together, and you didn’t come with me.”

“But you didn’t drown! And you did fine without me at school! But you resent me for everything. I see I shouldn’t have come.”

Franny hastened into the elevator, but Hay threw his arm across the door, making certain it wouldn’t close. “I couldn’t go through losing you again,” he said. “It killed me. It took me years to get over you.”

“But you did get over me. You found someone else. I didn’t.”

“Tell me you won’t walk away again and I’ll call the whole thing off.”

Franny took a step back, startled by his raw emotion.

“Tell me,” he demanded. “And I’ll do anything. I’ll hurt her if I have to.”

That was when Franny saw Emily. She had come to search for Hay and was watching them from the parlor. Franny lost her voice then, and felt the courage drain from her body. Who did she think she was to cause another woman such grief? Perhaps Emily was Haylin’s fate and Franny would only be interfering in what was meant to be.

“You still can’t make a promise to me,” Haylin said, and in that moment he let the elevator go.

On the street Franny hailed a cab. She rode along past the gates into the park she and Haylin used to walk through. Love had to happen without any certainty, the ultimate leap of faith. But Haylin now stood beside Emily Flood while Franny was headed downtown, weeping as she looked out at the world she had once known.

Once a month Jet went to Massachusetts. She told no one in her family, but they knew. Sometimes Franny packed her a lunch and left it on the kitchen table. A cucumber sandwich, some cookies, a green apple. Vincent often left out cash for the bus. She was grateful, but she never discussed her plans with them. She simply went early on the last Sunday morning of the month. When she got to town, she took the local taxi to the cemetery, and she always brought daffodils no matter the season. She sometimes stopped at the local grocery that sold flowers. Everyone knew who she was but treated her politely all the same. In the spring she walked to the cemetery, and she picked her own flowers, the ones that grew in the fields that were the color of butter.

Isabelle did not consider it rude that Jet didn’t stop in to see her, although once or twice she had spied her niece walking through town. One time in particular she’d happened to be going to the library when she noticed Jet standing in front of the Willards’ house. Maybe it was a good sign or maybe it wasn’t. Only time would tell. The Willard home was a white house with green shutters, more than two hundred years old, with a huge garden that had never regained its former glory once the Reverend had cast down salt on the day when April Owens blundered in, aiming to pick some of his pie-plate-size roses. Now the rosebushes were bare and the leaves curled up. The only things that grew here were daffodils, and Jet was surprised to see that there were hundreds of them.

There was an apple tree that Levi had told her about. He’d said he loved to climb the tree and pick crisp McIntosh apples, but now the bark of the tree was leathery and black, the boughs were twisted and bare. It hadn’t borne fruit for years.

Jet was leaning on the white fence looking up at the second-floor window where Levi’s room had been when the Reverend came out. He was putting out the trash, but he saw her and stopped. They looked at each other in the fading light.

“I’d like to see his room,” Jet said.

The Reverend no longer attended to any services. He didn’t attend to anything. He no longer watered or weeded his garden. The gutters on the house were sagging, and the roof needed work. There were two rocking chairs on the porch he never sat in. He didn’t want neighbors passing by to greet him or wish him well or ask him how he was faring. He looked at the Owens girl with the dark hair and her serious pale face with the scar on her cheek and then he signaled to her. He didn’t know what he was thinking or if he was thinking at all, but he watched her come into the yard and up the porch steps.