Page 445 of Manhattan Bossholes

I turned the pages carefully, newly awed that Olivia could create something like this. It wasn’t until the end that I noticed the words changing from what I remembered. The last ending had been about how you could always remember the advice of the people you loved who were gone, and how those words would guide you through.

This ending was different. In this one, the duckling realized that sometimes he would encounter situations his mom hadn’t given him advice for. But in those moments, he could listen to his own heart, because he knew the people who loved him had raised him to have a good, smart heart.

My hands tightened involuntarily on the pages.

It was what I’d told Olivia in the garden.

I’d thought she wanted to show me the change in her book as a way of re-establishing our casual online friendship.

But what if she’d been showing it to me to tell me to follow my heart?

“Breathe, Declan,” Mum said.

I inhaled sharply, the warm scents of a summer afternoon flooding me. I felt like I was coming back to life. Suddenly, the world was full of hope. And it was fucking beautiful.

Olivia was giving me permission to follow her one more time. And this time, I wasn’t going to waste my shot. After I was done with the community center’s celebration, I knew exactly what I needed to do…and where I needed to go.

39

OLIVIA

Exactly six days after I told Molly I needed to see Declan one more time, I found myself racing through the Minneapolis airport to get to my gate. One thing after another had gone wrong this morning. If I missed my flight because my rideshare driver didn’t believe in maps…

I skidded to a halt in front of my gate just in time.

Breathing as hard as if I’d just run a marathon, I wobbled onto the plane and sank into my seat. This time, no grumpy Irish man came to help me with my luggage. Half an hour later, when we were high in the air, I looked out the window and sighed.

I was trusting my intuition here, but part of me was still afraid. Things hadn’t worked out with Declan before, so what made me think this time would be different? Maybe I was I just being a fool, clinging to some harebrained notion that there was still hope. After all, how many women had fallen prey to the myth of ‘I can change him for the better’?

And is that what you want? I thought. To change him?

I didn’t know the answer to that.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said to myself. “I’m here now.”

The woman sitting beside me shot me a glance and heat rushed to my cheeks. I cleared my throat, embarrassed, then looked out the window. I took a deep breath, doing my best to steady my thoughts, and gave myself a nod.

Yes, I’m afraid, I admitted to myself. But I need to see him. More than anything, I need to see him and let him know how I feel.

“Ye're headin' to Ballybeith, are ye?” The gray-haired cab driver, who spoke in the thickest Irish brogue I’d ever heard, whistled. “Well now, that's not exactly 'round the corner, ya know.”

“I know, but I really need to get there.” I settled into the backseat of the cab, hoping that I wouldn’t be booted out and forced to wait for a bus. The driver seemed to consider the two-hour drive from Dublin to Ballybeith for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders.

“Yer off to that shindig then, I reckon?"

“I…what shindig?”

"Aye, there be a grand celebration of sorts in Ballybeith, or so I've heard tell. Me wife's sister hails from there, and we were plannin' to make the trip, but, ya know…” He shrugged, then drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Times be tough these days. No work, no pay.” He looked at me through the rearview mirror and tipped an imaginary hat. “Well, Ballybeith it is then, lass."

“Ballybeith it is,” I repeated, too tired to try to unpack everything else he’d said. Honestly, with that accent, I wasn’t sure I’d understood him anyway. I rested my forehead against the side window and watched as the Dublin roads gave way to hilly countryside. I tried not to think of what would happen, but it was almost impossible.

I couldn’t think of anything else but Declan.

How would he react when he saw me? Would he be happy to see me? Would we just end up fighting again? Or, even worse than that, what if he had already moved on? What if…?

Knowing I’d go mad if I kept thinking of that, I decided to distract myself and check Snug. My battery was almost dead, but I’d been corresponding with a potential sponsor, and I wanted to see if they’d gotten back to me. But when I opened the app, I found hundreds of notifications. At first I thought it was some kind of tech glitch.

Then I thought a bunch of spammers had left hundreds of comments on my blog. I scrolled, confused, until one comment popped out at me.