Page 118 of Fate, Interrupted

I look at him for a long moment. “You’d really do that?”

“Yes.”

“Keep driving. Past Paxton. Into whatever comes next.”

“Yes.”

I exhale slowly. “That’s either the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me or a description of a road trip from hell. I genuinely can’t tell which.”

“Could be both,” he says.

“It really could be,” I agree.

I walk back toward the kitchen, past the couch with the pillows I crocheted and the coffee table I bought at the flea market and painted coral. It’s a lived-in space, slightly eclectic and a bit disordered, but it’s a space that has had me in it long enough to know the shape of me. At the table, I pick up my phone.

I open Penny’s messages.

I type: Going out of town for a bit. I’m good. Talk soon.

I read it back. It’s not enough, and it’s not untrue. It’s all I have right now, because the full version of this conversation requires more than a text message can hold. Penny deserves the full version, and she’ll get it, just not like this.

I send it.

I put the phone in my bag. Tomorrow I’ll text Abby, Mark, and Jesse. I’ll ask them to cover for me until Abby can hire another staffer. And then I’ll text Jewell. Because out of all the people on my list, Jewell will read between the lines, and she’s the one I think I’ll miss the most.

If I stop and think about this, I’ll be arguing with myself even with this beautiful man willing to throw his life away with both hands to be with me. Safely. Boldly. The fact is, that I have been choosing things my whole life: leaving a lucrative job, becoming self-employed, building a real business out of orneriness and a belief that everyone needs books in their life. This is only another choice.

I move through the house fast—packing up whatever I need to moving on, to start over in a new city with whatever I can carry in two hands. A sweater Penny knitted for me. A pair of jeans. The good boots, because wherever we’re going, I’m not showing up in the run-down Keds with the frayed canvas edges. The toiletry bag that has been half-packed since I went to Rochester six months ago to visit college friends and never fully unpacked.

At the bookshelf I stop.

I run my hand along the spines one more time. The Woolf. Rudyard Kipling. A Willa Cather collection. My adored Wind in the Willows. My fingers pause on a small slim volume tucked between the collected Woolf and a paperback Didion—a poetry collection, slightly worn, one that I’ve had since college and have moved with me to every rental since, the one I reach for when I need to remember that someone else has already put words to the thing I’m trying to feel.

And then I reach for the tote hanging by the door.

I pick up a picture of Penny and me with our Mom, taken several months before her death, all of us wrapped up in a crocheted throw I keep over the back of the sofa. I put it in the tote.

Just that one.

Silas watches me carefully. “You know once we’re set up, I’ll have the guys pack all this up and send it by truck.”

“I know,” I say, zipping the bag, “but at the risk of having some random guys rifle through my underwear, this better not be a terrible mistake. I’m holding you personally responsible.”

“That seems fair,” he says.

“And you’ll owe me a new bookshop.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Not a chain,” I say, lifting the bag. “A bookshop with a soul.”

“Noted,” he says.

I sling the strap over my shoulder and look around the living room one last time. The mismatched coffee tables, the mid-century modern lamp I restored with so much care, the beaded curtain in front of the coat closet, and the shelves full of everything I’m leaving behind.

“That was faster than I expected,” he says.

“If I stop to overthink this, I’ll never leave,” I say. I say it like a joke, but I mean it as a fact.