Chapter Four — The Last Morning in Millhaven
1889 Words
POV: Nora
I packed one suitcase.
Everything else I left exactly where it was.
The fabric bolts stacked by the window. The half-finished dress on my mannequin. The photographs on the dresser — Mom and Dad at the mill picnic the summer before everything changed, Danny at his high school graduation, Jade and me at seventeen making terrible faces at the camera. I left all of it. I needed to believe it would still be here when I came back. I needed this room to look like mine while I was gone.
One year. Three hundred and sixty-five days. Then I'd come back and everything would be exactly where I left it.
I told myself that until it started to feel true.
Danny appeared in my doorway at seven. He'd showered, dressed, was moving more carefully than usual — the posture he used when he wanted me to think the recovery wasn't costing him anything.
"You're already packed," he said.
"I've been up since five."
"Nora."
"Don't start, Danny."
"I'm not starting anything. I'm just—" He stopped. Leaned against the doorframe. "You didn't have to do it all in one bag. You could've taken more."
"One bag is enough. I'm not moving there. I'm just staying for a while."
The distinction felt important. I held onto it.
He watched me fold the last sweater and set it on top. "The surgery went well," he said quietly. "They said the recovery's looking really good. Better than projected."
"I know. I read the report."
"I just want you to know that it — that you—" He stopped. Tried again. "I want you to know it worked. Whatever you're about to walk into, it worked."
I zipped the suitcase. Didn't look at him yet. "I know it worked."
"Okay."
"Okay."
I looked up. His face was doing something complicated — pride and guilt fighting each other for space, the way they'd been doing since the day I came home with that folder. I'd told him not to feel guilty. I'd told him three times. It hadn't taken.
"One year," I said. "I'll call every day. I'll be fine."
"What if he's—"
"He won't be."
"But what if—"
"Danny." I crossed the room, picked up my suitcase, and stood in front of him. "He is cold and he is clinical and he treats everything like a business transaction.
That is not a fun combination of traits. But it also means he's not unpredictable. I know exactly what I signed up for. Okay?"
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he stepped forward and hugged me — properly, both arms, the kind of hug he used to give me when we were kids and something had scared him.
"Come back," he said into my shoulder. "Okay? Just — make sure you come back."
My throat tightened. "I'll come back."
"Promise me."
"I promise you."
He let go. Stepped back. Cleared his throat like he hadn't just nearly cracked me open.
"Jade's outside," he said. "She's been sitting in the car for twenty minutes working up to coming in."
"I know. I can hear her music."
He almost smiled. "It's very loud."
"It's always very loud."
I picked up my bag. Walked to the door. At the threshold I stopped and looked back at my room — the mannequin, the fabric, the photographs, all of it sitting quiet and waiting.
"Keep the mill running while I'm gone," I said.
"Obviously."
"And eat actual food. Not just whatever's in the freezer."
"I eat real food."
"Danny."
"I eat mostly real food."
I left before either of us said anything that would make it harder to go.
I walked through Millhaven one last time before Jade drove me to the station.
Not because I was being sentimental. I just needed twenty minutes where I wasn't in a car or a train or a building that cost more than the entire town I grew up in. Twenty minutes of knowing exactly where I was.
Main Street was quiet at eight in the morning — the diner was open, Kellerman's Hardware had its door propped, the mill at the far end was running its morning shift, the low mechanical hum of it carrying down the block the way it always had.
My father used to say you could tell the health of a town by whether you could still hear the mill. Millhaven was still making sound.
I went to the cemetery.
I don't go as often as I should. There's always something — the mill, Danny's appointments, the hundred small emergencies that make up a life held together with wire and determination. But I went this morning. I stood in front of my parents' headstone and looked at their names for a while.
Thomas and Ellen Calloway.
Dad would have had opinions about what I was doing. He would have sat at the kitchen table with his coffee and asked me seven careful questions and then told me he trusted my judgment while clearly not entirely trusting my judgment. Mom would have been quieter about it. She would have hugged me and then, later, when she thought I couldn't hear, cried a little in the kitchen.
I missed them both so much right now it felt like something physical.
"I'm going to be okay," I told them. "I know how this sounds. I know what you'd both say. But Danny is going to walk right, and I'm going to be fine, and in a year I'll come back and everything will be different."
The wind moved through the old oak by the fence. That was all.
"Okay," I said. "I'll take that as agreement."
Jade was on her third loop of the same song when I got in the car.
"You went to the cemetery," she said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Good." She pulled out of the parking lot. "I almost came with you but I thought you probably needed it alone."
"I did."
She nodded. Turned the music down to a reasonable volume for approximately forty-five seconds before it crept back up. I let it. Some things you don't fight.
We made it three miles before she started crying.
"I'm not crying," she said, at the first red light, wiping her face with the back of her wrist.
"Jade."
"I have something in my eye."
"Both of them?"
"It's very dusty today."
"It rained last night."
"Nora." Her voice broke slightly on my name. She pressed her lips together and stared at the road. "I just really hate this. I know it's the right thing. I know you've thought it through. I know you're going to be fine." She wiped her face again. "I still really hate it."
"I know."
"He better be — I swear to God, if he treats you like—"
"He's going to treat me professionally, Jade. That's all it needs to be."
"That's the saddest sentence I've ever heard."
"It's practical."
"It's sad and practical." She reached over and grabbed my hand off my lap and held it. "Call me every day."
"Every other day."
"Every single day, Nora Elizabeth Calloway, or I will drive to Manhattan and make a scene in his lobby."
"You'd enjoy that too much."
"Immensely. Every day."
"Fine. Every day."
At the station she put the car in park and held on when she hugged me, the way she always does when she means it. I held on too. We'd been doing this since we were twelve — showing up, holding on, letting go.
"You are the most stubborn, capable, infuriating person I know," she said into my hair. "He has no idea what just walked into his life."
I laughed, short and real. "He thinks he does. He researched me."
"He researched Nora Calloway from Millhaven. He has no idea about the rest of it."
I didn't ask her what the rest of it was. I'd think about that on the train.
The train left at nine forty.
I had a window seat. I watched Millhaven disappear behind me — the water tower first, then the mill, then the cemetery hill with its old oak, then the last of the rooftops. Then just fields and then the grey sprawl of the highway corridor and then nothing that looked like home anymore.
I turned forward.
Manhattan built itself on the horizon slowly, the way it always does on this route — like it's giving you time to prepare, which is generous of it, because no amount of time actually prepares you. The buildings rose. The sky narrowed between them. Everything got louder even through the train window, even before we pulled into Penn Station and the full noise of the city wrapped around me like something I'd have to learn to breathe through.
I had the address. I had my phone. I had one suitcase and a signed contract and whatever Jade meant by the rest of it.
I took a cab.
The driver didn't talk, which I appreciated. I watched the city move past the window — the density of it, the scale, the sheer volume of people who had decided this was where they were going to live their life. I'd never understood that choice before. I still didn't, entirely. But I was about to spend a year inside it.
The building was exactly as I remembered it. Glass, steel, forty floors of deliberate intimidation. Except this time I wasn't going to the office. I was going to the fifty-eighth floor. I was going home.
Home.
The word sat wrong. I filed it away.
The doorman held the door. The lobby concierge — a different one this time, not the woman who'd made me wait — called upstairs without me asking and then directed me to a private elevator. Silver doors. A panel with no buttons below fifty.
The elevator moved fast and smooth and very quietly.
The doors opened.
The penthouse was exactly what I'd expected from the photos I'd found online at two in the morning: floor-to-ceiling glass, the whole of Manhattan spread out like it had been arranged specifically for this view, furniture that looked like it had been selected by someone who understood beauty and had no interest in comfort.
Ethan Weston was standing in the living room with his back to me, phone pressed to his ear. He was already in a suit. Of course he was. I suspected he slept in the suit.
He didn't turn around.
The elevator doors closed behind me.
I stood in the entrance of his penthouse with my one suitcase and my signed contract and the echo of Danny's voice in my ear — come back, okay, just make sure you come back — and I waited.
He kept talking. Whatever the call was, it mattered more than acknowledging that I had arrived. That I had given up my room and my town and a year of my life and was now standing eight feet behind him, waiting to be noticed.
I set my suitcase down. Stood straight. Looked at the back of his very expensive suit.
This was my life for the next three hundred and sixty-five days.
I could do this.
I had to do this.
He still didn't turn around.
- Writer
