Despite my worry that Alex might ask more awkward questions of Miranda about the meaning of “Seattle,” he appears to have accepted Julian’s insinuation that there is some other “there” there as smoke without fire. The rest of his stay — hard to believe it, but Al has been back for almost two weeks now — was relatively uneventful, for the most part. To be fair, after the whole “fuck” incident (one tiny guest told his mother, who let Minty know) there was a long, post-party family discussion about Bad Words, and how Daddy may say them occasionally but they are Not Right and should never be repeated, in public or in private.

I say “family discussion,” but it really was Miranda and Alex who spoke with Lucy. Minty said she just didn’t want to deal with it when there were still so many guests around. (The adult aspect of the party didn’t end until after midnight, when Alex scooped up a fully-inebriated and fairly uncoordinated Will and marched him back to the B&B.) In the past, Minty might have stopped Alex from having anything like an active parenting role in Lucy’s life but as time has moved on — and Alex’s payments keep arriving — she has let him into his daughter’s life again, let him be a father again. And she was relieved to have another parent around to play bad cop for a change. (Alex is happy to be any cop where Lucy is involved.)

Monday morning found Al, Miranda and Will (nursing a ferocious hangover) on the 6:27 train from Wareham to Waterloo. Tucked comfortably in a First Class carriage, the three gathered around Miranda’s phone for a Hangouts video call with me. Seeing the three of them together, exhausted but so obviously thrilled to be back together after such a long time — the last time had been Alex’s going away party in late 2017 — I felt… guilty. And jealous.

The jealousy was easier to process for me: I had wanted to be there, and I wasn’t. Those were my friends (well, Amanda isn’t) and I couldn’t attend, not if I wasn’t wanted. The night before the party, Minty had the chance to speak with Alex about his relationship with me, and finally understood that I was no grasping shrew keeping Alex on a short lead, nor was I likely to be out of his life any time soon. I was a harbor for Al in his new home, a place of safety and placid homecoming. No trap, no jagged rocks upon which to founder, except the ones Julian placed there from time to time out of spite. Unsurprisingly, Amanda had been selling her a story of Julian’s manufacture that I was draining Alex of his salary, thus preventing Minty’s move to London. (How Amanda can accept two contradictory versions of the same story — Alex is paying through the nose to buy me fripperies, and I can’t afford to make a car payment because Alex is siphoning off the majority of my support payments — is beyond me, but Amanda has always been known less for her common sense than she is for her large breasts and simpering devotion to Julian.) With the air cleared, I became less Evil Stepmother set on stealing her child and more, well, Mel. A known quantity, no monster.

The guilt has lingered though, like some particularly fetid tang following me around for the past few weeks, hovering at ankle height. Seeing the three of them together, Miranda perched on Will’s ever-broadening lap, her slim arm slung around Alex’s neck so that they could all cram in view of the camera’s lens, I couldn’t help but think it was my fault Alex was denied the pleasure of his friends. If we had just managed to deny our impatience to be together a little longer, maybe we could have gotten engaged, and married, and I could have come to him. I could have lived in London and slipped away from Julian’s ambit and back into my old circle of friends, could have found some little job suitable for a well-educated and well-heeled former housewife, could have run Alex’s life for him better than I ever did Julian’s. Alex would be in Lucy’s life every weekend, or as frequently as Minty let him, and I might be a stepmother. I might be a good stepmother.

That moment of pure elation and wonder I saw on Alex’s face when his daughter revealed herself to be so very much his own — foul-mouthed, headstrong, charismatic, slyly unapologetic — is one he should be recreating every week. But instead he is in San Francisco, near enough to half a world away, in the back of Lyft after Uber after taxi just to be with me. “I’m here to make money, too, sweetest, not just for you,” he sighed, the afternoon I’d travelled up here for the first time from Burbank, to help him unpack and learn the lay of the neighborhood. It stung, I won’t lie. Some part of me wanted myself to be the sole reason, the money an afterthought. Julian is right: I’m not happy unless I’ve made my gluttonous self the star around which all other bodies revolve.

But the getting and spending and losing and paying out of money is never far from Alex’s mind. There is always a mother or a sister or an ex-wife or a daughter in need of clothing or paint or school supplies or food for a dinner party which Al cannot attend. In the most woolly of my woolgathering, I think of what his life might have been had Uncle B not forced the point and placed Alex at the head of his own household at the age of 16. Alexander Carr, PhD, might have taught mathematics at Sheffield Hallam University, lived a modest and eccentric and pleasing little life. Dr. Carr would have never met me — he would have studied at St. Andrews for three years so that he could stay close to home. No Miranda, no Will, no Minty, no Lucy. No Julian. Fenn and Cora would have lost the house — no doubt in my mind — and moved into town. They might have even moved in with Alex to keep costs down. There might have been a slightly fey faculty wife for him, a brown-haired and quiet girl named Julia who welcomed his students for intimate dinners of roast chicken and sprouts, with a homemade Victoria sponge for pudding, Or not. There could be a little girl like Lucy, but probably not. An altogether less frenetic, less fraught life. A smaller one, but pleasant in its lowered expectations.

Yet that did not happen, and cannot happen now. What a concatenation of events that brought him, the stomping boy in the stream behind his house, across an ocean to the further edge of a massive and motley and often barbaric continent, to live in a weird and foggy city to be near me, the former wife of his first best friend. It’s a chain that would never have clasped together without his Uncle Barnaby’s taste for high stakes gambling and French call girls. I feel absurd even writing that, like it’s someone else’s life, or a Jilly Cooper novel with people named Rupert and Lydia bonking each other after a dressage competition, with port to follow. (It’s bad enough that we have an Araminta and a Julian, really.)

Instead I watched the three of them sprawl over each other, as best as three can in a First Class seat for two, mug for me, tell me they miss me. Miranda with her pert little point of a chin, brown hair clipped to one side, a perfectly matched set of matinee-length pearls atop her black boatneck tee. Will, a queasy study in overindulgence, a little green in the face, with the grey at his temples just starting to show, his blue blazer open one button at the top. And Alex, dark and rangy, the bruise of jet lag beneath each eye, smiling just to be with the two he misses most, besides Lucy. I didn’t feel even the slightest twinge of jealousy when Miranda mussed his hair and kissed his forehead, like, hey, that’s my boyfriend, the one who cheated on you so he could be with me, the one whose hand you forced in returning to you, the one whom you handed over to my lover and tormentor so you could have him back. Oh, maybe I thought that before, but I don’t think it now. Or rarely.

But Al is back with me, and life has tumbled on with the volume turned down. It’s my first summer up here, and barring those hot few days we had in June, it’s been so temperate (though I did buy a portable AC unit to alleviate the occasionally sticky night). Summers in Pasadena and Burbank were remorseless and scorched, sometimes literally on fire. The summer I broke up with Julian the land was lit up by the Station Fire, ash dumping daily on my car, the ’97 Nissan Sentra I was driving back then. I recall driving aimlessly at night in August and early September, along the edge of the foothills, the mountains ablaze with flashes of fire. I drove without any destination, for as long as I could stand, as if travelling distances would rid me of the pain, as if the movement might cause the ache to dislodge from my body like the ash floating away in the night air. (It never did.)

And last Saturday night, the last in this very strange July, we finally spoke of the Great Unspoken, as if it were no great thing at all. It had been an odd sort of afternoon at work, a little warmer than usual, and the door was already thrown open to catch the rising breeze outside when I arrived at noon. Ben had taken the day off to go wine tasting in Sonoma with his new sort-of boyfriend, Pete. I say “sort-of” because it’s only been two dates, both of which have been somewhat puzzling to Ben. “He strikes me as someone who is only dating because he thinks he should,” Ben explained. “Then again, so am I, so at least we have that in common.” Molly wasn’t able to stay any later than her usual 2 pm on a Saturday, but Ben and I both felt confident that it was about time I closed the shop on my own. I knew the procedures, and potential sellers could be given Ben’s card and told someone would be in touch on Monday. The hardest part would be taking down the awning at the very end of the day, which involves the use of a long and unwieldy pole, but it’s hardly a grand endeavor.

I’d reached a lull in the afternoon, after I’d taken in what remained of the free books (not much, a couple of Dan Browns and an ancient macrobiotic cookbook that had never been returned to the Indianapolis Library System back in October 1981, according to the stamped paper card still living in its little manila jacket pasted on the back endpaper). I’d dusted the shelves, watered the tiny succulents I’d moved from Alex’s apartment to the windowsill beside the register, reordered ephemera (as always), and began jotting notes to myself about an August display for the front window, a task I’d been charged with by Ben. I was thinking “Sur La Plage,” and finding volumes tangentially related to the beach, and the French Riviera wherever possible. Tender is the Night, Bonjour Tristesse, House of Mirth, definitely, just for starters. I thought of artists as well — some of the more lovely Picasso and Cézanne coffee table books, and there’s a Jean Cocteau one somewhere on the shelves downstairs. Maybe a French-English dictionary, too.

I looked up from the yellow legal pad to welcome a browser who was dithering in the doorway. As I did, I saw a flash of blond hair as a dark blue Mercedes convertible crawled past the shop. I nearly chewed through the pen I was nibbling on — that cannot be Julian. As if drawn by an invisible strand that links us still, I rose without thinking to rush and greet him, but by the time I reached the door, the car had rounded the corner and did not return. It wasn’t him anyway, Melissa, don’t be ridiculous. I helped the browser — a serious undergrad type, wire-rim glasses and a Sigur Rós t-shirt — locate a copy of Huysmans’ À Rebours. (One of Julian’s favorites, coincidentally.) The student was blond himself and bearded, and I told myself that it was a trick of depth perception; as I saw him in the doorway, I somehow projected his appearance onto the driver of the Mercedes. It was the only explanation that made sense, but the experience left me jumpy.

When Alex showed up a half an hour later to be with me during the last hour of the workday, I gathered him so tightly in an embrace that I pushed a squeak out of him. “What’s all this for, darling? I saw you six hours ago,” he laughed as I loosened my grip on his waist.

“It’s probably nothing, a trick of the light, but I thought… I thought I saw Jules this afternoon, driving by the shop.” Alex took my hand in his, tilted his head slightly as the corners of his mouth pulled downwards. “I’m being ridiculous. I don’t think it was him, I think I was just… making it all about me again. No, I don’t think it was him.”

“Why not?” Al’s voice was dangerously soft and low, a tone I recognized as a precursor to fury. He studied my hand closely, folded it gently into his own. “It might have been.”

I was surprised at how seriously he was taking what surely was just my brain reordering a confusing image into something familiar. “There was a guy walking in the shop who looked a little like him, and it was some kind of optical illusion.” I drew a hand across Alex’s right cheek slowly. “I’m just tired. We shouldn’t have stayed up so late.”

The grey cloud, his constant companion, lightened a little as his smile returned. “Well, my love, I tend to think some of the blame for that lies with you. If you hadn’t insisted on my kissing nearly every single inch of you, we might have been asleep far earlier.”

(This was true.)

I tucked my head under his chin, felt the press of his head upon the crown of my own. “Okay, it was worth it then.”

“No more talk of Julian?”

I pulled my head back to look up at his face, a little more brown from being in the sweltering London heatwave than it was likely to ever get up here in the Bay. (I’d forgotten he freckled in the sun; now a light trail of them led from ear to ear.) “I don’t even know who you’re speaking of.”

“Clever girl. I’ll go hide in the true crime section while you finish up. I want you wrapped up and out of here at 6 pm so I can pick up where I left off last night with you. There are several places I want to kiss again on you and I don’t feel like being left waiting.” He brushed the back of my neck with his mouth, my shivers a reflex in response.

“Why, Alexander Carr,” I breathed, my voice catching in a desire wholly inappropriate for work. “You are so bossy. And so persuasive.” I shooed him away, fearing I might just decide to close up early, yank down the large green roller blinds on the shop windows, and throw him down in carnal embrace right in front of Literary Fiction if he went any further. I sped through the remaining 45 minutes, bringing in the shelves outside, closing out the register at 5:45, and sending Alex out to retract the awning just before 6 — he has almost exactly a foot on me, after all, and he’s more dexterous with the pole than I am. I locked up at 6, brought the drawer down to the safe in the basement, turned on the alarm and we were out the back door by 6:05.

“You’re five minutes late, but I’ll forgive you this time,” he said as he pulled me away from the door I’d just locked towards the bus stop. “This time only, girl.”

And after a dinner of moussaka (I’d made a tray on Thursday night and frozen it) and a bottle of Rombauer Zin (nothing too fancy), with the dishes drying on the rack, Alex started the conversation we’d been trying not to have for months. Or really, the conversation he’d been trying not to have. Each time I’d steered conversation towards the “what next” of us, he’d deftly snatched the reins and reoriented our talk to something less charged.

“Mel, don’t pull down the bed just yet,” he called to me from the loveseat as I stretched up for the handle. “Come here, love. Sit with me for a moment.” He patted the space next to him.

I flinched. His was a movement I was very familiar with, but in a wholly different context — when Julian wanted to have a “talk” with me about how I needed to improve in some way, he’d text me from his study and ask me to come in, like a naughty pupil come to see the headmaster. This wasn’t role play; it wasn’t sexy, and it usually left me feeling unsettled and unworthy of his love. I usually knew the nature of my error before I arrived, but sometimes I would face a philippic arising from a sin I wasn’t even aware I’d committed. I’d slowly turn the knob and try to slip in quietly — long before, I’d learned that entering already weeping only made things worse. He much preferred it if he could see the tears begin in his presence as a sign of accepting I had been disobedient, rather than springing from bitterness or anger outside of his line of sight. “Sweetheart, come and sit beside me,” Julian would say and pat the seat beside him. “This will only take a moment.”

“It’s nothing bad, I promise you.” Alex extended an arm to me and the spell of the past was broken. He is not him, even though you are still you, I reminded myself, taking his hand and tucking myself beside him neatly on the little sofa. Just enough room for two here, no more, and barely at that.

He didn’t let go of my hand as he explained to me that he’d spent every evening with Will and Miranda that week he’d been in London trying to figure out what he was doing with me, whether he was being fair to me, whether I had expectations that he could never meet. “You deserve someone stronger than me, Mel. I’m still that tangle of frustration and navel-gazing I was when I was 16. I’m used to acting like I’m responsible, but I always feel like I’m aping some idea of what a responsible man is supposed to act like.” He scratched his head with his free hand. “You know by now I manage to turn even the greatest successes into failures. I can’t let that happen to us.”

I did not like where this conversation sounded like it was headed. It sounded suspiciously like the talk I’d had with the man I’d dated briefly before I reunited with Julian. I remembered that one well ten years later, at the end of a dinner at the Tam O’Shanter. “You deserve someone who matches your spirit more closely than I can,” Noah had said to me as we waited for dessert to arrive. I knew what he really meant: you are not ready to be dating me. Which was completely accurate, really.

“Alex, please,” I begged, suddenly desperate as the decade-old memory of losing Noah superimposed itself on the moment. “Just tell me now. I think I know how this ends. It ends.” I stood up from the loveseat, and made to move to the studio door. I wanted to get out and walk and walk and be away from yet another disaster I’d somehow hewn from what had appeared to be a seam of love and stability.

But Alex grabbed my forearm and tugged me back beside him. “What? Melissa, no! Fuck, I manage to cock it all up, even the good things.” Taking my face in his hands, he placed a wobbly kiss on my lips. “I mean to say, I’m ready. I’m ready to live with you. I am so, so fucking sick of leaving you on Sunday nights. I’m tired of not waking up next to you every sodding morning.”

This was not what I was expecting. Calamity? Sure, I know that one. Disappointment? Check, it’s a medium I work in. Bust-ups and blow-outs? Bring them on. I know all the different types of tears. Even Alex and I coming together was a disjointed jumble, a chaotic time of wanting to be with him and being terrified that I’d just destroy this one true thing I knew, just as I seemed to tear down every pleasure in my life through my selfishness and greed. (At least, this is what I had been told by the most unreliable narrator in my life who was not myself.) Eventually I allowed myself to accept Al’s love, to accept I was worthy of his love.

I said nothing, though. I screwed up my face to try to stanch the tears I knew were about to come — I wasn’t completely sure if they were happiness or relief or terror. After all, while we worked so well at a distance, I was unsure that daily proximity wouldn’t unpick the stitches that knit us together so successfully.

Alex looked uncomfortable in my silence and dropped his hands into his lap, though never taking his eyes from my own, as if to scry my emotions. “Is that a ‘I’m trying not to cry happy tears’ face or a ‘that’s disgusting’ face, Mel? I… I thought you’d want this. I even want to move here, to Berkeley. I don’t want you leaving here where you’re happiest, where you have Caitlin and Ben. I want us to have a beautiful apartment where you can try to keep me from killing plants, and I will string fairy lights on every wall if you like and we can even have a human-sized bed that my legs fit on. I will make you a coffee every morning and you never –“

“Oh be quiet, Al,” I laughed, my face relaxing as the tears now flowed freely. “Yes. Yes. When?”

“My lease is up on the first of October, but we’ve got the wedding the following week. Really quite awkward timing.” He kissed my hand. “We’ll make it work.”

“You could always just stay here for a while, until we find the right place. Put your things in storage for a month or two, and we can take our time when we get back.” As these words came out, I realized the utter impracticality of the two of us in this space for more than a few weeks. While it was a fairy dream cottage for me, a place I could make house for myself alone, it was comically small to contain us both for more than a few weeks. I could foresee my dainty home and relationship combusting through some simple misunderstanding for which a few hundred more square feet might provide an ample firebreak.

“We’ll see. We have some time.” I lay back as best I could on the loveseat, my head on his lap, my legs rucked over the overstuffed arm. “I don’t want to rush this one, Mel. I’ve made so many fucking mistakes in my life rushing into things, and this? This is one I cannot get wrong.” Stroking my hair absently, he closed his eyes. “There’s just one other thing, sweetest. I’m going to say it now before I lose the nerve. Miranda said it needs to be said now, that you deserve to hear it now. That it’s cruel to hold it in.”

My shoulders tightened, the familiar pricklings of anxiety started in my neck and started coursing through well-worn paths: down the spine, radiating over my shoulders into my chest, my arms, my palms. Saliva dried up, even my nose tingled. But this discomfort came as no surprise, no real suffering. I am so accustomed to catastrophe that seeing misery on the horizon is comfortable in its own way, because at least it is a known quantity.

“Here goes. Mel, I am not going to marry you.” His words echoed off the high ceiling of the studio and rang dully in my ears. “Wait. Fuck. Shit Mel, no. Don’t… that’s wrong. What the fuck is wrong with me? I am not going to marry you now. Jesus, Alex, what the fuck is your problem?”

“Now.” It was such a small word, offering hope and delaying satisfaction at once.

“Yes, now. And this isn’t a proposal. Aw, fuck. You deserve something so much better than this… shite I’m talking.” He looked down at me, all doleful brown eyes and high high cheekbones and long long nose with the little turn up at the end, the new brush of freckles the only change in the face I knew too well. “Melissa, I’m not ready to get married now but… I’d like to think I will. Someday. And I’d like to think you will, too. To me. Someday. Fuck. Idiot boy. What a cock up!” He dragged a hand over his eyes and up through his hair.

And now I had it. Or something like it. The proposal, or a not-a-proposal that had a promise at least somewhat near the center of it. I felt underwhelmed, and disgusted with myself for not recognizing its simple beauty, even if it was inartfully executed. The offer-not an offer was classic Alex — messy and odd and genuine. Julian’s two proposals came unbidden into my mind at this time, and I hated the intrusion of these memories. The first was Christmas 2008, at his parents’ home by the sea in Suffolk. I was so excited to receive that garish ring I launched myself upon him for a hug and nearly knocked over the tree, earning a rebuke from Jocasta for my clumsiness. The second was at the end of his surprise visit in January 2010, when he’d come to win me back for good, over a dinner at Nobu. I could hardly say no when there were so many people watching him kneel before me in humility and contrition.

But I didn’t say yes this time; instead I said: “Someday.”

Relief suffused Al’s face. “Not yet.” He stroked my hair lightly, pulled his long fingers through and tangled them there. “You understand. We both can’t make any mistakes this time. We have the space to take it more slowly — you don’t have immigration forcing you to marry me quite so quickly — I’m here for a while yet, and my visa can be extended. And I don’t have… well, you know.” Yes, I knew how his mother and Uncle B had strong-armed him into proposing to Minty, and although there would be no Lucy without their cajoling and wheedling and ultimatums, it was still a rather nasty and sordid beginning.

It wasn’t perfect, this proposal/not a proposal, but it was perfectly Alexander. I scolded myself for wanting it to be otherwise, and in a flash of clarity I decided it was enough, more than enough. Lifting my head from his lap, I leaned over him, cupping his face in my hands. I kissed his cheeks right-left, right-left, a brush on the lips, then on the little turn up at the tip of his nose, and pressed my lips on his forehead, where beads of sweat had gathered. “Yes, I know. And it will be right this time. We can make it right this time because…” I paused and kissed him one more time on the lips. “Because it’s us. It’s us and we’re here and it’s now and we’re not going to pay attention to what we should be doing or when we should be doing it. It’s us, Alex. Fuck the past.”

“That’s my girl. Fuck the past. Who needs it? Who needs more than what we have?” He scrambled off the blue velvet loveseat to pull down the bed for the evening.

Oh Al, I thought as he fussed with the bedclothes and stripped down to his new Paul Smith boxers before turning off all the lights but the one at my bedside. Are we really this damaged that we can’t want more? Because I think I still want more.