Page 62 of The Break-Up Pact

“That’s what I’m hoping,” he says.

I ease myself away from him, then root through my bag at my feet. My fingers stop on the papers I carefully put into a thick folder yesterday, that I’ve had stashed away since. It feels less like I’m giving him an old manuscript and more like I’m surrendering the very last piece of my heart.

“I found this in Annie’s things,” I tell him, handing him the early scenes of The Sky Seekers.

I see the recognition dawn as he flips through it. The recognition and something else—a longing. A nostalgia. They streak across his face so quickly that it would be easy to miss it if I hadn’t felt all of it myself.

“Anything you write is going to be a hit. I know that,” I tell him firmly, sincerely. “But I thought you should have it. Not just for the sake of your writing. But because it’s yours.”

He thumbs through it, taking it all in—both the typed words and the scrawled notes in the margins. Some of them his and some of them Annie’s. Not just a story, but a capturing of a moment in time.

When he looks up, he gives me a watery, grateful smile. The kind that cinches in my chest.

“Thank you,” he tells me. He sets the pages next to the photo of Annie with the same kind of reverence. “I’ve been remembering pieces of it lately, but—this is so much more than I ever thought I’d have back.” He lets out a self-conscious laugh. “And it’s nice to know I had other ideas once. I’ve been so focused on getting this manuscript done that I’m not even sure what to start on the other side of it.”

“Well, if you ever want to revisit an old idea, you know I’ve got even more than that stashed in my brain,” I say, tapping my temple.

“I’d like that,” he says warmly. “Even if I don’t go back to it. But I’d like to think someday I will.”

There’s a wistfulness that settles between us then, one that makes us both go quiet, lost in our own thoughts. I wonder if we’re in the same place right now—wandering through our old woods, the sunlight streaming through the trees, the cicadas humming under our feet, the world an infinite, sprawling thing ready for us to create anything we wanted.

After a few moments of quiet, I nudge him with my elbow and say, “Maybe someday you’ll even write me into something, huh?”

I mean for it to be a cheeky way of letting him know I still recognize all his characters. Annie did, too. It’s right there on the first page in her purple ink: You planning on asking me and Dylan for our life rights orrrrr??

But Levi’s expression dims. His eyes linger on mine, the guilt in them so acute that it’s almost like his trail of thought has woven its way right into my own head. Flicked on a light and exposed something I probably should have noticed a while back.

“Oh,” I manage.

Because it feels like a cosmic joke. I was so focused on wondering why I wasn’t in The Sky Seekers to even think to look for myself anywhere else.

“The girlfriend the main character is so tortured about in your New York book. The one he loves but feels like he has to leave behind, to break up with for her own good.” I close my eyes, feeling a rueful smile bloom on my face. “That’s me, isn’t it?”

When I open my eyes again, Levi’s own smile is just as sad. “I was just—processing, in my own way,” he says. “I missed you so badly. You have no idea.”

But of course I do. I spent the same years missing him, every version of him I could imagine. The Levi who was my best friend. The Levi I fell for in high school. The Levi he is right now, because there is no iteration of Levi I haven’t pined for, haven’t wanted at my side. When you love someone the way I love Levi, it becomes every bit as much a feeling as it is a part of your own soul. Something inevitable. Something permanent. Something that never quite had a clear beginning and will never end.

It should be an earth-shattering moment, letting myself acknowledge that I’m in love with Levi. But it isn’t. It’s quiet and gentle and sure. It has been a part of me for so long that it doesn’t know any other way to be.

No, it isn’t the love that scares me. It’s what might happen to it. I pull in a quick, shaky breath and say, “I’m going to go ahead and guess they don’t have a happy ending.”

He does just what I’m hoping he’ll do. He leans in to wrap his arms around me, to hold me so firmly that I sink into the warmth of it, breathing him in like I can keep the feeling of this in my chest after we come apart.

“It’s only a story, June,” he says. “We get to make our own endings.”

I nod into his chest, but that’s just it. I don’t want an ending. I want a beginning. And right now—with Levi leaving in the morning, with the doubt swimming in my heart, with so much unresolved between us and the pasts we’re leaving behind—I feel like I’m still holding my breath, waiting for the story to start.

Chapter Twenty

It turns out there are some perks to having your ex-boyfriend humiliate you and make you a national laughingstock, because months after the fact, you might get a plate of free mini croissants and little strawberries cut into cute shapes next to a folded note that says Welcome to New York, June!! That, and a sweeping, ridiculous view of downtown Manhattan from one of the top floors of a very swanky hotel, paid for courtesy of the same reality show producers who zoomed in on you wiping snot off your face with your own sleeve in HD.

There’s a strange kind of calm in me as I stand by the window and take in the sea of buildings cutting across the sunny skyline. In a few minutes, a car will come and take me to the studio. In a few hours, the interview will be finished. And not long after that, the Griffin chapter of my life will be sealed shut. I may not be entirely certain what’s on the next page, but right now, that’s comfort enough.

This much I do know—Levi and I are going to meet up afterward and get a celebratory drink in the hotel bar, then do some decidedly steamier celebrating up in the room. Tomorrow we’ll go on a run in Central Park and catch a matinee and grab a quick dollar slice before I get on the bus to go home. But what I’m hoping is that I won’t go right back to doing what I’ve been doing ever since Levi left a week ago, which is mostly feel like I’m stuck in limbo, half with Levi and half not.

It’s not as if we haven’t kept in touch this week. We call each other in the morning and after Tea Tide closes. We text each other links to funny memes and TikToks about the Revenge Exes still floating around. We’ve started an email thread of the Gallery Game where we just send each other random pictures of framed museum art with a bed emoji and a question mark and the other either responds with a check mark or a giant X.

We’re fully in the present with each other, but that’s just it—we’re only in the present. Neither of us has said anything about the future. I have no idea when Levi’s coming back or where he’s planning to live, no sense of whether I can ask him to a concert happening in Benson Beach a few months from now, no real picture of what we’re going to look like moving forward. The wedding is in a month, and beyond that, there’s just a murky, unplanned gray.

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