Page 81 of Love, Morgan

I looked around the small crowd again. Morgan wasn’t here. Thalia wasn’t here. How…?Why?

I nodded, attempting to take a steadying breath. I couldn’t wrap it how I’d told Morgan I would. I couldn’t wrap it the way she’d wrapped the necklace.

I turned to the wall of gift wrap I’d set up. This wasn’t the way to wrap a mango—why would you even want to?—but it would work, and, arguably, it was more interesting to watch.

Unable to get Morgan completely out of my head, I pulled the pink paper towards me, the one that matched the ribbon she’d given me. The ribbon that sat on my bedside table.

“Paper?” the woman with the mango asked, amused.

“Yeah,” I replied, my voice a little weak. “Unconventional, perhaps, but so is a mango as a gift. We’ll get to do a little bit of origami with it, and it’ll look beautiful.”

She smirked and gestured for me to go ahead.

Something wasn’t right. Almost everyone else had introduced themselves, they’d wanted to chat, they’d told me who the gifts were for, but this woman just seemed amused.

I folded and turned, folded and turned, talking people through what I was doing, though not moving slowly enough for anyone new to wrapping to be able to replicate it. I wasn’t sure if that was a problem or not given that I would not be adding instructional videos on how to wrap mangoes to my page.

Though, really, how many people outside of Japan were gifting mangoes? A few months ago, I wouldn’t have guessed any. Especially not standard-issue mangoes. Miyazaki mangoes, maybe, but grocery store ones?

I finished wrapping and held it up to the woman. “One wrapped mango.”

“Awesome.” She took it before looking back up at me with a difficult-to-read smile. “I actually have something else that needs wrapping. It’s quite large as far as gifts go, and very unusually shaped.”

“Well, I meant it when I said any size and shape,” I said, smiling through the dizziness swamping my brain. Something really wasn’t right.

She took a breath, looking nervous for the first time. “I’m wondering whether… you could help me wrap a person?”

I blinked. “A person?”

“Yes.”

“Like… a live one?”

“Of course that’s what you ask,” she said, laughing, and the familiarity of her tone made my head swim. “Definitely a live one. I didn’t bring you a corpse, don't worry.”

“Okay…”

As if that would have been much weirder than asking me to wrap a living person.

She smiled, shooting me a cautious, reassuring look before she called over her shoulder, “Morgan, come here.”

The whole world stopped. My brain spun in my head, my stomach dropped out of my body, and my heart fluttered wildly.

Two women, one with a baby strapped to her chest, parted, and there she was.

Morgan.

There, in front of me.

Even more perfect than my mind had remembered.

She stepped forward, looking terrified and hopeful, and a million other things I’d felt myself since I met her.

“Morgan,” I whispered, my fingers finding the mango necklace again. “You’re here.”

The crowd started whispering, and, even through my foggy brain that didn’t know anything but Morgan, I was certain I heard them figuring out that this was her, this wasM. My M.

She smiled, her face full of heartache. “I couldn’t not be.” She took a deep breath.

---