Page 53 of The Librarians
She recalled his candor, his curiosity, and the rather threadbare texture of his T-shirt under her palm.I will always remember you, he’d said.
Yes, let him remember her as she had been this day, spellbound and wonderstruck. And let her remember him as he had been this day, gentle, wise, winsome.
She took out the piece of paper from the inside pocket of her small backpack.Conrad. Funchal, Madeira.The date. His number. And underneath that,If I never see you again, have a wonderful life.
She hesitated. A wonderful life, what an outrageous aspiration.
But she proceeded to carefully tear out the part of the piece of paper that bore his number. She would keep his name, the time and the place of theirmeeting, and his heartfelt inscription. She would simply remove the temptation to ever find him again.
She pressed the number to her lips, then ripped it to pieces and let the wind carry away the confetti.
Now it would never not be perfect.
Chapter Sixteen
Hazel might not have recognized Conrad had he not stared at her with those distinctive eyes: amber, downturned, a rim of white showing just above his lower lash lines.
Now she is the one staring, trying to merge the flesh-and-blood man with the impressionistic clutter of her memories. Trying to make sense of the monumental significance of those memories against the awkward silence of two strangers sitting down to coffee.
Coffee, not lunch, because he has a flight to catch and only a quarter hour to spare.
The pure elation that surged through her a minute ago has dissipated, like effervescence fading from a glass of champagne. She realizes she has no idea what to say.
But she took his number, so she must account for her lack of a response all these years. “I’m sorry that I never called or texted.”
“That’s quite all right—I didn’t expect you to.”
His voice is so distractingly lyrical—how did she not remember this?—that it takes a moment for her to understand that his courteous and understanding answer is also cruel. He implies that it didn’t matter and he didn’t care. He implies that she was but a fling on a sailor’s shore leave—less than that, in fact, because they never got around to having sex.
She presses on because of the way he looked at her in the noodle shop.The sheer disbelief on his face, as if he’d buried her himself and here she was, alive, prattling, without the least recollection of said interment.
She couldn’t have been entirely trivial, could she, if her reappearance provoked this outsized reaction?
“Will you give me a chance to explain?” she asks but does not wait for an answer. “Until I was ten, I grew up in a happy home. My dad was a family doctor and my mom ran his clinic. He adored her. Whenever I butted heads with her—and we did that a lot—he always pulled me aside and told me that she’d sacrificed so much for us.
“I had no idea what he meant until one day, in fifth grade, I came home to find her crying happy tears. That was when I learned that she’d been born into a wealthy family in Singapore.”
His brow raises slightly. “Crazy Rich Asians?”
“Close enough. They fell in love when they were in college. Her family objected to her choice and threatened to disown her. She said ‘bite me’ and married him, giving up an enormous inheritance in the process.
“But that day, her parents finally relented and called her. And they told her that not only did they miss her desperately, they also admired her. That she, raised in the lap of luxury, had managed perfectly well without their money. Now would she please come back into the fold, so that they could have her company—and mine—in their old age.”
He slowly peels the wrapper from the cupcake before him, no longer looking at her.
She wishes he would—when they met on Madeira he rarely took his eyes off her.
She presses on. “To me my mom’s story sounded like a fairy tale, the banished princess finally allowed back into the castle. For my dad, however, it was a cruel twist of fate. My mom would come into so much money that his income would become utterly irrelevant, and he had always prided himself on being the provider for our family. He simply could not deal with that existential crisis.
“It marked the beginning of the end of their marriage. Five months later, my mom took me and moved back to Singapore. Two months after that, theyformally separated. Another two months after that, he died of a stroke. His father too had died of a stroke, but in his fifties. My dad was only thirty-eight.
“In the wake of the news, I overheard my mom saying to her own mother that if he was fated to die anyway, why couldn’t he have died a year sooner, so that she would always remember him as a wonderful husband and father, and not as a man who could only be happy with a wife financially dependent on him. A man who lacked the maturity and confidence to face his much wealthier in-laws, as if all his achievements in life evaporated the moment my mother regained her birthright.”
His cupcake’s wrapper now lies in a perfect circle. Hazel looks down at her cup of mocha. The barista had drawn a heart with latte foam.
“That was my first lesson in romantic love. That time is its great enemy. That, everything considered, an early end might very well be the kindest possible outcome.” She dips in her spoon. The foam heart elongates but still holds its shape. “It was the reason I tore up your number, so that I would never be tempted to get in touch with you.”
“Wow,” he says softly, his tone undecipherable.
