The Unsinkable Greta James(10)

She reaches for her phone, squinting as the screen brightens, and sees she has a text from Luke: Got my jacket. Left the key.

That’s it. No goodbye. No sign-off. Just: the end.

She doesn’t really blame him. It had taken her weeks to even respond to his request for his favorite leather jacket, which he’d forgotten the day he came to pack up his things and which she’d been secretly hoping he might let her keep. For a while, she’d taken to wearing it around the apartment. It still smelled like his cigarettes.

Now she stares at his name on her screen, debating whether to simply delete the whole contact. But she doesn’t. Instead, she toggles back and lets her finger hover over the entry for Jason Foster.

She hasn’t heard from him since the day of the funeral, when she’d fled the reception downstairs and found him in her old bedroom, running a hand along her first guitar, the one her dad had bought all those years ago. They hadn’t seen each other in a long time, almost two years, and it had never occurred to her that he’d come home for the service. As she watched his dark hands trace the curve of the instrument, moving slowly across the swirling mahogany, she felt goosebumps rise on her forearms. It was almost like he was touching her instead.

Greta’s mom had died exactly twenty-four minutes before her plane hit the tarmac. After listening to the voicemail from Asher, she’d sat with her head pressed against the cool of the window, her heart clenching like a fist inside her chest, until a flight attendant laid a gentle hand on her shoulder, and she’d realized she was the last one on the plane.

At the moment, Luke was still in Germany. He’d tried to get a flight back when she told him, but a bad storm had swept in just after she left, grounding most transatlantic travel, and everything had been booked for days. Already, he’d missed the funeral, which her father had insisted on scheduling as quickly as possible, and it was becoming obvious that he was going to miss being there at all. It didn’t matter that he’d sounded devastated when he called to break the news to her. She wasn’t even really upset about this. There were other things, too many to count. Even so, she knew this would be the one she’d never forgive.

And now Jason was in her room. Jason Foster: the first boy she’d ever loved, and the man she returned to after every failed relationship.

They had rules about this sort of thing. They never officially dated, and they never used each other to cheat. There were no strings attached and no expectations. This was fun and satisfying, nothing more. And it worked for both of them: Greta, who was always traveling and could never seem to commit to anyone for the long haul, and Jason, who was always working and had never wanted anything permanent.

But now her boyfriend was stranded overseas, and her mother had just died, and everything was a mess.

And mostly, he was there, and Luke wasn’t.

Neither said a word as they walked toward each other, but Greta remembers, in the fog of grief and exhaustion and shock, thinking how inevitable it felt right then. There was a moment to tell him about Luke—a moment to consider Luke, period—and then that moment passed, and Jason’s arms were around her, and there was nothing more to be done about it.

Afterward, they lay in her old twin bed and stared up at the glow-in-the-dark stars. Jason let his head fall to the side, peering at her childhood bookshelf. He reached over to pull out a fraying paperback, and she put a hand on his arm.

“What?” he said, turning back to her with a lazy smile. “You worried I’m gonna find your diary? I bet it says ‘Greta Foster’ all over it.”

She rolled her eyes. “You wish.”

“Oh, come on,” he teased. He had a new haircut, faded on the sides, that made him look younger, and something about seeing him here in her childhood bed—with that self-assured grin and those dimples that used to make her go wobbly—made her feel like time was elastic, like all her teenage fantasies were suddenly coming true. He tickled her hip, and she shivered. There was laughter in his voice when he whispered in her ear: “You wanted to marry me from the day the moving truck rolled up. Admit it.”

Greta shook her head. “No way.”

“Admit it.”

“Fine,” she said with a smile, relenting. “Maybe a little. But then I grew up.”

He dropped his head back onto the pillow, looking up at the stars with a thoughtful expression. “Do you ever wonder where we’d be if…”

“What?”

“If we’d gotten together for real.”

Greta looked over at him, too surprised to answer.

“Like, would we have ended up back here, do you think?”

“In Columbus?” she said. “No way.”

He smiled. “I don’t know. Sometimes I can see it. A little house in the neighborhood. Kids playing tag until dark, the way we always did. Family dinners. Barbecues out back. The whole deal.”

She knew he was just musing, that on this of all weekends, the air was thick with nostalgia. But it was still jarring to hear. Jason was the only person Greta knew who had been equally anxious to get away from this place, this kind of life. In high school, he’d thrown himself into his work with a single-minded determination that had eventually carried him to Columbia, where instead of taking a breath, he’d redoubled his efforts, graduating at the top of his class. Later, he became the first Black CFO at his hedge fund, a position he’d worked twice as hard as his colleagues to get, all those smug white guys whose dads were clients or who played golf with people who were. But it wasn’t just a job to him. And New York wasn’t just a place to live. They were dreams he’d dreamed on the front stoop of the small yellow house next door to where they were lying in bed right now. And he’d gone and made them real.