“Even my Peloton?” I ask.
“Great piece of equipment,” he says.
“The fact that I check my email after work hours?”
“Just makes it easier to share Bigfoot erotica without having to walk across the room,” he says.
“Sometimes I wear very impractical shoes,” I add.
“Nothing impractical about looking hot,” he says.
“And what about my bloodlust?”
His eyes go heavy as he smiles. “That,” he says, “might be my favorite thing. Be my shark, Stephens.”
“Already was,” I say. “Always have been.”
“I love you,” he says again.
“I love you too.” I don’t have to force it past a knot or through the vise of a tight throat. It’s simply the truth, and it breathes out of me, a wisp of smoke, a sigh, another floating blossom on a current carrying billions of them.
“I know,” he says. “I can read you like a book.”
EPILOGUE
SIX MONTHS LATER
THERE ARE BALLOONS in the window, a chalkboard sign out front. Through the soft glare on the glass, you can see the crowd milling around, toasting with champagne flutes, talking, laughing, browsing.
To the uninitiated, it might look like a birthday party. There is, after all, a little girl with strawberry blond waves — newly four years old — who has stolen a cupcake from the tower of them at the back of the shop, and now runs in dizzying figure eights around the legs of the adults, knocking into chairs and shelves, purple icing smeared around her lips.
Or the crowd could be celebrating her lanky older sister, with the straight, ashy bangs, who has finally, after some struggle, learned to read. (Now she spends almost every day folded up in the green beanbag chair inside the children’s book room with a book in her lap.) Or it could all be for the baby on the pink-haired woman’s hip. She crawled for the first time just nine days ago (albeit backward, and only for a second), and you’d think she’d won the Nobel Prize, from the screaming on her mom and aunt’s video call. (“Do it again, Kitty! Show Auntie Nono how you’re the most agile, athletic baby of all time!”)
There’s cause to celebrate the pink-haired woman’s husband too. After weeks of trailing along with the local Catch-and-Release Club, he finally caught something early that morning, while the mist was still thick across the river — even if it was just a very large bra.
The cupcake-thieving four-year-old darts through his legs and runs smack into the tall older man using the cane. She giggles as he rustles her hair. Someone pats his arm and congratulates him on finally retiring. “More time to clean the gutters at home,” he says.
Maybe everyone’s here to honor the woman with the sweet, crinkly eyes, who moves in a cloud of weedy jasmine — two of her paintings have just been accepted into a group show.
Or they could be celebrating that the shop hosting the party just had its most profitable month in eight years.
It could be that, after months of working freelance, the thick-browed man with a pout of a smile has just accepted a job offer at Wharton House Books, a position several rungs higher than when he worked there the first time. Or this could all have something to do with the small velvet box he can’t stop turning over in his jacket pocket. (There’s nothing inside it; she mentioned once that if she ever got married, she’d choose the ring herself.) Or that the ice-blond woman leaning against him has known for weeks already what she’s going to say. (She made a pro-con list, but only ended up writing his name under pro and possibly wear a piece of jewelry I didn’t pick out for life???? under con.)
The party in question might also be for the woman in the Coke-bottle glasses, clutching a champagne flute as she approaches the microphone in the center of the bookstore, a stack of slate-gray books arranged on a table beside her, a room of readers falling quiet, rapt, waiting for her to speak, to introduce this new story to a world that has been waiting for it.
“For anyone who wants it all,” she begins, “may you find something that is more than enough.”
She wonders whether what comes next could ever live up to the expectations.
She doesn’t know. You never can.
She turns the page anyway.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Every time I write a book, the list of people I need to thank grows while the odds of me hitting everyone who deserves a heartfelt mention shrinks. But I’m going to try anyway, because the truth is, I wouldn’t be here in this book you’re holding without the essential help of so many people.
Thank you first and foremost to my beloved Berkley family: Amanda, Sareer, Dache’, Danielle, Jessica, Craig, Christine, Jeanne-Marie, Claire, Ivan, Cindy, and everyone else. I love being a part of this team so much, and genuinely feel like the luckiest writer on the planet to have landed among such smart, talented, passionate, driven book lovers like you. Huge appreciation also to Sandra Chiu, Alison Cnockaert, Nicole Wayland, Martha Cipolla, Jessica McDonnell, and Lindsey Tulloch.
I also have to thank my incredible UK team over at Viking, especially Vikki, Georgia, Rosie, and Poppy.
Immense gratitude to Taylor and the whole Root Literary team — including but not limited to Holly, Melanie, Jasmine, and Molly. You all are the more organized, more savvy, more pragmatic half of my brain, and I would be lost in this business without you. Huge thanks also to Heather and the rest of Baror International for getting my work into the hands of readers all over the world, and to my tireless film agent, Mary, as well as Orly, Nia, and the rest of the UTA team.
Publishing has a lot of fairy godparents, and I want to thank a few of mine from the past handful of years: Robin Kall, Vilma Iris, Zibby Owens, Ashley Spivey, Becca Freeman, Grace Atwood, and Sarah True.
Additionally, I wouldn’t be where I am today without Book of the Month Club and my local independent bookstore Joseph-Beth Booksellers, not to mention all the other indie shops across the US and beyond who’ve so graciously supported me and hosted virtual events over these last two strange years. You’ve worked so hard to find ways to connect authors and readers in the midst of a global pandemic, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
One of my absolute favorite things about getting to publish in this space is how many kind, generous, funny, smart, empathetic people I’ve been lucky enough to cross paths with. Some (but certainly not all) of those include Brittany Cavallaro, Jeff Zentner, Parker Peevyhouse, Riley Redgate, Kerry Kletter, David Arnold, Isabel Ibañez, Justin Reynolds, Tehlor Kay Mejia, Cam Montgomery, Jodi Picoult, Colleen Hoover, Sarah MacLean, Jennifer Niven, Lana Popović Harper, Meg Leder, Austin Siegmund-Broka, Emily Wibberley, Sophie Cousens, Laura Hankin, Kennedy Ryan, Jane L. Rosen, Evie Dunmore, Roshani Chokshi, Sally Thorne, Christina (and) Lauren, Laura Jane Williams, Jasmine Guillory, Josie Silver, Sonali Dev, Casey McQuiston, Lizzy Dent, Amy Reichert, Abby Jimenez, Debbie Macomber, Laura Zigman, Bethany Morrow, Adriana Mather, Katie Cotugno, Heather Cocks, Jessica Morgan, Victoria Schwab, Eric Smith, Adriana Trigiani, and (my absolutely perfect audiobook narrator, friend, and fellow author) Julia Whelan.
The rest of my friends and my family: You know who you are, and I love you so much. Thank you for your love, support, and patience. There’s no one I’d rather be quarantined with.
And lastly, the biggest thank-you ever to everyone who’s read, reviewed, bought, borrowed, lent, and posted about my books. You have given me an incredible gift, and I will never stop appreciating it.