Just as Linus answers there’s a faint knock at the front door.
“Hello, hello . . .” Linus’s voice echoes.
There’s another knock, louder this time. Kate? Broodje?
I tell Linus I’ll call him right back. I put the phone down. I open the door. And once again, time stops.
I’m shocked. And I’m not. She is just as I remember her. And completely transformed. A stranger. And someone I know. The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin, I hear Saba say.
“Hello Willem,” she says. “My name is Allyson.”
Allyson. I say the name in my head and a year’s worth of memories and fantasies and one-sided conversations are revised and updated. Not Lulu. Allyson. A strong name. A solid name. And somehow, a familiar name. Everything about her seems familiar. I know this person. I’m known to this person. It’s then I understand what I was dreaming about this morning, who it is that’s been sitting next to me on that plane all this time.
Allyson walks in.
The door clicks shut behind her. And for a minute, they’re in the room with us too. Yael and Bram, thirty years ago. Their entire story rushes through my head, because it’s our story, too. Only now, I realize, it was an incomplete story. Because so matter how many times he told it, Bram never told me the important part. What happened during those first three hours together in the car.
Or maybe he did, only without words. With his action.
“And so I kissed her. Like I’d been expecting her all that time,” my previously melancholy father would say, always with wonder in his voice.
I’d thought the wonder was for the accidents. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the wonder was for the stain. Three hours in a car, that was all it took. And two years later, there she was.
Maybe he was overwhelmed, like I am overwhelmed, by that mysterious intersection where love meets luck, where fate meets will. Because he’d been waiting for her. And there she was.
So he’d kissed her.
I kiss Allyson.
I complete the history that came before us, and in doing so, begin one all of our own.
Double happiness: I get it now.
DUTTON BOOKS
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Copyright © 2013 by Gayle Forman
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Forman, Gayle.
Just one year / by Gayle Forman.
pages cm
Sequel to: Just one day.
Summary: “After spending an amazing day and night with a nameless girl in Paris, Willem embarks on his own transformative journey to find her once again”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-101-62149-3
[1. Voyages and travels—Fiction. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. Love—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.F75876Jw 2013
[Fic]—dc23
2013022976
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