Charlotte’s hand went to her mouth.
“What — what is this?”
“Lottie,” he said. He had not
used that name in twenty years. It came out as naturally as breathing.
Her head turned toward him so fast she swayed.
“T-Tyler?”
She sat down on the couch with the particular lowering of someone whose legs have made a unilateral decision. He crossed the room and crouched in front of her, hands light on her shoulders.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s okay.”
What She Told Him About the Twenty Years Between Prom and the Delivery Jacket
When the crying settled, they stayed where they were for a few minutes — him in the chair he had pulled close, her on the couch with a glass of water, both of them in the quiet that follows the kind of recognition that takes something out of you.
“I swear I didn’t know it was you,” she kept saying.
“I know you didn’t. I knew immediately. But I’ve had twenty years to
track who you became, and you had no reason to track me.”
She wiped her face carefully. “Tell me how you — what happened to you? You look like someone from a different life.”
“Different life is accurate.” He told her the short version: college abroad, the years of rebuilding himself deliberately and imperfectly, the tech company that had grown well past his original projections, the house.
She listened and then looked at her own hands.
“And you?” he said.
She was quiet for a moment.
“I tried,” she said. “For a while it worked. I got some work in New York. Small shoots, some catalog stuff, some runway for smaller brands. Mom and Marcus were there, and I was covering a lot of it.”
Marcus was her brother.
“And then Mom got sick,” she said. “And when you’re the only one who can manage something, you manage it. You stop
pursuing the other thing because the other thing can be postponed and this cannot.”
She pushed up her sleeve. A pale, thin scar ran along the inside of her forearm.
“An accident, years ago. Nothing serious medically, but modeling agencies noticed it. By then I’d already been backing away for other reasons. You tell yourself it’s temporary.” She looked at the photographs on the mantel. “One year becomes five. Five becomes ten. You’re thirty-six delivering food in the rain and you still tell yourself this is temporary.”
