He had never been so wrong.
If he had bought that damn frozen pizza along with the bourbon, he could put it in the oven now and just close his eyes. Maybe he’d fall asleep with it in there. Maybe the old smoke detectors would malfunction. Maybe he would drift away as the smoke filled the house. Maybe he would never wake up. It would look like an accident—hell, it would be an accident. It would just happen. No one would know what a coward he was. But he hadn’t bought a pizza. He had absolutely nothing in the house to eat. And he couldn’t figure out a way for absolutely nothing to kill him, no matter how badly he wanted it to.
“Damn it, if I could go back—if I could just go back…” He was talking to her again—it was hard to stop now that he’d let himself start. A full year and he hadn’t allowed himself so much as a cry uttered aloud at her grave site. He went only very, very early in the morning, or very, very late at night. He was too afraid of seeing anyone else there. Who wanted to visit their daughter’s grave, or their son’s, or their friend’s, or neighbor’s, and find standing there—or sitting there, or lying on the ground sobbing—the person responsible for her death? No one. Finn didn’t even like being there with himself. If he could have found a way to abandon himself and move on as someone else, he would have done it in a heartbeat.
“I used to fantasize about going back to the night of the party, or the morning after. I used to wish more than anything that I could reach back in time to stop us from getting into that car. But I’ve come to terms with the fact that I don’t deserve that second chance.”
He splashed more of the bourbon into his glass, clunked the bottle back onto the table, and drank deeply.
As his grief had gradually grown into something darker, he had stopped allowing himself to ask for this. And whom had he been asking? God? He felt too much like a child who had broken a favorite toy. Please, if you get me a new one, I promise to take better care of it.
The worst was that she hadn’t been only his. She’d belonged to others too. She’d belonged to everyone. He had never even been punished for breaking her. Why hadn’t they punished him—all of them? He could never punish himself enough.
“I don’t deserve it,” he told Maribel again, “but you do.”
Still, he had no right to ask God. It was a question that had to be put out to the universe. The universe understood chaos. It was prone to making mistakes. Why couldn’t it right a wrong once in a while? Was that so out of reach?
He knew exactly where time needed to turn back to. He’d pinpointed the real root of his troubles, the one moment that if lived differently could have changed everything. It wasn’t the day of the party or the morning after. It was before—a year before, to be exact. His need to go back there was intense, though he’d never allowed himself to speak it aloud. But now it was just him and Maribel, who had always indulged his dreaming. And before he could contemplate how much the words might hurt her if she could hear him now—because he didn’t know if she valued her own life as much as he valued it now that he’d been forced to live his without her, because he didn’t know if she’d be as willing as he was to sacrifice everything good they had ever had between them if only she could live—the bourbon told her for him.
“I never should have posted that ad—at least, not the way it was written. It was like you told me that first night, in Fountain Square. You were right to be angry. You should have walked away then, while you had the chance. It was too vague. It could have been for anyone.”
He was crying now. He’d been bottling it in for so long that it came pouring out, and he didn’t bother to resist. What was the point of stopping it? Even if Maribel could see him now, how could she think any less of him than she already did? He’d been the one responsible for the end of her life. It didn’t get any worse than that.
“If you’d never met me, you’d still be alive,” he told her, sobbing. “If I could go back and rewrite that damn ad so there could be no mistaking who it was for, you never would have gone to meet me that night, and we never would have fallen in love, or made any of the plans that I can’t live without now. And we never would have gotten into that car. If I could just go back to before I posted that damn ad, maybe I could save us both.”
He swiped his glass roughly off the table, sloshing bourbon onto the worn wood. He staggered to the computer, smashing his thigh into the pointed corner of the old desk before dropping with a groan into the leather chair parked there. In his e-mail in-box, he found the folder he never let himself look in anymore but couldn’t bring himself to delete. The Maribel folder. Inside was everything they’d sent each other in their year together—random love notes e-mailed in the middle of their workdays, ordinary debates about where to go for dinner or what movie to see, pictures of one or both of them. Every Monday, Maribel had sent him a candid shot of him she’d taken over the weekend—more often than not a picture that he hadn’t noticed her snapping—contemplating a wine list, looking across the river to Newport, pointing to an available cab. She never captioned the photos—she never had to. He got that she was sending him glimpses of himself through her eyes. In every shot, there he was, caught unawares by her love.
The top of the folder mostly consisted of links to Asheville info, wedding DJs and cake bakeries—they’d been down to business those last weeks together, but they’d been having so much fun he hadn’t even missed their other notes. He scrolled to the bottom of the folder, to the beginning of things, refusing to let his cursor linger over anything else on the way. There it was, her very first note.
Okay, stranger, I’ll bite. Let’s see if I am your me and you are my you.
“You were not my you,” he said softly. “And I was not your me.”
There was one more message beneath it: the draft of the first ad he had written, the one he hadn’t posted. The one he’d rewritten into the call that Maribel had answered. He opened it now and read it again.
You on the beach in the Camp Pickiwicki shirt: If you’re reading this, the third coincidence is the charm. Care to pick up where fate left off? My name is Finn, by the way. It’s pretty obvious by now that I should have told you that.