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Andrea had walked back into her life. Right there at Dior, right where Emily worked, right where she had fought to be — had bled to be, really, if anyone was keeping count, which no one was. Andrea had walked in like she had every right.
Which, apparently, she did. New features editor at Runway. All moral high ground and integrity. La di da, Andy, Emily had said to Andrea, because where did that woman get off.
She hadn't answered Emily's call. Twenty years ago, after Roy had picked up the clothes and brought them to Emily's small New York apartment and left without a word. She had stood in the middle of the room with the dresses laid out over the sofa and the chair and the floor, Andrea's smell rising off all of them, and she had not known what to do with herself. She had kept one. Never wore it, never washed it. Moved it from apartment to apartment, apartment to house, house to the place on the Upper East Side where she and Frank had lived for eleven years until they divorced. It was still in a closet. Toward the back, behind the things she no longer reached for.
It meant Andrea had stayed with her too, in a way. She knew this wasn't true. She thought it anyway.
Frank had never asked about the dress. He wasn't that kind of man — incurious in the ways that mattered, which Emily had once thought was a virtue and now simply accepted as fact. Only once, early on, had he reached out and touched the fabric. Will you ever wear this? Emily's heart had lurched sideways in her chest. She'd pulled his hand away, steadily, and said it was a collector's piece. One of a kind. The kind no money could buy. He had nodded like he understood — he had his baseball cards in their plastic sleeves, she had this. One more valuable than the other. Emily liked to think she didn't need to explain which.
***
She remembered Andrea's face. That morning outside, she and Benji side by side on the outdoor sofa, the water flat and dark beyond the lawn, waiting for Irv's son to arrive on the boat. The plan had been genius, Benji Barnes buying Runway from Irv’s son, the whole thing clean and elegant if you didn't look too closely at the edges.
Andrea had sat across from them.
Emily had barely been able to look at her. Because who was Andrea Sachs, to sit there looking like that — was that tears, was that misery, that particular arrangement of her face — as though she were the one with something to grieve. Emily had thought: this is what she wanted. This life. The money, the access, all of it laid out in front of her on a silver tray. Emily liked to think she had all of it. She liked to think that very much.
Once, by accident, she had made eye contact. Andrea's expression had smoothed over immediately — a small smile, there and then gone, like a hand passing over a surface and leaving it still. Emily had looked away first. She wasn't sure what that meant. She didn't think about it.
***
"Emily, tell her!"
Emily fought herself not to look at Andrea's face. She could hear it well enough — the heartbreak in her voice, the disappointment sitting underneath it like something heavy. She thought, without meaning to: I didn't mean to hurt you.
And then something broke open in her, quietly, the way things do when you've been holding them closed for too long. Because was this it — was this what Andrea had felt, that day she had stolen Paris from her and left anyway? Left Emily with the broken ankle and the job she had wanted more than she had ever wanted anything, and still managed to be the one who got hurt. Still managed to make Emily feel, even then, like the one who had done something wrong.
Miranda had caught her. Had looked at her with those pale eyes and said, you're not a visionary. You're a vendor.
How dare she. How dare she, after everything. Miranda who had never once looked at her — not really, not the way she had looked at Andrea, pulling her upward, making room. Emily had given her blood and sweat and tears, had fought for that first assistant position like it was the only thing standing between her and nothing, because it was, it had been, and Miranda had looked straight through all of it. Had watched Andrea Sachs walk in and decided swiftly that Emily was furniture.
So when she saw it — the heartbreak moving across Andrea's face, undisguised, just sitting there — Emily told Miranda that Benji's lawyers would be in touch. Turned around. Left.
She had tried to leave the way Andrea had. Cleanly. Without looking back.
It had been hard. It had been one of the hardest things she'd done. And she still didn't understand how Andrea Sachs had made it look so easy. Maybe because when Andrea left, there was nothing behind her worth missing. Maybe because Emily had never been something Andrea needed to grieve.
***
Emily had screwed up badly.
Sasha Barnes had bought all of Elias-Clark, and Emily's stunt with Miranda — her attempt to buy, or steal, though steal was quite cruel a word, to take Runway from right under her — had gotten her demoted to coach. Which was humiliating in itself. Not catastrophic, but bad enough that she couldn't look at her Dior clothes for three weeks without feeling it. The people at Dior had mocked her French, which, frankly. Paris had been stolen from her twenty years ago. She could have practiced it then.
When she got home with the news she threw everything. Broke an antique vase. Shattered the mirror that then had to be repaired at considerable expense. Threw every pillow off the bed. Cried. Screamed into her hand, then wailed, then sat on the floor for a while. And nothing changed because of course it didn't. Of course Andrea had done all of that for Miranda. Of course she would. Of course she would come back after twenty years and still manage to sweep everything away, clean as a broom. Emily Charlton could be light years ahead and Andrea Sachs would walk in and start again from nothing and still surpass her. It had happened then. It had happened now. It would probably happen again, in whatever life came next.
Benji had tried to help, or something adjacent to trying. He was an idiot, but a rich one, which had always been the more useful half of him. He humored his way through her grief, bought her things — a necklace, the same as the others, more or less — and Emily had smiled through it because money was money and expensive things were still expensive things and there was comfort in that.
He broke up with her when she was still in the thick of it, still raw from the demotion and the humiliation and the loss of everything she had spent twenty years building. He said goodbye and shrugged and laughed his way out the door the way he laughed his way through everything, and Emily stood there with her mouth open and thought: there go the gifts.
She went to a salon the following week. Sat down and told them to take her straight to blonde. The hairdresser looked at her like she'd asked for something obscene.
She had been red since she was eighteen, since she'd finally left the Catholic school in London and sat down in a salon chair for the first time with her dark brown hair and become someone else entirely. That red had felt like a door opening. She had walked through it and stayed. It had been hers in a way that very little else had been.
She came home blonde.
***
A few months had passed since Emily had dyed her hair blonde. Each time she caught sight of it she still couldn't quite believe it. Couldn't believe she'd done it at all — that she, Emily Charlton, had sat down in that chair and said take it all off, take the red, give me something else entirely. She had been red since she was eighteen. It had been hers. And now this.
Around the sixth month, she thought about calling Andrea. She had called her once before — twenty years ago, met with nothing but a dead line and her heart in her throat. She had wanted to be friends then. She had stood in her small New York apartment with the phone pressed to her ear and wanted, very badly, something she hadn't been able to name. She wanted to be friends now. But she couldn't possibly, could she.
Not after the stunt she'd pulled. Not after what she'd done to Miranda. What she'd done to Andrea — betraying her like that, and so cleanly, so without warning. Though it hadn't really been her intention. To some degree Andrea had just been a stepping stone, a means to an end, the way everything was a means to an end when you had spent your whole life clawing toward something. She had never meant to see those broken doe eyes staring back at her in shock, and something that looked uncomfortably like heartbreak.
As if Andrea knew what heartbreak was. All she'd ever known was winning. Getting everything she reached for and leaving the rest behind without a second glance. Paris. Miranda. All of it. While Emily had stood there in her cast and watched.
She turned her phone over and over in her hands. She had gotten Andrea's number from Nigel — she had called him first, met with him at that small place on 54th he liked, ordered things she didn't eat, and apologized. That part had been easy enough. Nigel was uncomplicated in the ways that mattered. He had looked at her across the table with something that wasn't quite pity and wasn't quite surprise, and had simply listened. Andrea was something else entirely. Nigel hadn't understood how, but he'd understood why. He had looked at her with his eyebrows raised, reached across, taken her phone from her hand without asking, and put the number in himself.
"Tell me if you call," he said, sliding it back across the table.
She had looked at him and felt the particular embarrassment of being known.
She thought about it one last time. Thought about how Andrea hadn't called back, hadn't wanted to be pals after Paris, after everything — and it had been Andrea's fault too, to some degree. Andrea was partly the reason Emily had spent weeks flat on her back with a cast on her leg, watching the Paris she had bled for play out without her. She had held onto that for a long time. It had been useful.
But that was then. Now it was Emily's fault, squarely and without much room for argument, and she had never seen a look like that on Andrea's face before. Not through all the years of small cruelties, the criticism, the dismissals.
So she deleted the contact. Pressed down until it was gone. It was for the better. She was fairly certain it was for the better.
***
The years passed and Emily didn't think much about Andrea. Or she tried not to. There were moments — cleaning out the closet, looking for something she'd misplaced — where she'd come across the dress. Andrea's dress, still hanging where she'd always kept it, toward the back, behind the things she no longer reached for. She would touch it once. Just the fabric, just briefly. Resist every urge to do anything more with it than that.
Emily was forty-six when Nigel mentioned Andrea had moved back to Cincinnati, Ohio. Three years had gone by. Her blonde hair was long since grown out — she'd dyed it back to red at some point, sat in the same chair, said take it back, and felt something settle in her chest when it was done. They met for coffee once a month, she and Nigel, and they had an unspoken agreement about certain topics. Andrea was one of them. Except for that one time, a year ago, when Nigel had told her Andrea had broken up with the Australian boyfriend.
"What for?" Emily had asked. She had meant it to sound indifferent. She wasn't sure it had.
"Why don't you ask her yourself?" And that had been the end of that particular conversation.
—
"Andrea's moved back to Cincinnati," he said now. He said it the way he said things he found genuinely sad — not quite looking at her. Dragging a fry through the ketchup without eating it.
"Really? You’re being serious?" Emily took a sip of her tea.
"Does it look like I’m joking? Sad. All very sudden." He set the fry down. "Miranda's upset. It's all been a shock. Andrea hasn't been well. The past few months. Won't say why, won't say what." He shook his head once. "You know how she is."
Emily did know. She looked down at her cup. "What’s wrong with her? Is she alright?"
Nigel paused at that. Longer than she would have liked. He looked up at her with an expression she couldn't quite read and didn't particularly want to. "I hope so," he said.
"Well then, send my well wishes forward."
***
Emily was halfway through her closet when Nigel called.
She tucked the phone between her ear and shoulder and kept moving, pulling things off hangers, throwing a dress onto the bed. The closet had gotten away from her recently — too many things shoved in, too many things she kept meaning to sort through and never did. "What? I'm frankly quite busy, Nigel. Bronwyn has a recital tomorrow, I've got nothing to wear, Frank is being an absolute ass about the car again —"
"Emily —"
"And I'm fairly certain I've pulled out half my hair by now, do you have any idea how expensive it is to get it dyed at this age? It's genuinely eating through my paycheck, it's obscene, I went in last Tuesday and the woman at the desk looked at me like I'd asked for something unreasonable, I don't know how anyone manages —"
"Emily."
She stopped. Felt something drop in her stomach before she had any idea what was coming. The body knowing first before the mind even had a chance to catch up.
"What," she said.
"Sit down." She could hear him breathing, something not quite right with it. "Andrea's…" He stopped. Tried to start over again. "Andrea's —"
"She what?" The panic was already settling in there, already moving up somewhere through her chest. "She what, Nigel, just say it —"
"She's gone, Emily." His voice was careful in the way voices got when they were being held together by sheer effort. "She's gone."
Emily stood there in front of the open closet. She couldn't have said what came first — the anger or the grief — only that they arrived together, so knotted and intertwined she couldn't find the edge of either one. What came through first was nothing.
"How," she said. The word came out flat. She sat down on the edge of the bed, slowly and without quite deciding to. The dress slipped from her hand. "I don't — how, I don't understand, she was — she wasn't even —"
"Aneurysm. Her parents said." He paused. "It was quick, apparently. That's what they said."
She didn't know what to do with that. Quick. Quick. QUICK.
As though that were a comfort. As though there were a version of this that was not quick and that was somehow worse.
"The wake is in two days. Her hometown. I'm going. Do you want to come?"
Emily put her hand to her throat. Something hot had filled it, pressing upward. Something heavy was beating dully at the back of her head, or behind her eyes, or somewhere deeper than that. "I'll be there," she said.
Nigel didn't say anything for a moment. She could hear the quiet on his end of the line. Then, softly: "Alright."
***
Emily arrived with dread sitting low in her chest, and a confusion she couldn't quite locate. She hadn't cried yet. Wasn't sure when she would, or if she was supposed to. She had known Andrea for less than a year, when it came down to it. Less than a year, and most of it had been long hours and sheer panic and ordering her around, watching her cower slightly every time Emily said something sharp, which had been often. Watching her make mistakes and then watching her correct them and then finding something else to criticize. So what did she have to mourn, exactly. She couldn't place it. She had no right to mourn anything at all.
Nigel was already at the gate when she found him. He had clearly been crying — his eyes were swollen, his face had that particular hollowness. Of course he had. Andrea had been his, in a way. His discovery, his investment, the one he had watched and worried over and been quietly proud of. Emily stood beside him and felt, just for a moment, something small and selfish move through her. A wondering. Why couldn't she also. Why was it not available to her in the same way.
"How are you?" he asked, when she sat down beside him. Around them the gate was filling up, people dragging luggage, a child somewhere behind them complaining about something.
She looked at him. "Fine."
He stared at her. Shook his head slowly, the way he did when something genuinely baffled him. "Really." It wasn't quite a question. "Wow." He reached out and touched her shoulder, lightly. "Why?"
"I have nothing to grieve over." She watched his hand on her shoulder. Looked at it the way she looked at most things she didn't know what to do with.
He smiled at her, and it was one of the saddest smiles she'd seen on him. "Of course you do. Every single one of us does."
***
Emily had never been to Cincinnati. Had never had occasion to think about Cincinnati, really — it existed somewhere on the periphery of her awareness the way most of the midwest did, which was to say barely. She criticized three outfits on the way out of the airport and two more on the ride over, because that was the only thing she could do, the only thing that kept her head where it needed to be, kept her from whatever was sitting underneath all of it, pressing upward — something she had no right to, no right, no right at all.
The house surprised her. She didn't know what she'd expected — something generic, something forgettable — but it was homey in a way that caught her off guard. A small garden out front, tended and real. A treehouse just visible behind the roofline, poking up through the trees. Emily looked at it and thought: how eerily her. How completely, eerily Andrea Sachs.
She had worn something appropriate this time. A long-sleeved dress, dark, nothing that could be commented on. She had learned from Irv's funeral, or she had tried to, though that particular disaster had been neither fully on purpose nor fully an accident, which was perhaps worse.
Belonged was the word she kept coming back to, because it was precisely what she wasn't feeling. She looked around at the people filling the rooms, at the photographs on the walls she couldn't quite bring herself to look at directly, at the tissue boxes placed at careful intervals on every surface, and felt the absence of it completely. She should not have come. Miranda should be here, or someone else, someone with more of a claim — more people, different people, not her. She should never have come, should never have even —
Nigel squeezed her arm.
"Nigel!"
They turned. A woman was moving toward them through the small crowd, dressed in black from head to toe, eyes completely bloodshot, a piece of tissue held in one hand. She looked like someone who had been crying for two days straight and was prepared to cry for two more. She looked, Emily thought, like someone who had lost something they could not begin to calculate. Andrea's mother. It could only have been Andrea's mother.
She and Nigel embraced briefly, and Emily stood to the side and watched.
"You two know each other?" she asked, when they separated.
"Just a little," Nigel said, rubbing the woman's back gently. "Whenever Andy would call home on her breaks, I'd sometimes be there."
Andrea's mother turned to Emily then. Looked at her with those swollen eyes. "Emily, is it?"
Emily blinked. She had never seen this woman before. Had never spoken to her, never thought about her, had perhaps heard Andrea mention her once or twice in passing. "Yes?"
"Nice to meet you." She extended her hand. "Andy talked about you."
Emily stared at the hand for a moment before she took it. Talked about her. Andrea had talked about her. To her parents. After everything. After all of it, after what Emily had done, the way she had looked at her across that room, she had gone home, or called home, and talked about her. "Did she really," Emily said. It came out quieter than she'd intended.
"Of course she did. Even when she was at Runway." She smiled, and it was the saddest smile Emily had seen in a long time, sadder even than Nigel's at the airport. "She talked about a lot of people from that time."
"I find that particularly hard to believe." Emily laughed, and it came out awkward and too bright, wrong for the room. "Andy and I weren't close at all."
Andrea's mother just looked at her. Didn't argue or push back. Just looked at her with those red eyes in that gentle, exhausted way, the way someone looked when they knew something you didn't and had decided it wasn't the time. "Thank you for coming, anyway," she said. "She'd have appreciated it."
Emily didn't know what to do with that. She let her hand fall back to her side and said nothing, and Andrea's mother moved away through the crowd, and Emily stood there in the middle of the room with Nigel beside her, in a house that felt like someone she had never let herself know.
***
Emily had wandered through the house, past photographs of Andrea spread across every surface. Her mother's doing, she guessed, for the wake — or maybe Andrea had simply been this loved, and this was what that looked like at its default.
She stopped at one. A soccer team, young, all of them squinting. Andrea was easy to find, she was at the front row, toothy, gleeful, looking straight into the lens. Her eyes were very alive. Emily thought she remembered what that felt like, Andrea looking at her like that, looking at anyone like that, it was something direct and unguarded that she had never quite known what to do with. But she couldn't find it when she reached for it. Which was strange. She could have sworn it was just there.
She turned the frame over. January 5th, 1996. Turned it back. Looked at it one moment longer. Set it down and moved further into the house. She peered into a doorway and found Nigel standing among a collection of posters. He must have felt her there — he turned, waved her in. "Andy's room."
Emily stepped inside. Boy band posters along the wall, late nineties, curling slightly at the corners. Some she recognized and some she didn't. Books along the shelves, old paperbacks with broken spines and, beside them, newer ones still glossy, untouched. She looked at those for a moment. Someone had bought them for her. Or she had bought them for herself, had meant to get to them, had left them there for later. She realized, standing there, that no one would ever read those. That whoever had bought them had bought them thinking there was still time.
"Her mother said we could look around." Nigel was looking at the desk, at the laptop sitting closed on it. Neither of them moved toward it. "Said we could snoop — which I think is just the word for, I'm not strong enough to go through it myself." He said it lightly, but didn't laugh.
Emily looked at the bookshelf instead. Picture frames tucked between the books — Andrea with her parents, Andrea with someone else, the two of them holding each other and laughing like they were at a party, like whoever was holding the camera had caught them mid-something. Recent, by the look of it. A life Emily had known nothing about, which was reasonable. Which was perfectly reasonable, she told herself, and moved her gaze along.
She was almost past it when she noticed one had fallen face-down, its little stand folded flat. She reached over without thinking, straightened it, extended the leg — then turned it over.
A photograph of Emily. The Dior interview, three years ago now. She recognized the backdrop, the angle, the clothes she had spent forty minutes deciding on that morning.
She turned it over. Emily Charlton for Dior, 2026, written on the back in handwriting she recognized without knowing how she recognized it.
She turned it back around. Stood there holding it.
Why did Andrea have this? Andrea, who had not called her back twenty years ago, who had walked back into her life and then out of it again, who was gone now in a way that was permanent and non-negotiable — Andrea had kept a photograph of her. Had set it on a shelf in her childhood bedroom, among the things that mattered.
"Seems she cared quite a lot about you." Nigel said it quietly, almost to himself. He was holding something — she looked over, and he turned it to face her.
An old picture frame, the kind that had been handled many times, the finish worn at the edges. And inside it, a photograph of the two of them. The benefit, 2006. Emily recognized it immediately — the angle, the pavement, the particular way she had been standing. A paparazzi shot, obviously, the kind neither of them would have known was being taken. Andrea had just gotten out of the car and Emily had moved toward her, and she remembered exactly what she had said. Andy, you look so chic.
Emily remembered it, she had been running a fever and had forgotten some man's name, some important man whose name she absolutely should have known, and Andrea had appeared at her elbow and handled it, smoothly and without making anything of it. She had been there. She had been right there.
She wasn't here anymore.
Emily stared at it. "Why would she have that?" Her voice came out all too wrong. She swallowed, took a breath, reached out and took it from him.
"Because she cared about you," Nigel said.
"Don't say that." She set it down on the desk.
Nigel stayed silent for a moment. Just looked at her.
"She didn't know a single thing about me." Emily turned away from the desk.
"I think," he said, then paused. "She might have been the only person who did."
Emily turned sharply to look at him.
Had she. Had Andrea really — in that less than a year, in the long gap of nothing, and then that small strange window when she had walked back into her life after twenty years — had she actually. Emily didn't even know herself, not really, not in any way she could put her hands on. So who was Andrea Sachs to know something about her that she didn't.
And if she had — if she really had — how dare she not be here to tell her. How dare she leave. Again.
***
Lily found them before the service started. Andrea's best friend, she had come across the room toward them, and as she passed she gave Emily a long look, then reached out. Emily flinched. Lily squeezed her arm anyway, just once, and the look on her face was unbearable.
Emily felt it move through her stomach, felt something beginning to come apart, and understood dimly that the something was her.
Andrea had cared. After everything, after all of it, every sharp word and small cruelty and deliberate distance, she had cared. She had been too good for it, too good to let someone like Emily anywhere near her, and she had wanted her there anyway.
And Emily had done nothing with that. Nothing, and now there was nothing left to do.
She would never know what it felt like to be loved by Andrea Sachs. Not actively. Not now, not when the casket was right there in front of her, closer than Emily had been to her in years and further away than she had ever felt in her life.
She approached the casket. Her body was shaking — harder than she could remember shaking, in a way that felt almost embarrassing, almost beside the point, except that it wasn't, except that nothing had ever been less beside the point. She looked down.
They had done their best. She looked peaceful. She didn't look like herself. Of course she didn't, Emily thought.
Of course she didn't.
Andrea Sachs was dead. She would not smile again, except in photographs, except in the parts of Emily's memory she would spend years trying to locate and never quite reach. She would not look at her again. Would not say anything, would not walk into a room, would not reach out and squeeze someone's arm in a doorway because she was too kind to do otherwise.
Andrea Sachs would never smile at her again. And Emily was going to have to live the rest of her life knowing that she had let that be possible.
Emily looked at her. At the closed eyes — brown, wide, the kind that had cut straight across a desk and which Emily had once found completely irritating and would now give almost anything to see again. She looked at her mouth. Full lips, still. Emily thought, distantly, how lucky anyone had been to kiss them. To hear her talk, or ramble, the way she used to ramble when she got going about something she cared about, which had been often, which had been everything.
For a moment she almost believed it. That Andrea would open her eyes. Would look up at her with that particular expression, the one that was almost smug and almost fond and somehow both at once, and say what's wrong, em? And Emily would tell her. She would actually tell her, would let the words come out in whatever order they wanted, and Andrea would listen the way she always had, that infuriating open way, and Emily would let her.
Andy. The word moved through her like a sound with nowhere to go. Andy please. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, please. I need you to open your eyes, I need to remember what it feels like, I need to remember before I forget and I will forget, I know I will, I always do —
"Emily."
Nigel, just to her left. She turned. Felt, dimly, the wetness on her face, registered it the way you registered things that were happening to someone else. Her hand was shaking. She looked down at Andrea, reached out anyways and touched her face, and knew it would be the last time Emily Charlton would ever touch Andrea Sachs.
She moved aside. Put a hand to her mouth. How ridiculous, she thought. How utterly ridiculous and unfair, all of it, the whole thing, start to finish.
Nigel stepped forward. She didn't know what he would do, then he looked down at Andrea for a long moment and his eyes were wet, and then he smiled. The same sad smile he'd had at the airport, except softer now, more final. He reached down and booped her nose, gently, one last time.
"Goodbye, Andrea Sachs." His voice was steady, mostly. "It was very nice knowing you."
***
They lowered the casket. Emily watched it go.
Andrea's parents were somewhere behind her, she could hear them, and Lily, and others she didn't know, voices breaking open in ways she didn't have words for. Emily stood a few feet back and watched it go down and down and then be covered, and that was that. That was all there was. Andrea Sachs, who had walked into her office twenty-three years ago in a terrible outfit and looked at her with those eyes, was now six feet under the ground and would be for the entirety of Emily Charlton's life. Emily thought, briefly, that she hoped it wouldn't be very long.
Everyone dispersed slowly, moved back toward the house. Nigel passed her on the way — looked at her, said whatever he needed to say without words, and kept walking. Emily stayed.
She waited until there was no one left. Then she walked to the gravestone and stood in front of it.
Loving daughter, sister, and friend.
She stood there. Didn't know what she'd meant to say, had thought perhaps something would come when she got here, something dignified and composed and adequately brief. Nothing came. What came instead was a sound she didn't recognize as her own — a wail, cracked and sudden, pulled out of somewhere she hadn't known was open. Her knees hit the ground. Her hand went over her mouth. She gasped through it, reached out, touched the stone, touched the grass beneath her, and thought: this is the closest I have been to her in years. This ground.
Her voice shook when she finally spoke. "Andy." She pressed her lips together. Tried to hold herself level. Couldn't.
The gravestone doesn’t answer.
"I thought of you quite often." She picked at the grass. Her knees were going to be filthy and she didn't care, couldn't locate the part of herself that would have cared about that. "I thought about you when you walked into Runway with your stupid outfit and your stupid — everything." She breathed. "And you ruined me."
The gravestone doesn’t answer.
"I'm so angry." The tears came differently now, harder. "At myself. At you. How could you — you left twenty-three years ago and I told myself that was alright, I told myself I could hold onto something, some stupid hope, some idea that there was still time, that you might — but now I can't, Andy. I can't. Because you're not coming back. You are never coming back."
The gravestone doesn’t answer.
She fell forward. Both hands in the grass, her head dropping between them. "Andy." Just her name, over and over, like pressing on something that hurt. "Andy. Andy."
The gravestone doesn't answer.
"I love you." It came out ragged, barely words. "I love you. I have always loved you, years ago, longer than I knew what to call it, longer than I would have ever admitted, and I was so stupid, I did nothing, I said nothing, and now I've lost you forever and you'll never — you have to know. You must know. Andy, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Please."
The gravestone doesn't answer.
Emily gasped for air. Leaned back on her heels and looked at it. Andrea Sachs said nothing. Did not reply, did not cower, did not smile at her with that expression that was almost smug and almost fond. Did nothing at all.
"I know I'll have to let it go." Her voice was wrecked, barely holding its shape. "One day. I know that. But I keep it just in case." She swallowed. "In case you come back. Or in case you decide that you — or in case I wake up one morning and it's all been silly, because you're ridiculous, and it would all be alright."
The gravestone doesn't answer.
She reached out and touched it. Ran her fingers along the stone. "I miss you. I've been so foolish — I thought it was impossible to miss someone that much after so long, I told myself it was impossible, and I was wrong." She gasped once, quietly. "You were wonderful. You were so beautiful. You had surpassed me and I had been furious about it for years, I had held onto that fury like it was something useful, but I'm not angry now. I could never be angry now. You had done everything I couldn't imagine and more, you deserved to be here, you deserved everything, and I —" Her voice broke. "I was so cruel to you. I was cruel and cold and you still cared, you kept the photographs and wrote my name on the back and still cared, and I have never deserved that. I never will."
The gravestone doesn't answer.
"Oh, Andy." A trembling breath. She pressed her forehead against the stone and closed her eyes. "I love you."
The gravestone will never answer.