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Wes's house in Austin looked like the kind of place where a Bond villain might do hot yoga—all concrete and glass and angles that seemed personally offended by the concept of a throw pillow. Jill had decided, somewhere around her second flute of the prosecco that Wes had insisted on calling "just bubbles," that the whole aesthetic could be summarized as if an Apple Store and a parking garage had a baby and then sent the baby to therapy.
Except tonight the living room was full of cardboard. There were boxes stacked into little brown ziggurats, Sharpie-labeled in Wes's annoyingly neat handwriting—KITCHEN, BOOKS, FRAGILE, MISC (the box where things go to be forgotten forever). It was a strange thing, throwing a party to celebrate a departure while standing inside the half-packed proof of it.
She was working the room the way she always did—making strangers laugh and then forgetting their names on purpose, no guilt whatsoever—because these were Wes's real estate people, every last one of them, and the only two guests she'd have walked through fire for were Breeda and Andy. Everyone else was an extra. And anyway the 'going away' was a technicality: Wes was going away to come live with her, which made her less a guest at this party than the reason it was happening.
Which, if she was honest, set off a small evil laugh somewhere inside her. This buttoned-up man boxing up all his neat, orderly things and sending them off to live in her chaos, poor things. She was just settling into the smugness of it when his laugh cut across the patio and pulled her right out—and, helpless, she followed the sound.
He was by the pool with a tall, nervous-looking guy who was talking with his whole body.
"That was one Tuesday," the tall guy was saying, "and you'd been mana-screwed the entire game—that's not skill, that's variance. You draw the Bolt turn one, we're not even having this conversation—"
"It's a standing Tuesday now," Wes interrupted.
Whatever they were talking about, Jill had lost the thread three words in and felt no particular need to find it again.
"Sorry," she said, sliding in under Wes's arm, which came around her on reflex. "Are we trading Pokémon out here, or is this a grown-up conversation?"
She felt more than saw him smile—that quiet huff against the top of her head, his mouth pressing there for a second. He liked it when she did this. He always had.
The man in front of them went still, hands frozen mid-gesture, and looked from her to Wes and back. "Wait." He looked at Wes, then back. "You're Jill. The Jill."
"I'm a Jill," she said. "Possibly The Jill. Depends who's asking." His expression didn't change, not even a courtesy smile.
Tough crowd, she thought.
"Felix," Wes introduced, stepping in before the pause could get any longer. "Our IT guy. He’s basically Hackerman."
"I prefer 'consultant,'" Felix said. "If it's got a password, I've been in it." And then, unable to help himself, he held up his phone with the trembling pride of a new father. It was a trading card with a black flower on it, ringed in some elaborate medieval border. "Alpha Black Lotus. I've wanted one since I was eleven years old, and I finally got my hands on a mint copy—just the right favor for the right guy." He beamed at Wes. "He wouldn't even—"
"It's a hell of a card," Wes said, mouth flattening. His hand found the small of her back. "You want another bubbles?"
But Felix had already rolled on to who he'd play on Tuesdays with Wes all the way out in San Francisco, so the bubbles never happened, and Jill tried to file the whole thing under nerd things—except one part of it kept nagging. Before she could pin it down, somebody called Felix inside. He said a quick goodbye, and they watched him go.
And then it was just the two of them by the pool.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
The night was warm and the water threw blue light up onto the underside of Wes's jaw, and the party noise dropped to a hum behind the glass, and Jill stood there holding her bubbles, and the thought that had been nagging her since Felix's little slideshow.
"Power Nine," she said slowly. "You explained those to me once. And when I was here for Breeda and Andy's wedding, I asked what was in the binder and you talked for twenty straight minutes." She hadn't understood half of it, but she'd loved watching him say it—the way his eyes lit up and he talked fast. The grails—he'd called the best ones. They were the ones the nerds built whole cathedrals around, and his voice had gone almost reverent saying it. Then he'd let her hold that binder, but carefully like she was Nicolas Cage and it was the actual Declaration of Independence.
"I remember,” he said, his hand settling lightly on her arm, nudging her a half-step back toward the house.
But she didn’t budge.
"There was no Black Lotus in that binder," she said slowly. "I'd remember a Black Lotus. You'd have made me wear gloves." She kept her eyes on the water, working it out as she talked. "So you got one. The one you used to pull up on eBay just to stare at. You finally had it in your hands. And then you gave it to Felix. For a favor." Her voice slowed. "Who does that? Who gives that away for a favor?"
Wes didn't answer right away. He never did—which was probably half of why he was the one with the concrete house and the real-estate money, and she was the one who'd picked her work for whether it sounded fun and never once for whether it paid. They were built differently. She was fast and loud where he was slow and sure—and she'd always found that deeply unfair and also extremely attractive. So she made herself wait. But he wasn't just thinking this time. His eyes stayed on the water, off her, and when he finally breathed out it was slow. This wasn't him picking his words, it was him not wanting to say them.
If it's got a password, I've been in it.
Isabelle, back in her phone. It never made sense, how it happened.
Her breath caught. "It was the voicemails," she said. "You traded it for the voicemails."
"Jill."
He didn't have to fill in the rest. She could do that part herself.
She knew exactly when those voicemails had come back. It was New Year's Eve, her phone chiming in her palm, and suddenly they all were there again, her sister's voice whole, like it had never gone anywhere. She'd cried and decided it was a sign. Isabelle, saying hi. The universe throwing her a bone for once.
That was also the night they'd started speaking again. Except how did that even work? A thing like this didn't happen overnight—it had to have taken weeks, right? Which meant he'd been at it back when they still weren't talking, sometime in those months she'd spent not calling him but thinking about him anyway, almost every day, if she was being honest, which she mostly wasn't. And the sign she'd thanked the universe for hadn't come from the universe at all. It had come from him.
They'd been back together for months now, and all that time he'd never said a word about it. Watching him stand there now, not-explaining, she knew he never would have.
"We weren't even—" She swallowed, making herself finish. "We weren't even speaking."
Wes's eyebrows pulled together. His whole body had gone stiff, and she noticed he'd stopped breathing, which for a guy as calm as Wes was practically hysterics. She knew that look. She'd seen it once before, the night she found out what he'd kept from her—the night he lost her. And here he was again, caught with something he tried to bury, except this time he'd buried it for her, not from her, and she understood, all at once, that he'd never planned to tell her. Not tonight, not ever. If Felix had kept his mouth shut, she'd have gone her whole life thanking the universe for a gift Wes gave her. She reached down and took his hand, lacing her fingers through his, and his shoulders dropped.
"You'd already lost her," he said gently. "And then you lost the voicemails on top of it—and I couldn't—" He shook his head, once. "I needed you to have them. That's it. I needed you to have them."
The pool lights blurred.
So did Wes. She blinked to clear it and couldn't—and that was when she realized she'd started crying.
The moment she felt the tears on her face was the moment Wes moved closer, and she clung to him—fingers gripping his shirt, her mascara no doubt massacring the fabric—but he was warm and solid under her cheek, and she loved him.
"I love you," she said against his chest, which muffled it to almost nothing. So she pulled back and said it again, so he'd actually hear it. "I love you."
"I love you too," he said, into her hair, and he said it so simply that it wrecked her a little more.
After a minute he leaned back just far enough to see her, and his thumb came up to wipe her cheek, his fingers warm against her skin. Then he smiled, eyes crinkling, the smile she loved, the one that had gotten her into all of this to begin with, and she felt herself come back together enough to be a person again.
"You gave up a piece of Yu-Gi-Oh cardboard for me," she said, her voice still watery. "That's the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me and it involved a wizard flower."
"It's not Yu-Gi-Oh."
"It's adjacent."
"It is so far from adjacent—"
He was laughing even as he said it, and she kissed him before he could finish defending the honor of his nerd cards. Behind them the party was thinning out, somebody calling goodbyes through the glass. Time to go be hosts. She took his hand and pulled him back toward the light and the noise.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
Later—much later, after the last guests had finally trickled out, after she'd drunk water out of a measuring cup because every actual glass was packed—Jill lay on top of the comforter in his half-dismantled bedroom and listened to the shower run and did something she was not proud of.
She googled Magic: The Gathering.
It was worse than she'd imagined and also somehow better. The cards had names like she was reading an aromatherapy candle to a sorcerer. Lightning Bolt—that one she'd heard, out by the pool. Time Walk. Mox Sapphire. There were bearded men casting things at other bearded men. An entire economy of grown adults saying "tap" and "untap" and "mana pool" with total sincerity—all of which sounded like a euphemism, and none of which, the internet regretfully confirmed, was. There were sleeves for the cards, and then sleeves for the sleeves. She loved them. She loved every one of these magnificent freaks.
Then she searched the Lotus, and there it was on eBay—real listings, real numbers, numbers with too many zeroes, the kind of zeroes that made her sit up off the comforter. She'd known it was a lot. She had not known it was a down-payment-on-the-concrete-house a lot.
She thought about Isabelle, because she always eventually thought about Isabelle. She thought specifically about the last voicemail—forty-one seconds of her sister singing the wrong lyrics to a Shakira song and then laughing at herself, that bright collapsing laugh, the one Jill had played nine hundred times and would play nine hundred more. She'd told Wes once that making Isabelle laugh had basically been her whole life's work—that she'd have done anything for it. Anything. Crack, even, she'd said. She'd have done crack for one of those laughs. She'd been chasing them since they were kids.
And somewhere in the last few months she'd started doing the exact same thing with Wes—making him laugh, making him smile, chasing it the way she'd spent her whole life chasing Isabelle's. It was the same old reflex, aimed at someone new. He wouldn't let her do crack for it, obviously; he was very pro-cardio, very anti-felony. But the part that got her, the part that was new, was that Wes did it right back. He pulled real laughs out of her, the kinds that surprised her because for a long time she hadn't been sure she still had any left in her.
She thought, too, lying there in the glow of her phone, about the part that still didn't make sense. That out of everyone in the entire state of Texas, the person who'd ended up holding Isabelle's old phone number had been him. Some carrier somewhere had recycled a dead woman's digits and handed them, at random, to a stranger—and the stranger could have been anybody. Anybody would have blocked her. Anybody would have changed the number the second a grieving woman started leaving long, rambling voicemails to a person who wasn't there. Any normal person would have deleted them without listening all the way to the end.
Instead it had been the one man on the planet who listened.
She didn't believe in fate. She couldn't—because real fate, the kind with a plan behind it, meant somebody somewhere had looked at Isabelle and decided it was her turn to go. And she was never, not in a hundred years, not on her best day, going to make peace with a universe that would decide a thing like that.
But lying there with the shower running and her sister's voice safe in her phone again, she thought about how the worst year of her life had coughed up the best thing in it. Somehow, out of all of it, Wes. He had a whole sappy theory about that kind of thing—how every now and then life rigs one in your favor. She'd been in love with him for months, and somewhere in those months she'd quietly started to believe him. Tonight it stopped being a theory altogether.
The shower shut off.
"Hey," she called, wiping fast under her eyes to undo some of the damage. "Hey—I figured it out. We can get one back."
Wes appeared in the doorway in a towel, dripping, beautifully confused. "Get what back?"
"The Lotus! Your dumb flower! They have them. I'm on eBay right now, Wesley, there are like four of them—okay the price is genuinely insane, we'd have to sell, I don't know, a kidney, a second kidney—" she had a full head of steam now "but we could do it. We could get your card back. I'd feel so much—"
"I don't want one back."
She stopped. "What?"
He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, towel and all, completely unbothered, and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, his hand still warm from the shower.
"I don't want one back." He said it slowly, like he was still working out how to say it. "I wanted that card my whole life. I know. But when it came down to it—the card, or you getting her voice back—" He shrugged, like the end of the sentence was obvious. "It wasn't even a decision, Jill. And a new one wouldn't be the same. It'd just be a card." His hand moved along her jaw. "I don't think I care about it anymore. Not next to this."
Oh. And there it was—this man looking at her like she was the easiest choice he'd ever made. She loved him. She was floating, no floor left under her at all.
"You're going to make me cry again," she said, and felt it coming, the sting behind her eyes. "At one in the morning. In your weird concrete bedroom."
"Then I'll be right here for it," he said, running his knuckles slowly down the side of her neck. He smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
She put the phone face-down on the comforter—the listings and the wizard flowers and the impossible zeroes all going dark—and pulled him in by the towel, and he came willingly, still damp, still smiling.
For a little while afterward, neither of them stirred. The house had gone quiet around them—no party, no shower, no eBay glowing in the dark, just the hum of the AC and Wes, with one arm around her breathing slowly against her back. Any other night she'd have poked him awake with something dumb just to hear him groan. Tonight she let him sleep.
She relaxed against him, closed her eyes, and found she wasn't thinking about the card or the voicemails anymore.
You made a believer out of me.
It had been her line first—something she'd tossed out over breakfast tacos the night they met, "helping" him with the speech. And then he'd gone and said it into a microphone in front of everyone, turning them all to mush. And after, his eyes found her across the room and she'd never forget the way he looked at her right then.
Lying here now, Wes warm and solid against her back, wrapped around her like he had no plans to move for the rest of his life, she thought about that line—how she'd handed it to him as a throwaway, and how he'd spent all this time quietly making it true of her instead. All that time swearing she didn't believe in any of it—and here she was. A believer.
And she was pretty sure he already knew.