Page 85 of Only After We Met

“I think it’s going to be brilliant,” she said.

“I hope so.” I rubbed my jaw. “As for rehearsal…”

“Just trust yourself.” She rested a hand on my arm. Not hesitantly, the way Ginger would. Just like that. Unafraid. “You’ve done amazing work, really. My brother tried this a few months ago with a guy he knew who worked in a different club, but between you and me, it was so horrible I just told him I can’t sing that. I’mnot going to do something I’m not certain about. This song, though, these lyrics…it’s gorgeous. It’s exactly what we’ve been looking for forever.”

I liked that. I liked her, her voice, the way she said that.

“So when do you want to get started?”

“If it was up to me, I’d say tomorrow.” She withdrew her hand.

“How much longer are you staying here?”

“Just a few weeks, till the song’s done. Then I’ll go back to Los Angeles for the launch and the PR. My brother and I have tons of contacts there. Who knows? This could be the next big hit.”

I nodded, not knowing what to say.

Owen came back from his phone call with another round of beers and a smile on his face and settled down in his chair while his sister talked about plans, ideas for our project, and marketing. I became distracted at some point.

“Rhys, are you listening to me?”

“Sorry, what were you saying?”

“That I heard good things about an illustrator here in Byron Bay. His name’s Axel Nguyen. Everyone knows him. I’m certain he’s our guy. Go see him one of these days, tell him what we’re doing, and let him know he should get in touch with me when he’s done.” Owen took a card from his wallet and handed it to me.

“Sure. Perfect.”

“Great. Everything’s settled then.”

I returned home at midafternoon. The sun was shining bright in the pale-blue sky. The wind shook the vegetation on the road home. Then I saw it. A package on the top step. I grabbed it. It was from Ginger. I took a deep breath and set the keys down on the counter.

I took an apple from the fridge and walked out to the back porch, kicking off my shoes and sitting on the wood surface covered in sand from the beach, which the wind brought in every day. I took a couple of bites, looking at the box, wrapped in red-and-gold paper with a big bow, which was slightly damaged after all those weeks it took to reach its destination. I finished my apple, tried to calm my pulse, and opened the package slowly, imagining how Ginger would have folded the paper, cut the little pieces of tape, and placed them on the seams, concentrating (with wrinkles at the top of her little nose) then sighing with satisfaction.

It was a tiny old book.The Little Prince.

There was a note on the first page.

For Rhys, the boy I share my apartment on the moon with because “he was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.”

I smiled and took a look. I found a list of dates on the back of the cover. It must have been all the times she’d reread it. The pages were full of underlines in different colors, notes in the margins, and goofy little drawings. I realized, surprised, that this was the copy Ginger had bought at that bookstore in Bloomsbury and told me she held on to like a treasure. I felt something warm pressing down on my chest as I read one of the notes she’d scribbled:

He fell in love with the flower and not with its roots, and in autumn, he didn’t know what to do.

I read it and read it again. I spent half the afternoon thinking it over, digesting the words, turning them over. Thinking about what happened when petals fell and only roots were left. Still worse, what if there were no roots, nothing at all to tie me to the earth?

42

Ginger

“How was the day? Do you feel like an exec?”

“Eh…no. Unlessfeeling like an execmeans nearly falling over from exhaustion, thinking about taking a vacation my third week of work, and what I can do between invoices so everything isn’t so goddamn boring.”

My sister’s smile vanished as I tossed my bag onto the sofa and settled down next to her. She wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. A quiz show was on TV. I’d been working at the family business for three weeks. It wasn’t much different from my internship the summer before, even if my dad kept saying I was his “right-hand woman” and future CEO. I could feel the angry stares of coworkers who thought (and maybe they were right) that I was a daddy’s girl and hadn’t had to work hard to get where I was. But no one looked at Dean like that. For some incomprehensible reason, he’d managed to butter up half the staff in his first couple of days, with his charming smile, his jokes at lunchtime, and his gentle, open attitude.

“Is it so bad?” Donna looked worried.

“I wouldn’t saybadexactly, but I feel out of place. Every day at the office, I tell myself this will finally be the day things start to go better. But every hour is an eternity. It doesn’t help seeing Dean like a fish in water. What is it about me?”