Page 151 of 10 Rings I Hate About You
Concerned, I ran a hand up and down her back, waiting for her to tell me.
Instead of speaking, she tilted the book so I could see the first page. The handwriting was looped and confident, the pen pressed firmly, like someone wrote with intention.
Hello sweetheart,
Well, I think the cat is out of the bag. I’ve known for years you were stealing my romance novels when you visited. You thought you were subtle. So I decided to do something a little different before it inevitably went missing, and maybe we can talk about my little notes the next time you’re here.
Read it when you need reminding that love doesn’t always look the way you expect it to. Sometimes it shows up messy and chaotic, and in ways that you don’t recognize until you’re already in the middle of things.
I love you to the moon and back. And don’t laugh too hard at what I wrote. I did my best.
Aunt Jem
The date underneath was late July. Two weeks before she died.
She’d written it thinking Delaney would find it at her next visit. Thinking if she left it with the rest of her books, her niece would steal it and find the notes inside.
I read the inscription twice. The second time I felt something I didn’t think Jem had intended for me specifically, but that landed that way regardless.
I looked at Delaney and remembered our argument in front of Town Hall that I couldn’t fully reconstruct anymore because somewhere along the way, I’d replaced that memory with everything that came after.
Messy and chaotic,Jem had written. That tracked.
“I didn’t know. I was coming back for Thanksgiving, but then she …” Delaney sat on the bed with the book in her hands. The tears came quietly, not the broken kind from earlier tonight, something slower and deeper.
I put my arm around her and she leaned into me. We sat there on the edge of the bed staring at her aunt’s handwriting. Eventually, Delaney flipped it open to a random page almost at the end of the book. Jem’s handwriting stared back at us next to two paragraphs she’d highlighted.
Delaney read it out loud, her voice soft, “The little girl who’d stood at the edge of every room waiting to be picked, waiting to matter, tried so hard to stand tall. Tried to figure out a way to make this work, to contort myself into whatever shape would fit into the margins of his life.
“But the woman I’d slowly grown into over the past two weeks laid a steady hand on her shoulder and said,‘No,we’re done accepting small doses of attention and pretending it’s okay.’”
Beside it in the margin, in Jem’s handwriting:
FINALLYshe puts herself first. This poor girl deserved so much more from day one and that rotten family of hers. I wish I could throat punch them all.
Delaney laughed and wiped at her tears with the back of her hand. “That’s so her.”
“I can hear it,” I said.
She turned more pages. More notes—a skeptical “hmm” next to a plot development, a small star next to a scene that had clearly made an impression, an underlined passage, and thenDelaney flipped back to the end after the epilogue and Jem had a final note.
This book was sooo good. I hope you loved it as much as I did. While there are so many parts of the story to highlight, and so many things I love about the hero and heroine, what sticks with me is her finally understanding that home and the people she loved weren’t where she’d come from. It was the place she finally landed. With people who genuinely loved and respected her.
Delaney stared at it for a moment. I watched her reread it again. Watched her understand something, or recognize something, or find something she’d been looking for without knowing it.
I gazed at the woman sitting next to me on the edge of her aunt’s bed, in a room she hadn’t been able to enter until tonight, with her clothes finally hanging in the closet after all this time.
Jem had written about a fictional character.
Yet I wasn’t so sure it was about a fictional character—more her wish for her niece.
Delaney put the box on the floor, scooched up to the headboard, and held out the book. “Will you read it to me?” she asked.
“The whole thing?”
“From wherever you want to start. Just … read it.”
I took the book and settled myself beside her. Our shoulders touched, and eventually her head leaned against my arm. I began reading the first sentence in the stillness of her aunt’sbedroom, in my regular voice, reading the notations along with the words, while Delaney laughed at the right parts and went still at others as the night slowly grew late around us.
