Page 101 of Fate, Interrupted

The problem is a city that has already voted.

I stop outside the wine bar. Through the window: warm light, easy movement, a room full of people having a Thursday evening and finding it sufficient. A woman on a stool laughing at something. Two men in suits splitting a bottle with the comfortable ease of people who have done this before. A couple in the corner leaning toward each other with the attention of people who are only barely remembering that other people exist in the room.

I look at all of it.

I like this city. I built a real business here. The Last Chapter is mine in a way that nothing has ever been mine before, the handwritten signs, the mismatched armchairs, Mr. Clancy’s weekly Mystery, Thriller, Suspense order, Abigail’s steady invisible architecture holding the whole thing up. Three years of stubbornness and questionable financial decisions, and a genuine belief that a bookshop done right is worth it. I like the neighborhood, the regular customers, the satisfaction of matching the right book to the right person and watching their face when they realize it. I like Jewell writing song lyrics in the margins of the trivia answer sheets. I like knowing the dog my customer brings into the shop with him after her Saturday afternoon runs. I like that the dog knows me enough to snuffle me and lick my hand.

I like my life here.

And then I think: but this city has decided it gets to have opinions about who I spend my time with. And none of that is going to change. The city won’t wake up one morning and decide it’s done having opinions. The alley boys won’t have a revelation.

This is what it is here.

I am thirty years old, and I’ve never been particularly good at being told what to do. Standing outside this wine bar on a warm evening, I admit I am significantly less interested in getting better at it.

The city doesn’t get a vote.

That’s the thing I keep landing on and walking away from because it has implications I haven’t been ready to follow all the way through. I’m following it now, on this narrow side street with the good lighting and the familiar tailor’s window, and here is where it goes,

If the city doesn’t get a vote, and I’m not waiting for it to change its mind, and Silas is…whatever Silas is…then the question isn’t whether I’m staying.

The question is what staying is actually costing.

I’ve been answering that one day at a time for three weeks.

I think about what leaving would mean. Not in the abstract, I’m past the abstract.

The Last Chapter would keep running. Abigail has always handled the legal scaffolding without ever trying to run the shop. She’s always trusted me to run it, and I can trust her to keep the reins in hand while I’m gone. Jesse knows Mr. Clancy’s schedule and the requirements of the woman who comes in every other Friday and needs something she hasn’t read but which feels like something she has. Mark knows the regulars by name and knows when to talk and when to leave people alone with the shelves, which is actually the harder skill. The handwritten shelf signs are already written. The armchairs are already there.

The shop doesn’t need me to keep being the shop.

I built it that way on purpose, even though I didn’t know I was doing it. I built it to outlast any version of my life, which is either good planning or a very revealing thing to have done unconsciously.

Penny would be fine. She’d be furious, and then she’d be fine, in that order, because that’s how Penny works. She’d call me three times in the first week and then she’d show up wherever I was and eat all my food and tell me what she thinks, and then she’d go back to her life and we’d talk twice a week like we always have. Penny has never once needed me to stay somewhere for her sake. She would not appreciate me suggesting otherwise.

Jewell would write a song about it. I would let her. It would probably be good.

I walk back to my car. As I drive, the boutiques thin out as I get closer to home, the restaurants giving way to quieter storefronts, the crowd thinning to the occasional bar-hoppers. I turn onto my street.

The rowhouse sits where it always sits. The door is the color I chose because I wanted a color that wasn’t beige. The small planter by the steps that has survived three years of my care, which is either a miracle or evidence of the plant’s strong character. The light is on in the window in the living room because I always leave it on, because coming home to a dark house is a version of lonely I decided a long time ago not to subject myself to.

I stop on the sidewalk and look at it.

It’s a good life.

Genuinely good, built on purpose, and I’m proud of it. I’m not leaving because two boys in an alley scared me. Not because a police chief had a polite meeting in a back room. Not because a man’s father gave an order.

I’m considering leaving because I want to.

Because there might be a version of this life somewhere else, same armchairs, same instincts, same Norah, that doesn’t require spending energy I’d rather spend elsewhere on a city that has decided it gets to have biases about me. Because built things don’t have to stay in the place they were built. Because I am the thing that made The Last Chapter what it is, not the address.

Because, at thirty, I’m done letting a city decide what I’m allowed to want.

I go inside.

I put the kettle on and lean against the counter while it heats, looking at the kitchen. The mugs on their hooks. The plant on the windowsill that surprisingly thrives here. The stack of books on the table that I’ve been meaning to get to and haven’t. The small ordinary geography of a life that fits me, that I chose, that I keep choosing, that I will keep choosing even if I’m choosing it somewhere else.

The kettle boils.