Fortuity (Transcend 3)

“Hey, buddy.” Nate’s voice sends me into cardiac arrest. I’ve missed his voice. “I miss you. Are you doing okay?”

Gabe shrugs. “I guess so.”

“Did you have a good Thanksgiving dinner?”

He nods. “Gracelyn made a ton of food. It was really good. I helped with the pies.”

Nate chuckles and it nearly brings me to my knees. The state of fine is fragile. Fine is balancing a table on the end of a stick pin. The slightest movement can end in catastrophe. Hearing Nate’s voice isn’t a slight movement; it’s an earthquake.

“I have to use the bathroom real quick. Here … you can talk to Gracelyn.”

I shake my head a dozen times really fast.

Too late.

Gabe just sets the iPad on the sofa, giving Nate a nice view of the ceiling, as he makes a straight line for the bathroom. Taking a long, unstable breath, I sit on the sofa and slowly reach for the iPad. The anticipation unravels my heart.

It’s been four months (or forty years) since I’ve seen him. My heart doesn’t know because it’s felt like eternity since the day he pulled away in the rain.

I pick up the iPad, and emotion burns my eyes the second they land on him—his thick, wavy hair, the shine in his blue eyes, that beard that’s trimmed a little closer than the last picture I saw of him, and a fitted red sweater.

He gets my scraggly hair, my weary face with no makeup, and the white hoodie I haven’t taken off since we returned from the cemetery. Basically, I’m the opposite of sexy at the moment.

It doesn’t deter him from smiling like he’s always smiled at me—a slow growing grin, like tulips opening in the spring.

“Hey, you,” he says.

“Hey, yourself.” My smile has less control. It goes from nothing to a hundred percent in under a second, a lot like my heart rate.

He’s in a room filled with family. What can we really say?

“So … Thanksgiving dinner was good?”

I nod, pressing my lips together because my grin completely lost control for a few seconds.

“Yours?”

“Yeah.” He nods.

I nod more.

We’re good at nodding.

“Did your neighbor join you for dinner?” he asks in a way that no one else would question because they don’t know about the letter.

My mouth twists to the side for a few seconds just to make him squirm. I know he’s hit his limit when he runs one hand through his hair before rubbing his jaw.

“He couldn’t make it. Maybe for New Year’s.”

“Oh!” Morgan grabs the iPad and Nate disappears in a blur. “On New Year’s, at midnight you get to kiss someone.”

I grin. “I’ve heard that. Who do you kiss on New Year’s Eve?”

She rolls her eyes. “Just my dad. It’s always a sloppy kiss. Then he tickles me until I have to go pee.” She lowers her voice and moves closer to the camera. “I don’t really have to pee. I just say that so he’ll stop tickling me.”

I laugh. “I used to do that too when my dad or brother would tickle me.”

Gabe comes out of the bathroom.

“Gabe’s back. I’ll let you two talk. So glad I got to see you.”

“You too.”

Gabe takes the iPad and flops back onto the sofa. As they start chattering again, I head to the bathroom to run a hot bath and not miss Nate.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Two weeks before Christmas, I get a package from Nate. I tear it open and read the short note:

Now you’ll know …

Xo Nate

It’s a thick stack of papers. The first page reads:

Transcend

By Nathaniel Hunt

It’s his manuscript.

I press my hand to my mouth. In an hour, I have to pick Gabe up from his friend’s house, but I can’t resist reading just a few pages.

Nathaniel Hunt – Age 10

“Nate and Morgan sitting in a tree … K I S S I N G. First comes love, then comes—”

“Shut up before I knock your teeth out with my fist and you go crying to your mommy like a baby in a baby carriage.” Morgan spat on the kids below us as they marched toward the lake, fishing poles in one hand, tackle boxes in the other, dodging saliva bombs.

I ignored their snickers and smooching sounds. Morgan didn’t ignore anything. Her parents called her Little Firecracker, but not me—I called her Daisy because her middle name was Daisy and she hated it when I called her that.

“Have you ever hit anyone?” I asked as we continued our game of Go Fish, perched high in the old oak tree on the abandoned property a mile from our neighborhood.

I like this story. He’s starting it from childhood with Morgan—the girl whose name his daughter bears. A firecracker … like his daughter. And they were ten … Morgan’s and Gabe’s age.

I flip through page after page. I can’t read it fast enough. When my phone rings, I reach for it without taking my eyes off the words. “Hello?”