Chapter Text
And I was never good at tellin' jokes, but the punch line goes
"I'll get older, but your lovers stay my age"
From when your Brooklyn broke my skin and bones
I'm a soldier who's returning half her weight
And did the twin flame bruise paint you blue?
Just between us, did the love affair maim you too?
'Cause in this city's barren cold
I still remember the first fall of snow
And how it glistened as it fell
I remember it all too well
Thirteen years vanished, sometimes so quickly she convinced herself she’d only blinked. Outside, the world was wintering, New York iced in glass and shadow, but inside her apartment the air was a precise 70 degrees and so perfectly modernly pristine it looked like it had been grown in a lab. She slipped the second silver hoop into her earlobe and admired the reflection in the floor-length mirror: not a line out of place, nothing left to chance. Her hair auburn hair was twisted up in a French twist, glossy and pinned and perfect. Beneath the hairline, her face held a new sharpness, the maturity that had aged her face like a fine wine.
The apartment was what realtors called “architectural,” a glass-and-concrete wedge perched high above the city. Every surface was intentional. Books lined the walls, but only in monochrome: black, white, bone, navy, a few in the punch of fire-engine red. The couch was a designer relic, more art than furniture. The kitchen’s chrome surfaces gleamed like dental tools. It was the kind of home she’d always dreamed of, back when she’d lived in postage-stamp apartments with radiators that sang all night and neighbors who screamed at each other in languages she never bothered to learn.
She took her time in the bedroom, running her hands over the slip of dark silk that draped her body before pulling on her fleece-lined tights and Dolce and Gabbana black turtleneck. She checked her phone: a dozen unread notifications, all for her, all urgent. She ignored them, at least for now, and let her gaze linger instead on the paperback on her vanity: a blue cover, edges fuzzy and worn from too many rereads. The image on the front was a red scarf, caught on the white branches of a birch, a single drop of color in a forest of frost.
All Too Well. Her book. Her name on the spine in blocky capitals, just below the scarf.
She left the apartment on foot, boots knifing through the slush, coat pulled tight at the waist. Her personal assistant Henri had tried to send her driver, but she had insisted on walking. She wove past the commuters, the dog walkers, the bundled children trundling off to their various evenings of ice skating and holiday cheer. The city had changed, every storefront a new permutation, every block rebuilt or gentrified, but the sidewalks remembered her. Remembered the naive girl who had moved out here all those years ago, determined to become an author and forge a life for herself.
The bookstore was four blocks down, a wedge-shaped cave that she’d loved for years, even before the world cared what she wrote. The windows were steamed over, inside a slow boil of bodies pressed together, coats unzipped and hair half-melted from the cold. She could see them all through the glass: the fans, the hopefuls, the ones who clutched her book to their chests like it was the answer to all the questions they had ever asked.
She paused outside, heart beating just a little too fast, and for a second she saw herself as a stranger would: the hair, the coat, the careful posture, the way her lips twisted into a smile just shy of a smirk. Then she pushed through the door, into the blast of heat and perfume and the sticky sweetness of baked goods from the cafe in the back.
It happened in a wave, as it always did: first the hush, then the staccato of whispers, then the sudden centrifugal pull of every eye in the place. She let herself be swallowed by it, grinning wide and open, greeting the faces she recognized from social media, from previous stops on the tour, from the blur of the past month. There were women of every age, every shape, some in crisp business wear, some in pajamas under winter coats, a few with their daughters, faces twin-lit with excitement and awe.
At the front of the store was a table stacked high with her books, covers facing out like a wall of blue water. The scarf was redder in this light, almost alive. Next to the stack stood her assistant Henri, a too-tall, too-serious man in a navy sweater and thin spectacles. He took her coat and purse with the quiet urgency of someone who had seen everything.
She signed the first hundred books in a blur: Her name, date, a quick flourish, sometimes a smiley face or a line from the jacket copy if the recipient looked especially on the edge of tears. She was good at the performance, had learned to pace the compliments and the gratitude, to touch each person’s hand for just the right amount of time before moving on. For every one who told her she’d changed their life, she responded as if it were the first time she’d ever heard it, and in a way, it felt like it always was.
It was the scarf that stopped her. One woman—middle-aged, maybe, but with the energy of someone much younger—wore it looped around her neck, a near-perfect match to the one on the cover. She grinned as she slid her book across the table.
“I knitted it,” the woman said, voice trembling with a rush of something she’d probably call joy but was closer to awe. “I saw your interview, the one where you talked about losing your real scarf, and—well. I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I made one. Hope that’s not weird.”
“It’s not weird,” she said, meaning it. “It’s beautiful.”
The woman’s eyes welled up, and for a split second she saw her mother, or maybe herself, or maybe every version of heartbreak she’d ever tried to exorcise on the page. She smiled, signed the book with a flourish, and let herself imagine, just for a second, that she was still capable of feeling moved by a stranger.
When the stack of books was gone, Henri tapped her on the shoulder. Time to take the stage. She followed him through the maze of bodies, pausing to wave, to squeeze a shoulder, to accept the occasional shy hug from someone who needed it more than she did.
The stage was barely a stage—just a platform set up by the window, with a single microphone and a blue backdrop printed with the store’s logo. She stepped up, heels clicking on the wood, and took a breath. The room went silent, like a church congregation.
She scanned the crowd, all of them holding up phones, ready to record. She thought about her own first reading, how she’d been so terrified she’d nearly vomited in the alley behind the venue. Now it was easy, almost too easy. She could do this in her sleep.
She opened the book, page already dog-eared, and began to read.
The voice that came out was the same one she’d used to tell bedtime stories to her little cousins, the same one she’d used on late-night voicemails to Him, back when that meant something. It was measured, a little bit theatrical, but honest. She read about the scarf, about the winter she’d lost it, about the boy who’d taken it from her and never given it back. She read about the way she’d imagined it changing hands, imagined it living another life, imagined him holding it up to his face and breathing in the ghost of her perfume. She read about loss, about the way memory stuck to objects long after people had let them go.
The room was quiet. She could see the tears in the front row, women with their hands pressed to their mouths, a few men blinking fast and looking away.
She kept reading. She let the sentences hang in the air, let them echo off the glass and the books and the collective need of everyone in the room. She read until her throat hurt, until her eyes blurred, until the words lost meaning and became just sound.
When she finished, the silence held. For a moment, no one clapped, no one moved. Then the applause came, rising in a wave, filling the space until she thought the windows might actually crack.
She closed the book. She smiled. She nodded at the crowd, at the scarf-wearing woman, at the rows of strangers who had paid good money to watch her bleed on the page.
She scanned the back of the store, through the haze of camera flashes and the blue light from the street. For a second—just a second—she thought she saw Him, standing by the window, hands in his pockets, head tilted at that same impossibly smug angle. But when she looked again, there was only the reflection of her own face, caught in the glass like something trapped between two worlds.
She stepped down from the stage, heels clicking, and let herself be pulled into the sea of hands and voices and hunger. She signed more books, posed for selfies, accepted gifts of flowers and chocolates and, once, a tiny bottle of perfume wrapped in tissue paper the color of fresh blood.
When it was over, she let her assistant lead her out the back, into the alley behind the store, where the air was sharp and unfiltered and real.
She breathed in, letting the cold scrape her lungs clean.
She wondered, not for the first time, if the scarf was still out there—if He had kept it, if it still smelled like her, if it had ever really mattered to him at all.
She wrapped her own coat tighter and started the long walk home.
Above her, the city pulsed with light, and for a moment she let herself believe that somewhere, someone was thinking about her too.
****
He watched her through the glass, hands buried deep in his coat pockets, breath fogging up in the dark air like cigarette smoke. The snow wasn’t falling so much as swirling, an endless carousel of white that stuck to the city but never melted, never gave in. The sidewalk was a shallow grave of gray slush and abandoned coffee cups, but the window was perfect, a square of golden light in the gloom.
She looked exactly the same and nothing like he remembered.
Her hair was fire and formality, pinned up so precisely it looked like it might shatter if he touched it. The silver hoops in her ears flashed every time she laughed, the earrings he had mailed back to her all those years ago. The coat she wore probably cost more than his car, but the way she wore it—loose, careless, like a costume at the end of a party—made her seem both ten years older and exactly eighteen.
He’d heard about the book. Of course he had. It was impossible not to. All the blogs, the morning shows, the fever of attention that followed her now like a tail. He bought a copy, first edition, online, had it shipped to the studio so he wouldn’t have to explain it to anyone at home. He read it in a single night, the pages so thin he left fingerprints on every one. He read it and recognized himself in the margins, in the spaces between sentences, in the way she described a man who couldn’t love her right but couldn’t let her go.
He’d planned to stay away tonight. He had. But then the band canceled practice, and the air in his apartment turned thick and sour, and all at once he was out in the cold, walking streets he hadn’t walked in years. His body remembered the route even if he didn’t want to.
He watched her sign books, watched her beam at each stranger like they were the only person in the world. He watched her hold a crying woman’s hands, watched her let herself be pulled into photo after photo, never flinching, never bored. He watched her onstage, reading to a hundred people, her voice clear and warm even through the glass.
He wondered if she knew he was there.
He shifted from foot to foot, the cold biting through his boots, and pulled his scarf tighter around his neck. It was an old scarf, stupidly red, soft with age and stained with a decade of winters. He never meant to keep it this long. Sometimes he’d think about mailing it back to her, a little inside joke, but then the thought always seemed too heavy, too cruel, so he’d keep it another season.
A car slid past, headlights turning the window into a mirror. For a second, all he could see was himself: hair going gray at the temples, face hollowed out by time, the ghost of a tattoo peeking from under his cuff. He looked tired, and maybe that was true. Or maybe it was just that he’d spent his whole life trying not to feel things, and now there was nothing left to hold it all in.
Inside, she finished the reading. The crowd clapped, some of them on their feet, and she smiled with her whole face, soaking it up like a plant in a sunbeam. She gathered her things, accepted a bouquet from a little girl in the front row, signed a few more books. She leaned over to say something to her assistant, then paused, glancing out at the window, straight at him.
He didn’t flinch. He let her look. He wondered what she saw: a man she’d once loved, or just another sad bastard standing in the snow, unable to let go of the past.
She turned away, and so did he.
He walked the block, scarf pulled up, breathing in the ghosts of memories. He thought about the way she used to laugh, the way her hair stuck to his mouth when they kissed. He thought about the things he’d never said, the apologies he owed, the part of her he still carried in the lining of his coat.
He thought about calling her, just once, but the thought hurt more than the cold.
He kept walking, kept his head down, and let the city swallow him whole.
In a city filled with people, he was completely and utterly alone. He knew the feeling all too well.
Just between us, did the love affair maim you all too well?
Just between us, do you remember it all too well?
Just between us, I remember it (Just between us) all too well
Wind in my hair, I was there, I was there (I was there)
Down the stairs, I was there, I was there
Sacred prayer, I was there, I was there
It was rare, you remember it all too well