Chapter Two

Neither one of us moves. We just stare at each other like reflections in a mirror, his unflinching expression focused on me – and only on me. The weight of it seems to hold me in place, trapped in front of him. There were days, way back in that fateful summer, when I could have spent hours gazing into those eyes, but back then those eyes never looked like this. They were the same icy blue, of course – impossibly bright, and made all the brighter by the fact that they were bordered by long, thick eyelashes that any right-thinking woman would have killed for – but there was none of the old warmth in them, none of that spark of life that had captured me all those years ago.

‘Hale,’ I say. His name is a bitter taste; I’ve thought it often, but I haven’t spoken it out loud in years. To my knowledge, no one in town has. When he left, it was as though he disappeared. There was speculation, of course, and assurances from certain people that – seeing as a boy like that could only ever come to a bad end – it was better that he did it out in the world rather than against the homely backdrop of Eden, but even that had died down within a week. As far as they were concerned, Hale Fischer had simply ceased to exist.

For everyone except me, of course. Some stains don’t wash off so easily.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asks.

What am I doing here? I think. That’s goddamn rich, coming from you.

‘What do you mean, what am I doing here? I work here.’ I pause. I worked here when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. I can’t stand the idea of him thinking of me like that, just the same dumb kid I was back then. ‘I mean, I run the place. This is my diner.’ I plant my hands on the counter protectively, but if he’s impressed by my rise through the ranks, it doesn’t show on his face. His stare doesn’t soften. The corners of his mouth remain ever-so-slightly turned down.

Smile, I will him. Please. Just smile. Just once. Just give me that.

But he doesn’t. ‘You know what I…’ he starts, but his voice trails off. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have come here. I didn’t think.’

‘You didn’t think what?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t think you’d be here, I guess.’

‘Well, where else would I be?’

The question is out of my lips before I can stop it. I’d give anything to be able to draw it back and stamp it out on the floor, but I can’t. It echoes in the quiet of the diner.

Anywhere, of course. That’s the answer – or at least, the answer I would have given the old Hale – and I hate that it’s not an answer I can give now.

I don’t want to do this. Not with him, not after so long. I don’t want this to be our first conversation in a decade. Perhaps, if I pinch myself hard enough, I’ll wake up in my bed, in my tiny apartment, ready to start yet another day of mindless monotony. A regular, happenstance sort of day. Not the kind of day where your almost-forgotten past turns up out of the blue and flips everything on its head.

He has the good grace not to answer me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. ‘I’ll go.’

I knew Hale for three months, back in 2006, and as far as I remember I never heard him apologise once – and now here it is, twice in the space of two minutes. Seems like we’re going for a new world record. That’s so not like you, I think to myself. My Hale would have stood his ground, made a scene, kicked up a fuss. He never would have apologised for just showing up to a place.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? He’s not my Hale. If he ever was, he hasn’t been for ten years. And yes, even though there are parts of him that are unmistakably the boy I used to love, the man standing in front of me is a different beast entirely. It’s not even that he’s changed, exactly. It’s more that he’s been… updated, I guess? The old leather jacket, covered in patches and scrapes, has been replaced by a new one – well-worn enough to make it clear that it’s not just for show or an idle fashion statement, but still in good repair and with a look of quality about it. The red plaid shirt beneath it is sturdy, but a good fit; not the kind of thing you could pick up at any old place in town, that’s for sure. The jeans are clean, the denim a deep, rich blue; there are no rips at the knees, no pale patches where the sunlight has bleached them white. The weirdest part is, he looks comfortable in it. Hale, who to my knowledge never wore an item of clothing that wasn’t a hand-me-down or dug out from the bin at a thrift store, for whom even the idea of new clothes was a pipe dream, looks perfectly at home in these not-quite-designer threads. They suit the man he is now.

It’s not just the clothes, either. It’s in himself, too. The way he walks. The way he talks. His hair, always a little on the long side (and, as my parents loved to point out, in need of a good trim), reaches down almost to his shoulders, but it’s pushed back in an unselfconscious swoop behind his ears. His face has grown up too, hardened from the childish clay of his teenage years into granite. His cheekbones are firm, his jawline straight and strong. It’s a little like looking in a funhouse mirror at the county fair: the basic parts are all present and correct, but they’re stretched and contorted in ways I didn’t really think were possible.

I can’t help but wonder if he’s thinking the same thing about me. I’m not sure I want the answer, but as he turns away and takes a step towards the door I’m extremely sure I don’t want him to leave.

‘Hale.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Why are you here?’

Here in Eden. Here in the Red Rose Diner. Here in front of me without any warning at all.

‘I just wanted some food, that’s all,’ he says. ‘I was driving through, and I thought… well, you know. Best burgers south of the panhandle, right?’ He points upwards to the sign on the roof, a loud proclamation of Dad’s cooking skills that we never got around to taking down. ‘But if you’re closed…’

‘Our cook’s gone for the next hour,’ I say, ‘but I was going to make myself something.’ It’s only half a lie. Yes, our closing time is usually when I take a moment to cook up something for lunch. What does it matter if today I wasn’t feeling particularly hungry even before he arrived? Or if my stomach started doing backflips the second Hale walked through the door? He doesn’t need to know that.

I gesture for him to take a seat, and for the first time since he came through the door I see the faintest glimpse of a smile cross his face. I wonder if he notices the blush that reddens my cheeks before I push through into the kitchen and get to work.

‘It won’t be much,’ I shout through to him. ‘I’m not much of a cook. Besides, Pete would kill me if I muscled in on his territory.’

I butter four slices of bread, both sides, and load them up with as much provolone and cheddar as they can realistically be expected to hold. Excess, I can almost hear my Dad say. That’s the key to a good grilled cheese. Excess, excess, and more excess. If you can look at it without feeling your arteries hardening, you might as well just go right ahead and eat a salad. For Dad, there was no greater insult.

‘Pete?’ he says. ‘Who’s Pete?’

‘Our cook.’ The griddle is hot now; it sizzles as I sprinkle it with water. ‘Nice guy. Very protective of his kitchen.’

‘Your dad finally got some help around here, then?’

I smile, sadly: the gentle face familiar to anyone who’s used to breaking bad news. ‘Dad passed a couple of years ago,’ I say. ‘Back in ’08. Cancer.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

I shrug. It is what it is. I made my peace with it a long time ago – I had to, because Mom absolutely went to shit after the fact and one of us needed to keep the place going – but I don’t expect Hale to understand. I never met his father, not in person at least, but from what I can gather from the scars and bruises on Hale’s body he didn’t seem like a man you could ever mourn.

‘What about your mother?’ he asks, more to break the silence than anything else.

‘Mom?’ I say. ‘Oh, she’s fine. Same as ever.’ That much is true, at least. It was a rough couple of years, immediately after Dad died, but over time she seemed to find some way to pull herself back into a rough facsimile of the woman she used to be. The thought of losing the diner to the bank was a powerful motivator, but… well, as she put it, time marches ever onward. Always, whether you like it or not. Sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse – and sometimes it’s hard to tell which it is until it’s after the fact and you can’t do a damn thing about it either way.

There’s a pot of Pete’s Soup of the Day left over on the stovetop, a rich and creamy tomato that’s such a deep red it looks almost like a pasta sauce. I ladle out two bowls, blast them in the microwave for a few seconds, and load them up on a tray.

‘Voilà,’ I say as I step out into the restaurant. ‘Dinner is served.’ Hale is seated at the counter, a wide strip of formica that separates chef from diner, customer from owner. I stay on my side, even though it means standing to eat. For some reason, it seems better that way. Without the barrier between us, I find myself worrying I might do something I regret. I haven’t yet made up my mind whether that’s more likely to be trying to kiss him, or slapping him as hard as I can across his pretty, stupid face for leaving all those years ago.

But instead, I merely slide a bowl and plate across to him and pluck a couple of spoons out of the dishwasher. ‘It’s not exactly haute cuisine, but it’ll fill you up.’

‘It looks great,’ he says. ‘Really.’

He digs a hand into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a leather billfold. ‘You can put that away, too,’ I say as he begins rummaging through it, trying to track down the right bill to make us even. ‘This one’s on me.’

There’s a flash of something in his eyes, something I recognise from way back when: that old defensiveness. He was a little too poor for a little too long for even something as a bowl of soup to seem like anything but an act of charity, and a little too proud for something like that to be allowed to stand unquestioned. ‘I can afford it, Carrie,’ he says quietly. ‘You don’t need to cover for me anymore.’

‘I’m sure you can,’ I say. ‘But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m not taking your money. This is my restaurant, and you’re not a customer here. You’re a guest.’

I can see him grumbling internally, wondering if it’s worth making a fuss about it, but eventually he gives in and puts his wallet down on the table next to him: not back in his pocket, just in case I change my mind and he can pay off his debt early, but down.

‘Thanks, then,’ he says. 

‘Don’t mention it. If it really bothers you, you can buy me a beer sometime, how about that?’

I try to keep it light and playful, but Hale freezes like a rabbit in headlights, the spoon he’s holding hovering inches above the surface of the soup. ‘I’m not really here for all that long,’ he says. ‘It’s more of a… flying visit, I guess.’

And suddenly any remaining appetite I might have had flies out of the window.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Well, I mean, in that case…’

I don’t finish the thought. I’m not sure I know how to. It’s ridiculous to think how quickly I had spun myself a new future with Hale, how easy it was for me to take the tattered fragments of a decade-old summer and weave them into something new and wholesome. And what did I think would happen, realistically? That he’d just roll back into town, announce that I was the girl for him, take over the hardware store at the end of the street and we could all live happily ever after?

No. Even I wasn’t quite that naïve. If there’s one lesson I’ve managed to pick up in twenty-six years, it’s that Happy Ever Afters belong in fairy tales and children’s picture books, where you can close the pages and keep them safely locked away so they can’t do any damage. It’s when you let the idea of them slip out into the real world that things get dangerous. Hope is the thing with feathers, as they say, but they never mention that it’s really a vulture, waiting to pick you clean if you let it.

But it worked for Hale, plainly. His hope – that stupid, stupid optimism that one day he’d break out of Eden and make his own way in life, that the horrors of his childhood were temporary, that there was a new world waiting over the horizon in the strange land of Away – had paid off. It had sprouted its feathers, spread its wings, and carried him forward, upward, onward. So why can’t it work for me?

Because I’m stuck here.

That’s why, isn’t it. Because my feathers were plucked and my wings clipped a long time ago. Because I was caged by a restaurant that has all the weight of memory attached to it, a weight that I can’t just cast off the way Hale could. I came close – so very, very close – but…

But I stayed, and he left. He grew, and I shrank. One glance at us would have made that clear to anyone.

Perhaps that’s why he froze. Perhaps when he looked at me, he doesn’t see the girl he used to know. Perhaps he sees an anchor, the kind of chain that would have kept him trapped in this dismal little life.

Or perhaps he doesn’t see anything all. After all, isn’t that what I tried to convince myself of for so many years? That that summer was some stupid crush, some girlish fantasy, rose-tinted by nostalgia into appearing something more than it really was?

I’m not sure which one hurts more, but they’re fighting it out in my chest like King Kong and Godzilla. Whichever one wins, I’m not going to like the result.

We stick to small talk until the soup bowls are drained; anything more feels like it would be too much. Hale compliments the food over and over, just to fill the awkward pauses in conversation, the lapses of years. He asks about the diner, and I respond in the vaguest of terms. I don’t ask too many questions about where he went when he left, or his life in the past ten years, or – God forbid – if he’s seeing anyone. It’s not that the questions don’t bubble up inside me like lava through a volcano, hot and eager to reach the surface, but I don’t want the answers. I’m scared of them. I’m reluctant to look too deeply into the wishing well and see what might have been.

And then the bowls are emptied and the sandwiches are nothing but crumbs on the plate. It’s over.

‘I should probably be getting gone,’ he says. ‘You sure you don’t want me to pay for the soup?’

‘I’m sure. On the house.’

‘Well, thanks. And good luck with everything.’

We stand, and do the awkward side-shimmy of old acquaintances – do we hug? Shake hands? Give a kiss on the cheek, continental-style? – before settling on none of the above. He gives me a sad little wave, and heads off.

And I know that if I let that be it, I’ll never forgive myself.

‘Hale,’ I say. The word comes out as a single choked cough, raw and shaky, but it stops him nonetheless. He pauses with his hand on the door.

‘Yeah?’

Now or never, Carrie. Now or never.

‘The night you left...’

He lets the words hang in the air for a moment, just long enough for me to wish I could draw them back. ‘That was ten years ago,’ he says gently, but there’s a tension in him; his hand is gripping the door handle so tightly that the knuckles on his otherwise tanned hands are white as paper. ‘It’s a long, long way in the past by now. Maybe we should let it stay there, you know?’

He’s right. Of course he’s right. What was I thinking? I can feel the blush of humiliation spreading up throughout my face, burning my cheeks to the same shade of red as the diner’s leather stools.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I mean, yeah. Obviously.’

And suddenly, for an instant, he’s the same Hale I used to know: the lost soul, the brawler, the charmer, the saint, the sinner, all rolled into one. I can see it in his eyes. I see the warmth in them now, the heat behind the ice. It was missing when he first walked into the diner again, but it’s back now.

Vulnerability? Regret? I don’t know. I’m not even sure he knows.

‘Everyone makes mistakes, Carrie,’ he says softly, eventually. ‘Everyone.’ He doesn’t wait for me to reply; the chimes above the door give a high-pitched, mocking jingle, and then he’s gone.

Again.

I watch him walk past the window, praying that he might turn around and look at me one last time, terrified that if he does he’ll see my face crack and a flood of hot, inevitable tears come pouring out of me. It doesn’t matter either way; he keeps his face straight ahead, his step resolute, and then he disappears out of the frame of the diner’s window and I know – I just know, deep down inside of me – that I’m never going to see him again.

That he’s gone from my life.

That his visit to Eden will be the last one.

I’m not really here for all that long.

It’s more of a flying visit, I guess.

Everyone makes mistakes.

Everyone.

Well, my mistake was clear – but then again, didn’t I already know that? Did I really need the salt in the wound of having him point it to me? To show up here, looking as he does, reminding me of the life I could have had if I’d taken the leap with him all those years ago?

No. Yes.

Maybe I deserved it.

Maybe the pain is the only thing that keeps you from making the same mistake in future, if the opportunity arises. It’s like a child touching a hot stove, a painful lesson that prepares them for the future in a way that a mere telling-off could never manage. Well, I burned my fingers real well on Hale when I was sixteen, well enough that even a child could understand never to touch that particular flame ever again – so why, why am I so reluctant to learn my lesson?