Happy Place

by Emily Henry

My best friends taught me a new kind of quiet, the peaceful stillness of knowing one another so well you don’t need to fill the space. And a new kind of loud: noise as a celebration, as the overflow of joy at being alive, here, now.

There’s a before and an after, with a hard line between them, proof that there are millions of small things you can do to make life a little better.

I feel the moment his gaze lifts off me and returns to the windshield, but he’s left a mark: from now on, dark cliffs, wind racing through hair, cinnamon paired with clove and pine—all of it will only mean Wyn Connor to me. A door has opened, and I know I’ll never get it shut again.

Not have broken my heart like it was a last-minute dinner plan. Not have made me love you in the first place.

I told myself I was too smart to think I was falling in love with him. Because I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. If only I’d been right.

I knew the only thing more painful than being without him would be being together knowing I no longer truly had him.

It’s a gift, this bit of tenderness she’s brought out to show us. It’s an honor to be trusted with something so sacred and rare as Sabrina’s softness.

He’s become my best friend the way the others did: bit by bit, sand passing through an hourglass so slowly, it’s impossible to pin down the moment it happens. When suddenly more of my heart belongs to him than doesn’t, and I know I’ll never get a single grain back. He’s a golden boy. I’m a girl whose life has been drawn in shades of gray. I try not to love him. I really try.

From the loneliness, from the fear that I would never escape it. Because feelings were changeable, and people were unpredictable. You couldn’t hold on to them through the force of will.

I need space. I need air. I need hours of hypnotherapy to erase him from my nerve endings.

It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. It can’t matter. He wasn’t happy with you. He broke your heart. He was never yours to keep, and deep down you knew that. I watched him fade from me, bit by bit, day by day, a mirage receding into nothingness.

But the way he’s looking at me threatens to obliterate logic, to erase history. If he’s a black hole, I’ve reached his event horizon.

For someone who’s spent a lifetime living inside her own mind, I become nothing but a body alarmingly fast, all buzzing nerve endings and tingling skin.

My skin burns everywhere it wants him.

You’ve spent months trying to forget what you’re missing, I tell myself. How will you survive being reminded? Living the loss of it all over again?

We all knew: this was the end of an era. So we sat on the rug, our arms wrapped around her like we were a giant artichoke, her as our heart.

His love is steady, constant. Easier than breathing, because breathing is something you can overthink, to the point that you forget how your lungs work and get yourself into a panic. I could never forget how to love Wyn.

Sometimes, lying beside him in our bed, my ice-cold feet tucked between his warm calves, the words flit through my mind, like they’re coming from somewhere else, like my soul hears his whispering in its sleep, You belong here.

“How many universes do you think we’re together in?” “Higher than either of us can count.” His mouth quirks. “And you can count very high.” “It’s true,”

“In every universe, it’s you for me. Even if it’s not me for you.” That isn’t how it works. I don’t care. Wyn—my Wyn—means it.

“Shouldn’t we be done fighting,” I say, “now that we’re broken up?” The corners of his mouth twist downward now. “Harriet, we never fought when we were together. If we had . . .” He trails off, doesn’t land that final blow. I feel it all the same, a knife twist in my heart.

“Shit,” Wyn says, shaking his head. “I don’t like not touching you.” I look away. Now my heart feels like one giant blister, too tender, too delicate. If only he’d felt that way sooner. If only I had any clue what went wrong, how I lost him. If only I believed there were some way to fix it. But he’s not the only one who’s done things he can’t take back. And revisiting what’s happened will only make the pain worse.

This!!!

“If it was possible to stop loving you, I would’ve managed it in that first year of desperately trying to. I’m here. For good.”

I’m okay.” I’m not. I live in a state of terror that he won’t ever come back to himself. That I’ve taken him from his friends and a job he liked and his family, and now I can’t even give him the time he needs.

The sacrifices he’s made, the jobs he’s hated and worked anyway, every bit of proof of his love. But he’s never been a soft man. He’s only accessible to a point.

Hank didn’t belong to me. Now he never will. The tracks of our lives split little by little, but the moments we’re together, my love still feels so big and violent it could consume me.

He tries to be happy. I try to be enough in this small, small life I’ve pulled him into.

Please, please help. Please help him stop hurting this much.

I’ll make bargains with the universe: If I make the apartment cozier. If I don’t complain about work. If I make the most of the constant rain. If I need nothing from him, he’ll be okay. We’ll get through this.

But a deeper part of me, a voice that’s always been there, tells me it was always going to end this way. That I’ve known since that first trip to Indiana that I would never be enough to make him happy,

It doesn’t matter that I never got concrete answers about what broke us. What matters is that we broke. What matters is that Wyn’s happy with his new life.

“It’s killing me not knowing.”

“Even though it’s been months,” I say. “It’s killing me, being here, acting like everything’s the same between us, and what’s even worse is sometimes it’s not acting. Because

“Because you just left, Wyn,” I say. “I never got an explanation. I got a four-minute phone call and a box of my stuff shipped to my door, and I’ve never even known what I did. And I told myself it was all about what happened with Martin. That you didn’t trust me.”

“I’ve spent months trying to make myself mad at you,” I go on hoarsely, “for blaming me and judging me for something I didn’t even do. And then I come here, and you act like you do blame me. Like you hate me or, worse, feel nothing at all for me. Until suddenly you act like nothing’s changed. And you tell me you never thought I cheated on you, and you kiss me like you love me.”

This is killing me. Every second of every day, I feel like I’m living with a piece of me torn out, and I didn’t even see it happen.

“I have this gaping wound, and no idea how it got there. It’s killing me hearing how happy you are, without even understanding how I—how I—” My voice quavers, my breath coming in spurts. “I don’t know what I did to make you so miserable.”

“So that’s it?” I say raggedly. “I took up all the oxygen, and you didn’t tell me until I’d suffocated you. Until you didn’t love me anymore, and there was nothing I could do.”

“Love means constantly saying you’re sorry, and then doing better.”