Happy Place

by Emily Henry

The most important friendships in my life all came down to a decision made by strangers, chance.

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.

What can you feel? Sunlight, everywhere. Not just on my bare shoulders or the crown of my head but inside me too, the irresistible warmth that comes only from being in the exact right place with the exact right people.

feeling like a woman in a tampon commercial: overjoyed, gorgeous, and impossibly comfortable—ready

was more scared of marrying someone who couldn’t bring himself to leave me or to keep loving me.

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

“Maybe you make me a little nervous.”

“Just because you don’t see me grabbing a mop every time you walk into a room doesn’t mean I don’t notice you’re there.”

An ache starts behind my ribs. Like having this small bit of him has transformed all the pieces I can never have into a kind of phantom limb, a pain where there should be more Wyn.

he says, “Just to be clear, you’re always welcome to touch me.”

publish separately. One of them writes literary doorstop novels and the other writes romance.”

Beach read reference

“How many universes do you think we’re together in?” “Higher than either of us can count.”

“No,” he says quietly. “In every universe, it’s you for me. Even if it’s not me for you.”

I am happier than I’ve ever been. Don’t yet know that there is a level of happiness even deeper, one so intense it hurts, almost like loss or grief. A happiness so bright and hot you feel like it could incinerate you.

“Marry me, Harriet.” “Yes,” I say on a breath.

It’s an old white gold ring with a square sapphire mounted in its center. “I thought it looked like you,”

“I can explain it to you right now,” he says, “or we can have sex in the car.”

His eyes return to mine. “I could make you one, if you want.” “A table?” I ask. He nods.

My heart is screaming You, you, you, as if I’m watching him fall into a pit, and yet I’m immobilized, unable to find a way to reach him.

Know I can’t bear to be the person who takes him away from where he belongs.

Somehow I know he will never live there again.

I don’t cry. It’s not real. He promised he would always love me. It can’t be real.

That I’ve known since that first trip to Indiana that I would never be enough to make him happy,

“It wasn’t you,” he says. “I promise it was never you. I was in such a fucking dark place, Harriet. After I lost my dad. I was drowning.”

without realizing breathing just wasn’t supposed to be that hard. Starting antidepressants was like that for me. I felt like shit all the time, and then suddenly I didn’t. And all this stuff seemed possible for the first time. My mind felt . . . quieter, maybe. Lighter.”

“I think I hate my job.”

“There was nothing bigger than you,” he says raggedly. “Not to me. Not ever.”

“They belonged to you before I ever saw you. They belong to you in every universe we’re in, Harriet.”

and I don’t want to say goodbye to your rodeo shirt,

She got over my bellybutton ring.