Happy Place

by Emily Henry

A cottage on the rocky shoreline, with knotty pine floorboards and windows that are nearly always open. The smell of evergreens and brine wafting in on the breeze, and white linen drapes lifting in a lazy dance. The burble of a coffee maker, and that first deep pull of cold ocean air as we step out onto the flagstone patio, steaming mugs in hand.

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.

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.

Love, I think. That’s new. And I’ll never be happy without it again.

“Is there one that looks like us?” he asks. They all do, I think. You are in all of my happiest places. You are where my mind goes when it needs to be soothed.

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.

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

It doesn’t matter how busy life’s been, how long the five of us have gone without seeing one another: meeting at the cottage is like pulling on a favorite sweatshirt, worn to perfection. Time doesn’t move the same way when we’re there. Things change, but we stretch and grow and make room for one another. Our love is a place we can always come back to, and it will be waiting, the same as it ever was. You belong here.

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 walked around the kitchen to hug each of them in turn, then looked at me, his eyes sparkling and clear, no fog. Like his first instinct when he felt joy was to check whether it had hit me too, to share it.

“Wyn,” I whisper shakily. His fingers twitch, tightening through my curls. “Are you saying I can come home?” “I’m saying,” he murmurs softly, “it’s not home unless you’re there.”