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.

Think of your happy place, the cool voice in my ear instructs. Picture it. Glimmering blue washes across the backs of my eyes. How does it smell? Wet rock, brine, butter sizzling in a deep fryer, and a spritz of lemon on the tip of my tongue. What do you hear? Laughter, the slap of water against the bluffs, the hiss of the tide drawing back over sand and stone. 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.

We collide in an impressively uncomfortable hug. Sabrina’s exactly tall enough that her shoulder always finds a way to cut off my air supply, but there’s still nowhere I’d rather be.

“Surprise.” His gray eyes communicate something more akin to Welcome to hell; I’ll be your host, the devil.

Our house. Where, the summer after sophomore year, Cleo, Sabrina, and I slept in a row of mattresses we’d dragged to the middle of the living room floor and dubbed “super bed,” staying up most nights talking and laughing until the first rays of sunrise spilled in from the patio doors. Where Cleo whispered, as if it were a secret or a prayer, I’ve never had friends like this, and Sabrina and I nodded solemnly, the three of us holding hands until we drifted off.

“It’s dating, Wyn, not an all-you-can-eat barbecue buffet,”

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. Regency era or not, in a lot of ways, he ruins me.

His jaw muscles leap as his pale-fog eyes retrain on me. “What should I have done, Harriet?” Found an excuse. Simply told her no. Not have broken my heart like it was a last-minute dinner plan. Not have made me love you in the first place.

The point is, some people live the bulk of their lives in their minds (me), and some are highly physical beings (Wyn).

Better? he asked. It terrified and thrilled me how, with that one quiet word, he could make my insides shimmer, shake me up like a snow globe.

It’s not fair that he’s fine. It’s not fair that being here with me doesn’t feel like having his heart roasted on a spit, like it does for me.

Talking to Wyn like this feels like whispering my secrets into a box and shutting it tight.

There’s no right answer. Tell him he did the right thing, and he gets absolution. Tell him I’m not happy, and I’m admitting that even now, a part of me wants him. That he’s gone back to being my phantom limb, an unstoppable ache where something’s missing.

The instant I step under the jangling bells and into Murder, She Read, I feel five hundred thousand times better. Which is to say, I still feel like utter shit, but shit ensconced in books and sun-warmed windows. Shit with sugary iced latte flowing through its veins.

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.

When we draw apart, he rests his brow against mine, breathing hard in the cold. “I think I love you, Harriet,” he says. Love, I think. That’s new. And I’ll never be happy without it again. Without any forethought, any worry, I tell him the truth. “I know I love you, Wyn.”

I will love Wyn Connor until I die.

He pulls me into his chest, and our heartbeats sync. I’ve never felt so certain of anything, so right, so safe.

I hold things up; he tells me about them. I’m gluttonous for all these bits of him.

Wyn ran wild here, and this place carved him into the man I love.

“You fit with me, and I was there.” “I know,” he says. “I think that’s really why I went. To find you.”

Home, I think. That’s new. But it’s not. It’s been growing there for a while, this new room in my heart, this space just for Wyn that I carry with me everywhere I go.

Maybe that was part of the anger that burned in me too: disappointment that I hadn’t loved him well enough to make him happy nor well enough to let him go.

We. Hearing him say it is like biting into a Maine blueberry, the way you taste the salt water and the cold sky and the damp earth and the sun all at once.

“Is there one that looks like us?” he asks. They all do, I think. You are in all of my happiest places.

“Do you remember what you told me,” I say, “about your brain?” His hand pauses. “You said it felt like a Ferris wheel,” I say. “Like all your thoughts were constantly circling, and you’d reach out for one, but it was hard to stay on it for too long because they kept spinning.” The lines of his face soften. His fingers curl, the backs of his nails pressing into my skin. “Except with you. You’re like gravity.” I couldn’t have pulled myself away from him then if he’d burst into flames. “Everything keeps spinning,” he says in a low, hoarse voice. “But my mind’s always got one hand on you.”

Try as I might to bring myself back to reality, to the world outside the bubble of Knott’s Harbor, I am fully, terrifyingly here, where nothing else seems to matter.

I want him on top of me, beneath me, behind me. I want him in my mouth, his clothes in a pile on the floor, his sweat on my stomach, his voice rough against my ear. I want anything other than to stop.

After a beat, he says, “I don’t want to do anything else that hurts you.” “You didn’t,” I say. I hurt myself, I think.

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.

He flattens my hand between his palms. “I’m glad I’m in one of those,” he says. “I feel bad for all the Wyns in universes where you’re with guys like Harvard Hudson. They’re so miserable right now, Harriet.” “Or the Harriets in universes where you’re with the Dancers Named Alison of the world,” I say. “No,” he says quietly. “In every universe, it’s you for me. Even if it’s not me for you.”

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

I fly home alone. As soon as I step foot in the apartment, I feel the shift. Somehow I know he will never live there again.

You’re already home, I think. I wonder if I ever will be.

“And then I met you, and I didn’t feel so lost or aimless. Because even if there was nothing else for me, it felt like loving you was what I was made for. And it didn’t matter what anyone thought of me. It didn’t matter if I didn’t have any other big plans for myself, as long as I got to love you.”

If you were mad at me, it meant your heart really was as fucking broken as mine is. I thought when I found a way to be happy, I’d think about you less. But instead, it’s like . . . like now that the grief isn’t strangling me, there’s all this extra room to love you.

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

Two of my best friends are having a baby. A near-painful joy flares through me. “Oh my god.” Cleo looks up. “Hm?” “I just realized,” I say, “I’m going to be an aunt.” She snorts a laugh. “Harry,” she says. “You’re going to be a co-godmother.”

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

Everything’s better when you’re happy.” “For me,” I say. “For me,” he says, vehement.

We’re out of time.

We light the sparklers Parth found in the garage, and we write our names in the dark, impermanent but all the brighter and more blazing for it.

My body has always loved him without reservation or caution. It knew so long before my brain did, and it still knows.

“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.”

I understood, then, the immense honor it is to hurt like she does. To have loved someone so much that the taste of maple syrup can make you cry and laugh at the same time. And I know, if nothing else, I’ll have that. I know I’ve chosen the right universe.