Happy Place

by Emily Henry

“O Harriet, my Harriet!” Sabrina shouts, half falling out of her dad’s old cherry-red Jaguar. She looks, as ever, like a platinum Jackie O, with her perfectly toned olive arms and her classic black pedal pushers, not to mention the vintage silk scarf wrapped around her glossy bob. She still strikes me the same as that first day we met, like an effortlessly cool starlet plucked from another time. The effect is somewhat tempered by the way she keeps jumping up and down with a poster board on which she’s scrawled, in her god-awful serial-killer handwriting, SAY IT’S CAROL SINGERS, a Love Actually reference that could not, actually, make less contextual sense.

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.

I was more scared of marrying someone who couldn’t bring himself to leave me or to keep loving me. It was why I hadn’t let myself cry when Wyn dumped me, or ask for answers or a second chance. I knew the only thing more painful than being without him would be being together knowing I no longer truly had him.

“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.”

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

“Harriet.” His mouth moves to the peak of one of my eyebrows and then to the other. “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.”

Everything is changing. It has to. You can’t stop time. All you can do is point yourself in a direction and hope the wind will let you get there.

…” He darts a glance at our hands. “You were in pain, and I didn’t even notice, Harriet. Or I did, but I thought it was about me. I fucked up, and I lost you for it.” I shake my head ferociously. “You had bigger things going on.” “There was nothing bigger than you,” he says raggedly. “Not to me. Not ever.”

Like even when something beautiful breaks, the making of it still matters.