CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

By the time Liam arrived at her apartment, the sun had come out. The day was so mild and beautiful that Tillie jettisoned her previous plans, and they took a train to the Staten Island Ferry. "This is one of the best views in the city," she promised.

He held her hand. "I'm just glad to be with you."

They rode outside on the ferry, enjoying the sunshine and the retreat of Lower Manhattan. The wind was soft, the setting sun lighting the water afire. He was quiet, taking in the view. Tillie sat next to him, pressing the sense of his form into her memory, already missing him. It felt foolish to let herself get so caught up in it. To try to be normal, she asked lightly, "What's your next city?"

"London," he said. "We've gone there a few times, and the crowds are really quite good."

"Will you see your friends? Or were they cousins?"

He leaned into her. "You remembered."

She smiled.

"Yeah. I'll spend a few days with my aunt. Technically, she's my mom's best friend, but I call her my aunt. Then we move on to ..." He shrugged. "I don't even know where. Krish will tell me."

A dark expression crossed his face.

"Is everything okay?" Tillie asked.

"No. I had a situation with Krish today that made me wonder what's happening. He's overstepping in ways that I need to get under control." As if he regretted the harshness of this, he softened. "We've been mates since we were eleven."

"And?"

"He has a real gift for business, for all the parts that I don't want to deal with. He found the app designer, supervised the process, and got it all up and running." He looked down at their arms pressed together on the railing. "It's been good, really. I'm just not sure right now whether it's his vision or mine."

"That seems like a tough thing to sort out."

"I'm worried that the work might lose its center, that it's becoming more about personality and money than trying to help others find calm and joy."

"‘In a troubled world,'" she quoted. "I looked up your website."

He half smiled. "That's Krish at his best."

"He seems very serious about protecting you and your image."

"No doubt." He pressed his lips together. "But you know that thing about power corrupting? I don't want to fall into that trap."

"Fair," Tillie replied. "I can see that might be a danger. Especially with your charisma."

"Am I charismatic?" he asked, leaning into her.

"You know you are. An aura the size of California."

"Thank you." He sighed. "Enough about my first-world troubles. How'd your day go?"

Tillie watched the city retreating. "I did some good work, and then I made some calls to see if I could find anyone who could give me any more information about my mother."

"Did you?"

"Not really." She thought about the thin clues. "But a man she used to date when I was little said he did know about the death of her daughter. He said that girl was my sister. But when I asked a woman in LA about it, she didn't know anything about me, a second daughter." The weirdness welled up in her throat, and she felt suddenly, alarmingly, unmoored. She shook her head, trying to keep it together.

Liam looped an arm around her wordlessly.

"It's just so ... disorienting," she said, "to think I know my history and then find out it's all a big lie. Or mess." Her throat was tight. "I really don't know what to do."

"You don't have to do anything," he said quietly. "Until you know the next step."

Ease moved through her body all at once, as if someone had pulled a plug in her toe and all the tense worry poured out. "Huh," she said, looking up at him. "That was pretty helpful."

He winked. "Just doing my job, love."

"Well, thanks." She traced a circle of words spiraling around his wrist in a stylized script. "What is this one?"

"‘There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same.'"

"More Rumi?"

"Tolkien." Liam smiled. "Krish and I discovered The Lord of the Rings at thirteen, and it was life-changing. We desperately wanted to be cast in the movies."

"Were you Frodo or Sam?"

"You're a fan!" he said.

She held out a hand, tipping it back and forth. "Sort of. It's a lot of boy-quest stuff. I was more of a Game of Thrones fan. Books, not the TV series."

"Always the book." They fist-bumped.

"Khaleesi?"

"Who else?"

"I never wanted to be a hobbit," he confessed. "Aragorn all the way."

"Of course." The sun blinked behind a row of buildings in the distance, covering them in gold, then darkness, then gold again. "Were you a big reader?"

"Hell, yeah. Still am. You?"

"We didn't have a television, and my mother believed in the library."

He laughed. The sound was slightly hoarse, deep. "We were such deprived kids, yeah?"

"So deprived. When did you get a computer?"

"Not until I was at uni."

"I got a laptop with money I earned myself, but we didn't have internet. I had to take it into town to an internet café. Remember that?"

"I do."

"Prime view of Lady Liberty coming up," Tillie said, standing. "Let's get some photos."

She showed him the gorgeous view of the Statue of Liberty from the ferry. They shot selfies of themselves hamming it up, and he let her take some of him in different lights and angles for her painting. He took approximately three hundred of her, which was both flattering and disconcerting.

They didn't get off the ferry, just looped back, and found a good vegetarian restaurant where they ate heartily, then walked the miles back to her apartment, talking. Time went so fast that she felt panicky when they got to her place—where there was no Jared, thank God. Liam looked up at the windows, where her lights were on.

"Do you have time to come up?" she asked.

"No. A car is on the way here now." He twined his fingers in hers. "And if I go up there, I'll cry."

She laughed softly. "That would do a lot for my heart."

"Do whatever you want with the painting. You can put it in your show if you like. I'll send you a release myself."

"That's okay. I just want it for me."

"I'll still send it." He stepped close, and their bodies touched lightly. "I hate leaving, Tillie. I really do."

"I hate it, too. That we can't even see where this is going."

"It's not over, is it?"

"Well, it can't really progress if you're traveling the world, can it?"

"We can text. FaceTime. Email." He curled his hand around her ear. "You can come visit when your show is finished."

The feeling of him leaving was a piercing hollowness in her heart. "Did you ever go to summer camp?"

"Sure."

"And fall in love? And then you promise to write each other, and you do for a little while. Then real life intrudes, and you drift away, and then the next year, you are a little awkward until each of you falls in love again. With someone else."

He was very still, those clear eyes beautiful even in the thin illumination of the streetlight. "This is not like that, Tillie. Nothing like it." He kissed her, a gentle kiss, sensual and so rich that she could live on it until she died. Everything in her years felt connected to him, cells to cells. "And I don't think you think it is, either."

When he raised his head, she saw tears gathering in his eyes, and it triggered her own, which were already too close to the surface. Then they were kissing and crying and hugging, and she would have done almost anything to keep him there. It was stupid, she thought, but it was also one of the best moments of her life so far, bittersweet and beautiful and awful.

"I am going to miss you like someone carved a piece out of me," she whispered. "It's crazy. I've known you less than a week, and it's like my whole life has changed."

"I think," he said, holding her head in his hands, "that we were meant to meet. And if that's true, we can trust that life will bring us what we need to be together."

She shook her head. "You're such a dreamer."

"Yeah," he said. "And you're a dream come true."

She laughed.

"Too much?"

"Yes. But I liked it."

A car pulled up, a black Town Car that was obviously his. Liam made a soft noise of protest and kissed her face all over, forehead and eyes and cheeks and nose and chin and then her lips. "I will miss you every second we are not together," he said. "But you won't be able to miss me because I'll be texting you constantly."

She hugged him, hard, to hide the rise of her emotion. "I can't wait."

And then he was gone, the car spiriting away the best thing that had ever come into her life.

Ever.