Attach ments(47)

They were quiet for another long while.

“It’s not like I fell out of love with you,” Sam said. “I’m just not the same person that I was when I fell in love with you.”

Quiet.

“People change,” she said.

“Stop talking to me like that,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m Lord Greystoke, and I need to be educated in the ways of man. I know that people change.

I thought …I thought we were going to change together. I thought that’s what it meant to be in love.”

“I’m sorry.”

More quiet. Sam watched her breath turned to frost. She leaned back on her elbows and made her face look distant. Then stricken. Then pained. She stuck with pained. Lincoln had seen her do this so many times, try on faces, that it didn’t bother him.

“Earlier,” Lincoln said. “You said you didn’t plan it this way. How did you plan it?”

“I didn’t plan it,” she said. “I hoped that we would both just know when it was time …That we’d have one of those moments. Like in the movies, foreign movies, when something small happens, something almost imperceptible, and it changes everything. Like there’s a man and a woman having breakfast …and the man reaches for the jam, and the woman says, ‘I thought you didn’t like jam,’ and the man says, ‘I didn’t. Once.’ “Or maybe it isn’t even that obvious. Maybe he reaches for the jam, and she just looks at him like she doesn’t know him anymore. Like, in the moment he reached for that jar, she couldn’t recognize him.

“After breakfast, he’ll go for a walk, and she’ll go to their room and pack a slim brown suitcase.

She’ll stop on the sidewalk and wonder whether she should say good-bye, whether she should leave a note. But she won’t. She’ll just get into the taxi and go.

“He knows as soon as he turns onto their walk that she’s gone. But he doesn’t turn back. He doesn’t regret a single day they spent together, including this one. Maybe he finds one of her ribbons on the stairs …”

Sam lay back onto the merry-go-round. She’d talked herself into a looser place. Lincoln lay down beside her, so that their heads almost touched in the center.

“Who’s playing me in your movie?” he asked gently.

“Daniel Day-Lewis,” she said. She smiled. Lincoln could probably kiss her now if he wanted.

Instead he leaned toward her ear so that she could hear him whisper.

“There’s never been a moment,” he barely said, “when I didn’t recognize you.”

She wiped her eyes. Her mascara smeared. He nudged the merry-go-round into motion. He could kiss her now. If he wanted.

“I’d know you in the dark,” he said. “From a thousand miles away. There’s nothing you could become that I haven’t already fallen in love with.”

He could kiss her.

“I know you,” he said.

Even as she turned toward him, even as her hand came to his cheek, Lincoln knew that this didn’t mean Sam had changed her mind. She was saying yes to the moment, not to him. He tried to tell himself that this was enough, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t. Now that she was in his arms, he needed her to tell him that everything was going to be okay.

“Tell me you love me,” he said between kisses.

“I love you.”

“Always,” he said. It came out like an order.

“Always.”

“Only.”

She kissed him.

“Only,” he said again.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Sam… ,” he said.

“I can’t.”

He sat up. Stepped jaggedly off the merry-go-round.

“Lincoln,” she said. “Wait.”

He shook his head. He wanted to cry again, but not in front of her. Not in front of her again. He started walking to his car.

“I don’t want you to go,” Sam said. She was upset. “I don’t want it to end like this.”

“You don’t get to choose,” Lincoln said. “It’s just happening.”





SHE’D DUMPED HIM. That’s all. It wasn’t that bad. It shouldn’t have been. It’s not like they were married. It’s not like she abandoned him at the altar, or made off with his best friend and their retirement savings.

People get dumped all the time. Especially in college. They don’t drop out of school. They don’t drop out of life. They don’t spend the next decade thinking about it every time they get a chance.

If Lincoln’s freshman year had been an episode of Quantum Leap, Scott Bakula would have gotten back on theGreyhound bus after Christmas, finished the school year like a man, and started making calls to the financial aidoffice at the University of Nebraska. Or maybe he wouldn’t have transferred at all. Maybe Scott Bakula would have stayed in California and asked that pretty girl in Lincoln’s Latin class if she wanted to see a Susan Sarandon movie.