She looked at her. Save my number. Destiny nodded. Looked back at the room. Where are you going home?
Clare said. She flew back to Atlanta on a Saturday in late May. One large suitcase, two carryons, exactly what she'd left with 18 months earlier. Though the inside of the suitcase looked different now, denser, more settled, the belongings of a person who had figured something out. Andre was at the airport.
Maya was with him. She came through the arrival's door and she saw them. At the same moment, Andre in the back, the way he always stood, and Maya beside him with her arms crossed and her chin up and a handwritten sign that said in large capital letters, "Question 24. " Clare stopped walking. She laughed. Really laughed.
The full involuntary kind. Right there in the middle of the arrivals hall with her carry-on rolling to a halt beside her and strangers moving around her. And Maya lowered the sign with the dignified expression of someone whose joke had landed exactly as intended. She walked to them, hugged Maya first long. Real the hug of someone who has been storing it up for 4 months and Maya hugged her back with the particular ferocity of a 13-year-old who was not going to cry and was managing that goal aggressively.
Then she looked at Andre. He looked at her real thing first. Composed version a distant second. "Hi," she said. "Hi," he said.
She stepped into him and he held her in the middle of the Atlanta airport the way he had held her every time completely without calculation like she was actually here and that was the only fact that mattered right now. Welcome home, he said into her hair. She breathed him in. "Let the words settle, felt them land. " "Question 24," she said, still holding on. "What is it? " "That's my question," he said.
"I have my own. " She pulled back, looked at his face. "What's yours? " He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. She recognized it before he unfolded it. The paper was familiar. The handwriting familiar, though she hadn't seen it since the night it was written.
He unfolded it carefully and held it so she could see. It was the original boyfriend agreement, the fake one written as a joke on a Friday night at her parents anniversary dinner. Listing the terms of a performance that had turned into the truest thing either of them had done in years. Someone Maya, she realized, recognizing the careful handwriting at the bottom, had added a clause. It read, "Amendment one, added by the only sensible person in this family.
All terms of this agreement are hereby made permanent and non-negotiable, effective immediately. " Below Maya's clause in Andres handwriting was one more line. One question remaining. I'll ask it when you're ready. She looked up from the paper, looked at him. I'm ready, she said.