Rewriting His Fate

I got a love letter the day I turned thirty.

He wrote it when he was eighteen.

Eighteen, and bad at it, he'd asked me whether we got married in the future.

I told him yes.

I lied. He never made it out of that summer.

Chapter 1

The man across the table had gone to the restroom and left his phone face-up, and it lit with a half-typed text meant for someone who wasn't me.

Him: [Steady job. Personality's fine. But she's painfully average across the board, and she's already thirty. I'm a catch. I can keep looking.]

I read it twice. Then I paid the check. The whole thing, both of us, a mid-range dinner for two.

He came back as I was standing. "I can split it?"

I shook my head and shouldered my bag.

My mother called before I cleared the door. "How was this one? Another good prospect. Steady. Right about your age."

I said nothing. The crowd carried me past a bakery, where a girl in an apron was moving a cake to the clearance shelf. Marked down because by tomorrow it isn't worth selling.

"Serena." Her voice climbed, scared and shoving. "You turn thirty tomorrow. Can you please be realistic."

I looked up at the sky. "Sure," I said. "I'll be realistic."

I bought the clearance cake on the way home. Reduced. Final sale. About right.

I couldn't make it to midnight, so I lit the candle early.

I didn't wish for anything. No point wishing for the thing that was never going to show.

Then I opened my eyes, and in the candlelight there was a letter on the table.

White envelope. A thread of freesia. On the front, in a slashing, too-sure hand: To Circle.

No signature. My eyelid jumped anyway. There was exactly one illiterate alive who'd ever called me Circle.

I slid the paper out. Two lines.

Circle. I like you. Don't be difficult about it.

Dated the first of March. Twelve years back. When we were both eighteen.

I never got this letter that year.

The ink looked wet. Like he'd capped the pen a second ago.

I picked up my own pen and wrote underneath: You're insane.

The paper held still. Then, slow, like the writer had been knocked off his feet, three words surfaced under mine.

Who are you?

Chapter 2

I held my breath and lied to a dead boy.

I'm your fairy godmother, I wrote. Eighteen-year-old Dorian. Be nice.

A long silence. Then, grudging: You're insane.

So I told him his fortune. You're going to roll your ankle at practice tomorrow. Careful.

He didn't write back. Didn't believe me. I set the pen down and waited, smug. Don't listen to your godmother, kid, and you limp for a month.

He named me on the first day.

We were eighteen, brand-new, sorted into the same intro section at Crescent Bay University because both of us had wrecked the placement test on purpose. He took the seat behind me. I'd been killing time drawing circles in the margin of my paper, one inside the other.

He leaned forward, all lazy gold and long eyes, and tapped the smallest one with his pen.

"Circle," he said, like he was naming a pet.

Everyone else called me Serena. From that day, he called me Circle. Only him. I figured out later that was the point. He had to be the one thing nobody else got to be.

My placement score came back a thirty. His came back a thirty-eight.

He stretched, looked at my paper, clicked his tongue. "Circle. Your English is rough. Want me to tutor you?"

A thirty-eight, offering to tutor a thirty. The nerve.

I turned away. Truth was I wasn't actually that dumb. My parents had been clawing through a divorce for a year, and I'd tanked the test to make one of them look up. It didn't work. All it did was make Dorian decide I was his.

Now the paper warmed under my hand.

You really a godmother? Or a witch. My ankle's killing me.

I laughed out loud in my empty apartment.

I knew. That was the spring he rolled it, milked a sprain that barely slowed him down, and made me fetch things for two solid weeks. Water. Lunch. Homework. Every order opened the same way. Circle.

You don't need me to walk you to the bathroom too, do you, I'd said once, standing over him.

He'd dropped his head onto my shoulder, gone fake-weak, breath hot against my neck. I didn't move. For a second the heat of him just sat there on my skin and I lost the rest of my sentence. His mouth curved against it, mean. If you're offering, I won't say no.

The man my mother kept sending me to was texting again. Want to grab dinner, get to know each other better? I actually liked you.

I was his backup. His clearance option, marked down because thirty. Fine. I'd been somebody's only choice once. First pick. Top of the shelf.

He asked me, careful, did Circle ever become a reporter.

Yes, I wrote. The first lie. My journalism died its quiet death the year after I graduated. I push paper now.

Did I make cop, he asked.

Yes. The second lie.

He never made it anywhere near the future he was owed.

Chapter 3

Did we get married, he'd asked, eighteen and pretending it was nothing.

My chest went hot. So he had loved me at eighteen, the real kind. It took me until thirty to know it.

Yes, I wrote, and the pen shook.

A long pause. Then, smug, in letters a mile high: Knew she had a thing for me.

I'd fooled an idiot. I felt terrible about it.

That March I'd been left standing outside an office, called in over my crashing grades, while the school phoned two parents who didn't pick up. There were college posters on the wall across from me. I read them with no particular plan. College was a word I couldn't touch.

His voice landed in my ear. He pointed at one. "I'm doing that. Police academy."

His ankle was still bad. I don't know why he was standing there next to me at all.

I tried to look away and he cupped the back of my neck, fingers cold, holding me still. "You take the journalism school across the road from it. Then it's just a crosswalk between us. Go be a reporter."

I figured he'd seen the major I'd written down and was about to list my virtues. He gave his reason like it bored him.

"You've got a nice smile."

A song was playing somewhere down the hall, the one that got big that year. Slow Tide. I didn't answer. I just started walking, and at the corner he called after me, grinning. "Circle."

I turned. He stood in the light, wind moving his hair, and the side of his face caught the sun and held it.

"Where are you going," he asked.

"Bathroom," I said.

He laughed under his breath and let me go.

The chorus came down the hall right about then, the part that would end up meaning him, and I didn't have one word to say back to it. Anyone who met Dorian at eighteen had a bad year. He showed up once and made me dizzy for life.

I went to that journalism school later. Crossed that road a hundred times. Closed my eyes for thirty seconds and opened them, every time, and never once found him on the other side. Liar.

So from the very start, we should have just left each other alone.

Dorian didn't say much, as a rule. After he got the answer he was fishing for, he went quiet and forgot I existed.

I tucked the letter where I'd see it. Days went by with no new ink. Then I came home from a chewing-out by my bald, fifty-year-old boss, looked at it, and found fresh marks. The graceful curves of a math problem, scrawled, impatient.

You're doing homework on your godmother's love letter, I wrote.

Right. You're still there.

I'm always here.

She icing you out again, I wrote.

The paper took a hard, annoyed press of the pen.

Called it. I checked the date. The two sides ran on the same clock. On his end it was the seventh. My cycle had always been steady, the seventh, the eighth.

Leave her alone today, I wrote.

A question mark bloomed beside mine.

She's got cramps, I wrote.

I watched him write something, scratch it out, write it again, until all that was left was a small, mortified oh.

I'd forgotten. He was eighteen. Those things still made him blush.

He was eighteen and blushing at a ghost. He had one summer left in him, and I was the only one alive who knew it.

Chapter 4

I set the pen down, and a picture I'd never lived dropped into my head, brand-new and certain.

Eighteen-year-old me, walking into class, lips gone a little white. A paper cup of ginger tea, still warm, sitting on her desk. No note. If she'd turned, she'd have caught the lazy boy by the window hiding his face behind a book, ears gone red.

The memory aged as I held it, softening, the way a thing does when it stops being the only version.

I blinked at the letter and my eyes stung. So it had just happened. Because of me. Because of what I wrote.

Where'd you get ginger tea, I wrote.

Don't worry about it.

I changed tack, gentle, coaxing. Your godmother is reaching back across a lot of years to pass on something Circle says about you, way down the line. She says you're too blunt for your own good.

He went still.

So you'd better start taking my notes.

I never thought he'd listen. Dorian didn't listen to anyone. Some days the sheer arrogance of him made my teeth hurt.

His answer came back.

Fine. If it makes Circle like me more, then fine. Yes.

I sat at my desk, knuckles white around the pen, and looked at that line for a long time.

This was the thing I'd come twelve years to do. Lie to a boy who wasn't finished growing. Teach him, one careful note at a time, how to leave me.

Stop saving her, Dorian.

Don't save Circle.

He started using me as a drop box. Every message opened on Circle and closed on Circle. He'd wander off onto other things and always circle home.

Circle's got a new barrette. Looks good.

So he lifted it off her head.

That premed guy keeps borrowing her notes. Can't he buy his own.

So he ran the premed guy into the floor at pickup.

I listened to all of it, his small secret business, and in his scattered lines I could see that whole campus again, a version of it I'd never lived. I never once knew he'd been carrying any of it.

I corrected him, patient, one note at a time. Don't crowd her. Keep some distance. Nobody wants the guy who's always underfoot. Stop bringing her the strawberry milk. Bring her black coffee and tell her to focus. Say please. Say thank you.

He did it for a while. He sounded pleased. She doesn't hate me as much now.

Did you think she hated you, I wrote, stiff.

A pause. Then: Yes.

I put my head down on my arms. Because back then, I had.

He was a bright kid, brighter than he let anyone see. He'd transferred in late and skipped a whole exam, and every other score of his sat a hair under perfect, buried so deep under the lazy act that I never knew until it was far too late to matter