Too Late to Love Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Birthday Toast
Zachary reads June's love letter to two hundred guests and Regan drowns her portrait; June walks out, and a man with Zachary's face is waiting on her stoop.
Zachary Aldridge read my love letter into a microphone.
He stood on the stage of his own birthday party, two hundred guests on the lawn below him.
"Dear Zachary," he read, in a voice like he was announcing a wine.
"For three years I have watched you cross the courtyard, and I have never once been brave."
The crowd made a long, delighted noise.
I was standing by the champagne fountain in my thrift-store green coat, holding nothing.
I had slipped the envelope into his gift pile an hour ago.
I had meant it to be read alone, in a bedroom, by someone kind.
"I painted you something," Zachary went on, and his friends whooped.
"It's not good enough. But it's the truest thing I've made."
He lowered the page and grinned at the lawn.
"Aww. The scholarship girl has a crush."
Somebody's phone was already up, filming.
"June, sweetheart," Zachary said, finding me in the crowd, "my mother's check pays for your paints."
"I can't date the help."
The lawn laughed.
It was a warm, easy laugh, the kind people give to a joke they are glad is not about them.
Then his sister Regan walked out of the crowd with my portrait in both hands.
I had wrapped it in brown paper and a green ribbon.
Regan had torn the paper off.
"Oh, it's wet still," she said sweetly, loud enough for the back rows.
"Let me save it."
She held it over the champagne fountain and let go.
The canvas slid under the gold water face-first.
Zachary's face, the one I had painted asleep on the studio stairs with half a stolen sandwich in his hand, went dark and soft and ran.
I did not decide to move.
I walked through the crowd, and it parted for me.
I put both arms into the fountain up to the elbow, and the cold went through my sleeves.
I pulled the canvas out, and champagne poured off the frame onto my shoes.
Regan laughed behind her hand.
"Give me that," Zachary said from the stage, bored.
I walked up the steps instead.
Nobody stopped me.
I took the microphone out of his hand, and he let me, because he thought it was more of the show.
My voice came out of the speakers, very small and very clear.
"The boy in this painting shared his sandwich with me at two in the morning, in a cold stairwell, when I was nineteen."
"I loved him for three years."
The lawn went quiet.
"He doesn't exist."
"I'm withdrawing from your mother's Fellowship interview and I'm never saying your name again."
I held the dripping portrait up so every phone could see the ruined face.
"Happy birthday, Zachary."
I set the microphone on the stage floor, and it rang once against the boards.
Zachary was still smiling, but his mouth had stopped meaning it.
"June," Regan called, bright and mean, "don't forget your wet little painting."
I took it with me.
I walked to the end of the Aldridges' driveway in my ruined shoes and did not turn around.
The bus took forty minutes, and I held the canvas on my lap like a sleeping child.
My apartment on Cedar Street was supposed to be a fresh start, a cheap one, away from the Aldridge housing stipend.
Boxes stood in the hall.
Hattie had left a note on the door that said GONE TO GET WINE, DON'T CRY WITHOUT ME.
I sat down on the stoop in the dark and cried anyway.
A car passed, and then the street was empty.
I felt someone standing at the bottom of the steps.
A man in a wet black coat stood under the broken streetlight with his hands open at his sides.
He was tall.
He had a short dark beard, and rain ran off his hair.
When he stepped into the light, I stopped breathing.
It was Zachary's face.
It was exactly Zachary's face, three years tired.
"Don't scream," he said, in Zachary's voice with the laugh scraped out of it.
He lifted his left hand, and the fishhook scar showed pale across the back of it.
"I'm Zachary, June."
"I'm Zachary three years from now."
"And where I come from, you're dead."
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