no idea how the universe works, or why. I just know that you are the girl that held my hand and gave me this card and now you are standing in front of me.”
Another tear escaped my eyes. “This was the first card I ever made.” I clutched the card in my hands. “Since this one, I’ve made hundreds. I’ve given them, anonymously, to hundreds of people. But this was the one that started it all.”
“Why do you make them?”
“It’s been my only way of reaching out and trying to connect with people. Connecting without having to connect in person, because I’ve been too scared of doing that. It was always safer to communicate through a card. Not in person.”
He nodded. “But you don’t need to do that anymore.”
He leaned in and kissed me. It was slow and soft and gentle, like it was last night. “You have me now,” he said. “You’ve had me for twenty years, I just didn’t know it was you.”
“I have?” I asked.
He nodded, his face still pressed into mine. His lips dragged against mine as his head moved up and down. “You’ve been on my mind and in my dreams since that day you gave me this card. You’ve had me for longer than I think you know.”
I let out a small sigh, and then wrapped my arms around his shoulders, the card still in my hands. I looked at the card and I couldn’t believe it had come back to me like this. All those years ago, I’d sent that card out into the world, given it to a boy who needed it, and that card and that boy—man—had come right back to me. Like a perfect circle, curling around and completing itself.
Completing me.
CHAPTER 73
We didn’t go back home after that night together in the hotel. How could we? It felt like our adventure together was just beginning and we had so much more to do before we both had to go back home, back to reality. Noah still had another few weeks off before he started nursing college and I, well, I didn’t have a job to go back to, it seemed. Which was confirmed when I received that email officially firing me. I don’t really blame my boss for that. I had sworn at him in front of the entire company. But strangely enough, I’d also gotten another fifty or so emails from the various staff members who I’d sent cards to over the years, each one of them thanking me for the cards and apologizing that they had never gotten to know me.
But I was glad they hadn’t gotten to know me, because the person I had been when I was there wasn’t really a person to get to know, and wasn’t the real me anyway. Zoe was the person to get to know. She was the real me. She always had been, she’d just needed a little more time to come out. She’d taken a slight detour in life to get to this point, but now that she had arrived, she was living loud and bright and tie-bloody-dyed.
Instead of going back to Joburg, Noah and I chartered a yacht to Mozambique. The idea had come to me when we’d been having dinner at my parents’ house the next day and they’d told me about the cruise they wanted to take when they retired. As soon as we’d left, I got in the car and Googled and booked a holiday for the following week. So what if I was a few years late with the cruise that my parents had encouraged me to take? It might have been late, but as it turned out, it was exactly the right time for me. In fact, everything that had happened to me had happened at just the right time, and in just the right way. Like living my teens and childhood in only a couple of days at the age of almost thirty, and then only having my first real love story now. And that was okay. My life had been put on pause by the accident, and then the illness, and then by me. I’d pressed the pause button out of fear, but now I’d picked the damn remote back up and had pressed play! And I was playing in full HD color right now.
Noah and I spent a week on the yacht, winding our way around the six islands off Mozambique and, on the last night on the yacht, we