Falling into Forever (Falling into You) - By Lauren Abrams Page 0,5

glance at her again. She’s twirling the little stick in her coffee back and forth, but her hands are shaking and her brow is furrowed when she glances back up. It takes a minute before I see that the ice in her eyes has melted into a desperate plea, meant for me. She doesn’t want me to say that we know each other, I realize suddenly. Part of me wants nothing more than to cross the room in two steps to demand answers to a thousand questions, but that wouldn’t help either of us now.

Fine, Hallie. We’ll play it your way.

“Chris Jensen,” I say, not taking my eyes from her. The effort of trying to make myself sound detached almost kills me.

She relaxes visibly and nods. “Hallie Caldwell Ellison.”

The sound of the last name cuts deeper than a blade.

The tension in the room is palpable, and Jeff hurries to cut through it. He’s never been a fan of silence. But then again, Hallie isn’t normally, either.

“Chris is planning to play the lead.”

Hallie chuckles, but it sounds nothing like her laughter. Her cadence is all wrong, clipped and serious and harsh.

“Of course he is.”

I need to get out of here.

“I, um, I…” Now, I’m the one who sounds nothing like myself. I look at her, the way I used to, for strength. But even though she’s looking at me dead in the eye, there’s nothing for me in her face. “I just came in case we needed a closer, you know to deal the deal, but I just heard the news, so I guess that’s it…”

People are saying things to me, but I don’t hear any of it. I need to look at her, to stare, to inspect her face for any sign that she’s still the person I couldn’t imagine life without. The person who still occupies the first and last thought in my head every single morning and night. As people break into smaller conversations and lawyers start shuffling papers, I lean back in my seat and sneak a glance in her direction. She’s seemingly absorbed in a conversation with the woman in the red dress, but I do notice that the woman is doing most of the talking.

I had imagined her at 25, at 40, at 60, at 100, but in all of those musings, she had been laughing and happy in my arms. This Hallie is neither laughing nor happy.

Technically, she’s gotten more beautiful, I suppose. As she moves to speak with Jeff, I realize that the years have given her a kind of unconscious grace that’s normally associated with ballet dancers. There’s no chance that she’s going to fall off the edges of any balconies now. The flip flops are gone, replaced by a pair of black stilettos that make her legs look impossibly long. Her hair still defies any description of color, chestnut reds and autumn browns all mixed up together, but it’s pulled back from her face and highlights the fact that her cheekbones are standing out in sharp relief against the flawless, too pale skin. She’s lost weight that she couldn’t afford to lose in the first place, and it gives her an ethereal appearance, like she could just disappear into thin air. There’s no trace of the girl next door that I once met on a balcony overlooking Central Park. Even the most seasoned account reps, who deal with famous and impossibly beautiful actresses on a regular basis, are taking an extra moment to stare.

Despite all of that, looking at her fills me with an incredible sense of loss. Everything that made her Hallie, her laughing eyes and animation and warmth and joy, is gone. Even her eyes, ostensibly unchanged by the passage of time, are still the same shocking shade of blue, but they’re impenetrable, frosted over with a thick layer of ice.

I had been able to pretend, for all of these years, that she hadn’t grown up, that she was still out there somewhere. I even managed to make myself believe that maybe when I’d gotten my shit together, I could find her. But even though she’s sitting right in front of me, I haven’t found her at all. This woman bears only a slight resemblance to the girl I remember.

My Hallie.

She doesn’t belong to you, I remind myself.

And the fault for that was entirely mine.

Before I can make a move to steal her away from the table, she shoots the woman in the red suit a murderous look and