—
She isn’t sure how long she’s been sobbing into her pillow. But when she finally turns her head to gasp for air, Everett is lying in the bed beside her.
“What are you doing here?” she asks. Her voice stumbles asshe attempts to work through the congestion her tears have generated, so it mostly sounds wet instead of annoyed as she intended.
Everett looks down at himself, then around. “Um. Laying? Or is it lying? I’ve never understood that.”
“You aren’t supposed to come into my room without asking first.”
“I did ask first. I said, ‘Knock, knock, can I come in?’ like usual, and then I did it again, and then I said, ‘Gretchen, sweetheart, you’re gonna drown in your tears if you don’t ease up.’ And you didn’t answer, so I thought maybe youdiddrown, so I—”
Annoyingly, the reminder that she was sobbing prompts another round of it.
“Oh, Gretch, please don’t cry anymore,” Everett says. A coolness over her back makes Gretchen suspect he’s hovering a hand over the spot in a futile attempt to soothe her. “It makes you so splotchy.”
She manages to give him a withering look through her swollen eyelids.
“Tell me what’s wrong. What’s eating you? Is it cold feet? Are you rethinking this whole marriage thing?” He sounds almost hopeful. “You don’t have to go through with it, you know. It’s Charlie’s burden, and I’m sure he won’t hold it against you if you don’t want to take it on—”
“It isn’t that. Not really.”
Everett sits up and crosses his legs. “Then what? I’m here for you. You can talk to me.”
Gretchen studies him. There’s genuine compassion in his eyes, something close to what she saw in Charlie’s in the kitchen earlier (though without the underlying heat). She rises to sit facingEverett and buries her face in her hands. “I love him too much. I love him and that’s why he has to leave.”
“Oh. Wow. Okay. I mean, I knew you were stuck on the guy, but I didn’t realize it was so serious,” he says after a moment.
“I didn’t either, but... it is. I know that love means giving him his freedom, and I thought I could be selfless enough to do that, but I’m not sure now. How am I going to live here without him? I know I don’t deserve to keep him, but Iwantto. I want to so fucking bad.” Her sobs make her shoulders heave, her whole body shake.
“Shh, shh.” Everett inches slightly closer to her, careful not to let their knees bump. “I... I wish I could hug you. I wish I could do something, anything...” He trails off into a silence that lasts uncharacteristically long enough to pierce through Gretchen’s sorrow as something notable. She wipes her eyes with her arm as she looks up, and catches an odd expression on his ultra-pale face.
“Gretchen, I have to tell you something,” he says at last, his voice quiet and his gaze dropping down toward the bed. “It isn’t forever.”
Something about the way he says it doesn’t sound as if he means, like, this too shall pass. “What?” she asks. But her Eichorn DNA has already provided an explanation; she recognizes Everett’s expression now as the same one she must have worn when she decided to tell Charlie the truth.
“It isn’t forever,” Everett repeats. “The curse. It’ll expire. In a few more months, a year or two tops, you can leave. Find Charlie if you want. It’s not... You don’t need to be upset anymore.”
As the ghost’s words fully register, it’s like one of those extremely sharp knives they advertise late at night on TV, slicingthrough her sadness so cleanly her tears abruptly stop. “I don’t need to be upset.”
“No, doll. Just... just patient.” He smiles nervously.
“Patient,” she repeats. “Because it isn’t forever. The curse has an expiration date.”
“Yep,” he says, the smile turning into an even more nervous grimace as he does half-hearted jazz hands. “Surpriiiise.”
“Which means you’ve been lying to me. Since the moment we first met.”
Everett abandons his attempt at lightheartedness as he notes her aggrieved expression. “Well. Yes.” He swallows hard. “But... good acting, right?”
37
There’s a long pause before Gretchen can get a word out again. But the look she gives him speaks volumes—practically an encyclopedia of her fury. He doesn’t even need help turning the pages.
Everett puts his hands up and backs away, falling off the bed. From where he’s splayed out a few inches over the floorboards, he says in a hurry, “Before you get too sore, let me explain.”
“Oh yes, you definitely have some explaining to do.”
“Was that supposed to be anI Love Lucyreference?”
