She felt herself smile, felt the anti-gravity motion of it, like her skin had to overcome its inertia from the hours of stress. She was leaving Belmar, and not even Old Man Jameson could fire her now. She walked over to the table where chicken enchiladas were being assembled and set a bowl down in front of the work-study student. "We're adding fresh cilantro today." She pointed to the large laminated recipe card in front of him. "Just put it in the mix and then a little bit on top of the tray after it comes out of the oven."

The young man pulled the bowl closer to the chicken. "Got it."

Max walked over to the coffee urn, poured himself a cup and stood back, watching, waiting, while she set out to add a little something to every recipe in the kitchen. When she'd made the rounds, unstopped by Old Man Jameson, she headed over for pie. Max got in line beside her. "You were like that guy who pretended to be all those things, you know an airline pilot and a doctor." He pointed to the apple pie and the server put a slice on a plate and handed it under the sneeze guard. "Everyone thought you ran the cafeteria."

"Yeah. For my next gig, I'm going to impersonate a homeless woman." She put a fork on the edge of her plate. "Oh wait, I am."

They sat down at a table, and Gwen knew it was the same section of the cafeteria they'd always sat in. They'd shared a hundred meals together from the first dinner at his parent's house until she'd left school a year-and-a-half later, and she didn't want it to, but it felt right to sit with him one last time.

Max took a bite of pie, set his fork down. "You're leaving, aren't you?"

She didn't even pretend she could eat. "Yeah."

He seemed to consider that for a moment. "It always looked like I was the one who ran."

Gwen's Life... December 12th, Tuesday 1990 The cramps woke her. She lay on her side with her knees tucked into her body, and it took her a moment to remember she was in Max's apartment. She'd dreamed herself back home while she slept, back to the summer vacation past when things were uncomplicated, except for missing Max so intensely.

He lay beside her in the dark, and she wanted to close her eyes and pretend, but she knew. Another cramp fisted low inside her.

She'd known, without wanting to, the day she'd told him in the football stadium. She'd known there was trouble, but they'd both ignored it as if it would just go away.

She felt her body begin to shake. This was trouble that wouldn't be ignored. She reached out and touched his shoulder, rounded in a curl of sleep. "Max."

He turned toward her, rubbing his face on the edge of her pillow.

"Max, something's wrong."

He drove and the late night radio jarred them with hard rock.

She sat with her arms crossed low over her belly, now a steadier pain, but still enough to make her heart race. If she could stop holding herself together for a second, she'd reach out and snap the radio off. She'd reach out, grab Max's hand, and never let go.

He pulled into the wide arch of the emergency entrance and walked in by her side, leaving only to re-park the car. By the time she'd filled out her paperwork, he was back. She didn't know how long they waited. She just felt herself sit without time or space, as if other people weren't waiting there too. And she thought about luck, about thin slivers of luck, and how ninety-eight percent effective meant two percent would have to live with failure.

A nurse with tired eyes, so tired they looked permanent, took them back to the exam room. She asked more questions, and Gwen thought she answered them and then the nurse handed her a faded gown and asked Max to step outside.

He kissed her. He said he would be right back, and she watched him go.

He stood in the hallway, leaning his back against the wall. He'd stood like that before, one foot behind him, sole to baseboard. Maybe he'd been ready to run into the gym for a basketball game. Maybe he'd been waiting to get his high school diploma. None of that had been very long ago and yet a whole lifetime had passed too.

He felt the doctor move down the hall, turn next to him, and go into the room. But Max didn't look up, not until the doctor came back out and stood in front of him. The guy studied him for a moment, and Max didn't even want to imagine what he saw. "You're..." he tipped his head toward the door.

"Yes."

"It's a first trimester, what we call, clinical spontaneous abortion. Very common. We'll do a D and C, and she'll get antibiotics to make sure there's no infection. Miscarriages happen to ten, twenty percent of women who are pregnant."

Max felt himself flinch, not at all the doctor had said, all that was going on, all that was happening to Gwen. The word miscarriage hadn't hit him. Pregnant had, and he felt ashamed for that.

"We've already given her a sedative. Come back in the morning." The doctor headed down the hallway as if everything was settled.

Max stayed with his back against the wall for how long he didn't know then he headed for the exit and back to U.

Back to U...

Max looked at her like he was finally figuring something out. "It always looked like I was the one who ran."

She flinched, and he must have seen the guilt that flashed through her.

"I'm right, aren't I?" He studied her face, and she wished she'd mastered the art of the bluff because he didn't need to know what hand she really held. It felt like he found a crack in her armor and pushed.

He leaned closer across the table as if asking something from her. "I came back. I came back to that hospital, Gwen, came back to get you, to be with you, and be there for you, and..." he swallowed, "and you were both gone."

Tears were already leaving her eyes, but she was too far gone to even worry that she might not stop if she started. She'd run for twenty years, and no matter how hard she'd tried to hold things together, she couldn't. Keeping everything from the past contained in the past hadn't worked because when the time arrived, it arrived, and nothing could seal the dam.

She took in a shallow breath, no older than she had been in that minute, nineteen and scared beyond belief. "I started to have cramps, and I thought..."

She hadn't been sure she could rely on her lungs to breathe, her eyes to see, her ears to relay the choices the doctor had given her at that moment. And Max hadn't been there.

She'd known he'd been leaving, maybe from the first time they met. He'd been someone to fall crazy in love with, but she wasn't ever supposed to need him. He'd left her there and not come right back like he'd said he would.

She'd been trapped, but he was free to walk alone into his future. That loss felt like the twin mountain of the one she'd known was ahead. "They asked me to decide. The cramping was slowing, and they didn't know if I would miscarry or not. They asked me if I wanted to try to save, you know, save the baby or just go through with it. I, I had to decide. And I did."

Reaching for a napkin, she pulled a dozen of them out of the silver holder and wiped beneath her eyes as if she could erase the tears. "They didn't know what would happen. No one could say, and I was so scared. I've never used that as an excuse. I just was. And I chose to have an abortion."

For a moment Max didn't seem to understand what she'd said. She found herself praying that he would, he would just get it, and she wouldn't have to say any more, explain what she hadn't ever wanted him to know in the first place.

When she watched his face fall into loss and the muddied mix of emotions that shoots in with it, she understood for the first time that he didn't have a Missy. He'd never had that child that made, somehow, the child that wasn't there, not all the way lost. She wished, when she saw him rise and start to say something, that she could have died with the knowledge, that he could have gone his life never knowing.

He shook his head. "I came back for you, and they said you'd gone."

She felt her own pain at that. "You can think I'm right or wrong for what I chose, but I was right about you, Max. I may have wanted to believe otherwise, especially when we met again, but your wife ended whatever that might have been. "

His eyebrows came together, and he shook his head. "I don't have a wife, Gwen. I told you about Nicola."

"Right. And then she told me..." Gwen considered for the first time the source, the grandmother recipe stealing source.

He laughed, short and sarcastic. "You know, I knew back then what you thought of me, but I loved you anyway. I wasn't perfect, Gwen, nobody can live up to your version of perfect, but I did my best, and I've done my best by you twenty years later too. You needed some big gesture back then, I guess, something that would prove I was there for you. Well, I was scared about the future too, but I was there. You were the one who ran away."

When he shook his head she knew he didn't even have the words to say how much he hated her for it. She had hurt him again, and after so many years, the wound was unnecessary. She watched him leave and felt pain in a way she'd never felt before, not even twenty years earlier when she'd left Belmar, and he hadn't come after her.

He didn't know how long he'd been sitting in the stadium bleachers. He just kept looking out at the skiff of snow on the field, its thin coverage only making the grass a sickly shade of yellow.

There had been beauty in the emerald green of summer, and there would be comfort in the thick coat of white a full-out winter would bring. But this wasn't either of those seasons.

He felt the leather camera case in his grip, just in the palms where he had a little warmth left. He ought to capture the moment. It was under-photographed, the ugly middle, the sketchy late fall when things were dying and not gone enough to offer the resignation of hibernation. She would leave. Not that it should matter. She'd already left him. Left him the first time by shutting him out. Left him the same way the second time, he supposed.

And he had what he'd always had. Himself. A camera. When he was younger, he'd also had the need to see the world. Maybe that impulse had really been to run, and probably from the moment he'd opened his eyes to his parents. But when it came to Gwen, he hadn't been the one to take off. This time he'd tried to prove himself, and maybe he hadn't even done a completely bad job of it.

But a man couldn't prove anything to a woman who didn't care either way.

She sat in the cafeteria until the last student left and the last work-study worker wiped the second to last table then skirted around her and dimmed the lights. She didn't consider that she couldn't stay forever. Nothing existed except the moment, the moment she'd hurt the one man she'd never wanted to hurt and, she knew, changed things forever.

When the table shift slightly, she looked up to see Old Man Jameson across from her. He wore the same neutral going-on-sour expression he always did, and he sighed like sitting was more work than he cared to engage in.

She sighed back because it was a language Eyeore might have understood.

"So, you changed my recipes."

She nodded once, sighed again.

"Without my say so, in my kitchen, past your own little gourmet hoo-ha."

"Yep."

He shifted in his chair, and Gwen felt more exhausted just witnessing it. "I suppose you know better with your fancy cooking da-gree and your la-de-da herbs."

He'd said herbs with the h, but Gwen didn't have the energy to correct him.

"Suppose you think you're something."

"Yes, I suppose I am just full of myself. I'm a la-de-da herbal genius."

"I could kick you out, Missy. Don't get sassy with me."

Old Man Jameson used to call her missy? "Oh my god, I named my daughter Missy."

"Probably just as big a know-it-all as you were. Got to learn the rules before you break them. Didn't know that when I sent you packing, did you?"

"Well, don't pop a blood vessel. I'm gone for good this time."

"Cry me a river. You'd think you didn't want a job, taking that attitude with me."

"Oh, please hire me 'cause I really need a minimum wage job dishing up runny eggs to match the rest of my life. I'm broke and homeless and out of school one semester before I actually finish a god damn degree, and alone, alone because I am a total screw up, twice with the same wrong man, and don't even get me started on my teenage daughter and mother."

"Your mother's a teenager?"

"Go away."

He rose, his knees creaking, which only made Gwen think serves him right when she might normally have thought oh, that's too bad. "Got an assistant who up and left for one of them rib houses. Serve you up dinner on a garbage can lid like people need a trough these days. Could have been a la-de-da chef myself, but I landed here. Benefits and a chance for my kids to go to college for free. Me too if I'd wanted it."

She studied his long, thin face. He had the beady eyes of a really sharp crow, but he made no sense. "What are you talking about?"

"Well, isn't Miss Smarty Pants paying attention now?" He sat back down. "I'm offering you a job."

"I have nothing, and you're offering me..."

"Free school, free room if you want it."

"And about..."

"Ten thousand meals a week."

Gwen swallowed then put her forehead on the table.

"You can eat nineteen of those yourself, but you might want to pace it some. Woman your age can run to fat."

Gwen didn't lift her head off the table but held out her hand. Old Man Jameson took it in his dry thin one, shook it and, she thought, laughed.

When his fingers took on a shade that was more frostbitten white than really cold red, he'd left the stadium for his office, fumbled with the lock on the door, and managed to get inside to unthaw in the dark. He blinked when the light went on.

"Cher?"

He smiled to himself and turned toward the doorway and the woman who would be blamed for sabotaging him, if Gwen had really loved him. He studied her pretty face, so Gallic with its sharp features, and so expressionless. A dozen images of Gwen, happy, irritated, in crisis, in passion, in sleep, came to him, but he pushed them aside.

"I am off now. Just now. My mere and pere have asked me home."

Bailed her out again. "I'm happy for you, Nicola."

"You will not go with me?" She asked, but he could see her discomfort, or could guess at it since she didn't like to wrinkle her face with feeling.

He'd make her wonder a minute before he put her out of her misery. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three. He glanced out the window and tried to feel something for the snowflakes drifting down. Nothing. He heard her let out the small impatient huff she usually reserved for her parents. He turned, smiled. "I'm going to stay here, I think."

She briefly took his hands in what felt like an afterthought. "I am here then to say goodbye. And also my passport, naturellement. You were watching these things when we arrived."

He nodded and slid open the top drawer of his desk, reaching for a silver key in the midst of a nest of rubber bands. Behind him he could hear Nicola poking around in his boxes with the lack of effort he'd once thought charming. He keyed the bottom drawer and opened it to her passport and the keys to the Paris apartment. He had watched out for her and maybe taken better care than he'd given himself credit for. It didn't escape him that he'd figured something out just in time for nothing. He was like the guy who finally develops the skills for basketball, and it's football season. He was ready for a spring sport, but in his life, it was fall.

He turned to Nicola, the passport and keys in his hand, and felt relieved that they weren't for him. "Here you go." He saw that she'd managed to unpack the top layer of every box. It was like turning your back on an irritated but not very thorough cat.

She dropped what was in her hand, a battered green notebook that took the fall as if it were just another of many. He moved to it, felt Nicola tug the passport out of his hand. He opened his palm to give her the keys and reached for Gwen's journal.

Smoothing the cover, he pressed down the bend at the corner, and looked up to see Ty in the doorway, standing half-turned towards the hall with his eyes glancing towards the exit. Aussie boy didn't have much fight in him, but Max would bet a hundred bucks he excelled at flight. The kid hadn't been worried about Max wanting to poach Gwen, but seemed stressed about a potential caveman fight over Nicola. Dingo-got-my-baby boy was an idiot.

Max held out his free hand, shook Ty's before he could do anything but react out of habit.

Behind him, he felt Nicola's growing impatience. He was doing her a favor, slowing down her exit. Any delay in their take-off would give her another minute of Ty sticking around to use her. Nicola jostled by, tilted her head at Ty. "You have put the valises to the car?" She didn't wait for him to answer, and Max felt her attention turn his way. He tried not to wonder what she wanted next, but she just kissed him lightly on each cheek, "Adieu," and set off down the hallway, leaving Aussie boy behind.

Max tilted his head at Ty just as Nicola had. "Bonne chance."

Ty shot off after her, and Max turned back to his office and the scattered boxes. In his hands, he held Gwen's college life. He should put the journal back in the nearest box, and seal it away for another twenty years in a masking-taped time capsule. He tossed it in the bottom desk drawer, slid it closed, but didn't lock it.

Chapter Twenty-Two.