The journals.

He’s up, crossing the room to the narrow set of shelves where he kept them: red, blue, silver, black, white, green; six notebooks, all of them still there. He pulls them from the shelf, spreads them on the bed, and as he does, the Polaroids tumble out.

The one he took that day of Addie, her face a blur, her back to the camera, a ghost at the edges of the frame, and he stares at them a long time, convinced that if he squints, she will come into focus. But no matter how long he looks, all he can see are the shapes, the shadows. The only thing he can make out are the seven freckles, and those are so faint he can’t tell if they’re really visible, or his memory is simply filling them in where they should be.

He sets the photograph aside and reaches for the first journal, then stops, so convinced that if and when he opens it, he will find the pages blank, the ink erased like every other mark she tried to make.

But he has to look, and so he does, and there they are, page after page written in his slanting script, shielded from the curse by the fact the words themselves are his, though the story is hers.

She wants to be a tree.

There is nothing wrong with Roger.

She simply wants to live before she dies.

It will take her years to learn the language of those eyes.

She claws her way up, and out, hands splayed across the bony mound of a dead man’s back.

This is her first. How it should have been.

She feels him press three coins into her hand.

Soul is such a grand word. The truth is so much smaller.

It does not take her long to find her father’s grave.

He picks up the next journal.

Paris is burning.

The darkness comes undone.

And the next.

There is an angel above the bar.

Henry sits there for hours against the side of the bed, turning through every page of every book, every story she ever told, and when he’s done, he closes his eyes, and puts his head in his hands amid the open books.

Because the girl he loved is gone.

And he’s still here.

He remembers everything.

Brooklyn, New York

March 13, 2015

II

“Henry Samuel Strauss, this is bullshit.”

Bea slams the last page down on the coffee counter, startling the cat, who’d drifted off on a nearby tower of books. “You can’t end it there.” She’s clutching the rest of the manuscript to her chest, as if to shield it from him. The title page stares back at him.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

“What happened to her? Did she really go with Luc? After all that?”

Henry shrugs. “I assume so.”

“You assume so?”

The truth is, he doesn’t know.

He’s spent the last six months trying to transcribe the stories in the notebooks, to compile them into this draft. And every night, after his hands had cramped and his head had begun to ache from staring at the computer screen, he’d collapse into bed—it does not smell like her, not anymore—and wonder how it ends.

If it ends.

He wrote a dozen different endings for the book, ones where she was happy, and ones where she was not, ones where she and Luc were madly in love, and ones where he clung to her like a dragon with its treasure, but those endings all belonged to him, and not to her. Those are his story, and this is hers. And anything he wrote beyond those last shared seconds, that final kiss, would be fiction.

He tried.

But this is real—though no one else will ever know it.

He does not know what happened to Addie, where she went, how she is, but he can hope. He hopes she is happy. He hopes she is still brimming with defiant joy, and stubborn hope. He hopes she did not do it just for him. He hopes, somehow, one day, he’ll see her again.

“You’re really going to method actor this shit, aren’t you?” says Bea.

Henry looks up.

He wants to tell her it’s all true.

That she met Addie, just like he wrote, that she said the same thing every time. He wants to tell her that they would have been friends. That they were, in that first-night-of-the-rest-of-our-lives kind of way. Which was, of course, as much as Addie ever got.

But she wouldn’t believe him, so he lets it live for her as fiction.

“Did you like it?” he asks.

And Bea breaks into a grin. There is no fog in her eyes now, no shine, and he has never been more grateful to have the truth.

“It’s good, Henry,” she says. “It’s really, really good.” She taps the title page. “Just make sure you thank me in the acknowledgments.”

“What?”

“My thesis. Remember? I wanted to do it on the girl in those pieces. The ghost in the frame. That’s her, isn’t it?”

And of course, it is.

Henry runs his hand over the manuscript, relieved and sad that it is done. He wishes he could have lived with it a little longer, wishes he could have lived with her.

But now, he is glad to have it.

Because the truth is, he is already beginning to forget.

It’s not that he’s fallen victim to her curse. She has not been erased in any way. The details are simply fading, as all things do, glossing over by degrees, the mind loosening its hold on the past to make way for the future.

But he doesn’t want to let go.

He is trying not to let go.

He lies in bed at night, and closes his eyes, and tries to conjure her face. The exact curve of her mouth, the specific shade of her hair, the way the bedside lamp lit against her left cheekbone, her temple, her chin. The sound of her laughter late at night, her voice when she was on the edge of sleep.

He knows these details are not as important as the ones in the book, but he still can’t bear to lose them yet.

Belief is a bit like gravity. Enough people believe a thing, and it becomes as solid and real as the ground beneath your feet. But when you’re the only one holding on to an idea, a memory, a girl, it’s hard to keep it from floating away.

“I knew you were going to be a writer,” Bea is saying. “All the trappings, you’ve just been living in denial.”

“I’m not a writer,” he says absently.

“Tell that to the book. You’re going to sell it, right? You have to—it’s too good.”

“Oh. Yeah,” he says thoughtfully. “I think I’d like to try.”

And he will.

He will get an agent, and the book will go to auction, and in the end he’ll sell the work on one condition—that there is only one name on the cover, and it is not his—and in the end, they will agree. They’ll think it some clever marketing trick, no doubt, but his heart will thrill at the thought of other people reading these words—not his, but hers, of her name carried from lips to lips, from mind to memory.

Addie, Addie, Addie.

The advance will be enough to pay off his student loans, enough to let him breathe a little while he figures out what he’s going to do next. He doesn’t know yet what that is, but for the first time, it doesn’t scare him.

The world is wide, and he’s seen so little of it with his own eyes. He wants to travel, to take photos, listen to other people’s stories, maybe make some of his own. After all, life seems very long sometimes, but he knows it will go so fast, and he doesn’t want to miss a moment.