“Yes. I loved it. College is everything they say it is.”
“What do you mean?”
“That it’s the time when you find yourself. When you figure out what you want. And when you have a ton of fun.”
“I can’t wait to start. I know I’m going to love it.”
“You are,” Bryan said, but there was something sad in his tone.
I looked at him. “Hey. You okay?”
“Totally.”
“Because you sounded…”
“I’m fine.”
But he grew quieter as we checked out the campus bookstore, and a cafe where I said I would probably do all my homework, and the library, which was speckled with students for the summer session. His mind was elsewhere, and he didn’t tell me where he’d gone.
At the station on Sunday night, I thanked him again for the necklace.
“You should always wear it,” he said before I caught the last train to Mystic. His voice was wistful, and when he kissed me goodbye, the moment had become melancholy. I didn’t feel like a girl who was returning in a week for her eighteenth birthday. I felt like a girl being sent off with only a Hello Kitty necklace to remember him by.
When I called a few days later to confirm our weekend plans, his voice was different. Strained and distant.
“I don’t think you should come in,” he said.
Something didn’t compute. We’d been planning this weekend for more than a month. “Why? Did something come up at work?” My shoulders started to tighten with worry.
“No. It’s just…I don’t think we should.”
“Should what?”
There were so many ways to answer the question, but the scariest one was the one he said next.
“I don’t think we should be together.”
I looked at my phone briefly as if it were a radio, mistakenly tuned to a channel I could no longer understand. I brought the phone to my ear and said the only thing I could think of. The thing I was clinging to. “But I’m totally in love with you, Bryan. One hundred percent and then some. And I want to be with you.”
Then I waited, and I waited, and I waited.
Words didn’t come.
The silence choked me. It was as if hands were on my neck, gripping me.
How could I have misread him so badly? He’d said he was falling for me. Where else do you fall but in love?
Then he spoke, and his words were sharp glass. “I have to go.”
Breaking the clasp in a single, fierce pull, I ripped off the necklace, then tossed it into the trash, stuffing it at the bottom of the can.
That was the last time I spoke to him.
Even now, five years later, those words rang through me. I could hear them, the pause before he spoke, the shape of each and every syllable. I have to go.
That’s exactly what he did. He left.
Chapter Nine
The factory was loud and busy. Machines whirred, conveyor belts hummed, parts rattled and people chatted. Bryan gave me the guided tour of the whole operation, stopping along the way to talk with his employees, from the managers who ran the facilities to some of the men and women at the end of the line who worked like master jewelers with loupes, carefully and painstakingly putting the finishing touches on pair after pair of fine platinum and pewter and silver cufflinks for the line called Sleek. Made Here also created cufflinks from recycled materials including old watches and bike chains that had a deliberately worn and purposefully tarnished look for the Scuff line. The factory had once made lugnuts for hubcaps. With his expertise in engineering and his vision for solving problems in unconventional ways, Bryan had retrofitted the former auto parts factory for Made Here’s goods, and the result was a mixture of automation and craftsmanship.
“You know what I really want most for the recycled line?”
“What would that be?”
“The lover’s bridge in Paris.”
“Just take the whole bridge and chop it up?”
He laughed. “No. The padlocks,” he said, referring to the locks that hung on of one of the bridges arcing over the Seine. Lovers wrote their names on locks, hooked them to the links and tossed the keys in the river as a promise. It was a popular spot for locals and tourists and the net effect was every year the old locks had to be cut and tossed away to make room for new proclamations of the heart. “I’ve been trying to work with the city of Paris for years. To find a way to buy the used locks from them — the ones they have to cut off every year. But, French bureaucracy is, well, French bureaucracy.”
My eyes lit up, and for one of the first times with him in this go-round, I spoke from the heart. “That would be amazing, though. What a perfect gift. A pair of cufflinks made from padlocks on the lover’s bridge.”
“Right? Wouldn’t it be? And it’s not as if the city cuts the locks because the couples broke up. They only throw them out because they need room for more. So what if I could take those off their hands and turn them into something?”
“Do you think it’ll happen?”
“I’ve made some headway. But it’s a project I can’t delegate. I’m the only one at the company who’s fluent enough to converse with French civil workers.”
“Well, if you need any help, you know where to find me. But I should let you know, I charge extra for my translation services.”
That earned a brief smile. “Let me show you more.” He pointed to the machines that moved the parts along in a precision-timed fashion. “That’s how we can turn out product quickly and on time by keeping the process moving,” he said, then we stopped at a section of the factory floor where workers took their time handling the materials to turn them into the beginnings of new shapes and sizes.