The Missing Last Chapter

At Anse Lazio, sunset was warming the granite boulders to the color of ripe peaches. Pale sand curved around the bay, and the Indian Ocean carried long strokes of coral between patches of blue. Harriet sat above the reach of the waves with her sandals beside her and a book open on her knees. She had read the same paragraph three times. A few feet away, a man was turning the pages of his paperback backward, occasionally looking up with an expression of personal betrayal, and she was finding him much more interesting.

He caught her watching and held up the book. The cover showed an orchard, a woman in a green coat, and the sort of house that usually concealed several family disagreements. Harriet had not read it, but she recognized the promise. Someone would return after a long absence. Someone else would be waiting. Whether they deserved each other was what made three hundred pages necessary.

This particular copy, the man explained, appeared to have misplaced its ending.

His name was Ben. He had bought the book at the airport and saved the final chapter for this evening, expecting the pleasure of finishing it somewhere memorable. Instead, after a character opened a much-anticipated letter, the story had abruptly returned to an incident from twenty years earlier. He had checked twice. The last printed page was quite definitely the last printed page, and it had left him with an apple tree, a bicycle, and no explanation whatsoever.

Harriet liked the restrained indignation in his voice. At forty-four, she had developed a weakness for people who cared about small things without mistaking them for disasters. She asked to see the book, and he moved closer, leaving enough space for her to decide whether the conversation would continue. His sleeves were rolled untidily, and his feet were bare. When he passed her the paperback, their fingers touched, briefly enough that she could pretend she had not noticed if she wanted to.

She did not especially want to.

They compared the final pages. The numbers jumped backward. Harriet suggested that he might have discovered an unusually literal form of experimental fiction, but he was unwilling to grant the author so much freedom. There were clues that demanded answers: a locked garden gate, a visitor who never stayed, the letter whose contents had occupied his thoughts for much of the afternoon. He described them with enough enthusiasm that she found herself wanting the ending too.

Around them, people were gathering towels and shaking sand from bags. Near their place on the sand, a sultry woman with sea-green eyes and a wine-red scarf passed with her shoes held together by their straps. A child's abandoned sandcastle softened at the edge of the wet sand. Ben secured his place in the book with a finger and asked what Harriet would have written in the letter. She said that depended on whether the person opening it had earned good news.

He laughed, and the sound pleased her more than it should have. Ben was forty-seven, a school cook on a holiday he had promised himself for his birthday. Harriet owned a small hair salon. She liked her work and had left it in capable hands for a week without feeling obliged to apologize. They were both divorced, facts that emerged naturally when they discussed whom they traveled with. Neither followed this information with a sad history or an attempt to make the other person feel better.

The light was deepening over the water. Harriet noticed how often Ben looked away from his book to see whether she was enjoying the conversation, and how little effort it took to let him know she was. He had an expressive mouth and a faint mark beside his eyebrow. She found herself wanting to learn whether his face looked the same when he was concentrating on something ordinary, a recipe or a set of instructions, and was surprised by how intimate that curiosity felt.

They began checking the paperback more carefully, fanning its pages without bending the spine. The binding was intact, but one block of pages sat oddly between two sections. When Harriet opened it there, a higher page number appeared. She turned back, then forward again. The final chapter had been bound into the middle of the book. Ben had assumed it was an abrupt leap forward and had stopped reading that section to avoid learning the ending early. Later he had forgotten exactly where the leap occurred.

His expression when she explained this was worth the entire investigation. The missing conclusion had been traveling with him all along. Harriet laid a finger on the beginning of the misplaced chapter and waited while he decided how much teasing he was prepared to accept.

“Considerable amounts,” he said, before she had asked.

She handed him the book. He could read now, if he wanted. She would watch the sunset and be quiet. Instead he asked whether she would mind staying while he finished, and the slight seriousness beneath the question made her answer just as plainly. She wanted to know what happened. She also wanted to stay.

For a few minutes he read beside her. The silence was companionable, yet she remained intensely aware of the space between their shoulders. Then he reached the letter and smiled. It had come from the woman's sister, who had left home years earlier after an argument. The expected lover was not the person waiting by the garden gate. Harriet liked this ending immediately. Ben admitted that he did too, although he had spent most of the book suspecting the wrong man.

He read her the last few lines quietly, without performing them. When he closed the paperback, neither moved to leave. Harriet could hear the slow withdrawal of water through the sand and the small catch in her own breath when he put his hand down close to hers.

“I'd rather like this to continue,” he said.

She knew he did not mean the novel. She turned her hand toward his, letting their fingers meet. They discovered that their homes were close enough for a real invitation to make sense, though neither suggested the holiday had to end before they used it. Harriet asked if he would walk with her along the beach while there was still light. Ben rose, offered his hand, and kept hold of hers after she was standing.

They carried their shoes over the firm sand, talking about books they loved and books they had abandoned without remorse. Near the path, Harriet stopped and turned toward him. His attention dropped to her mouth, then returned to her eyes. When she told him she would like him to kiss her, his answer was a quiet smile and a step closer.

His hand rested gently against her cheek. The first kiss was tentative; the second followed because she drew him back, unwilling to make an ending of the first. For a moment she forgot the paperback tucked beneath his arm, the sandals in her hand, the taxi she would eventually need to call. When they separated, he looked as pleased and slightly bewildered as she felt.

They exchanged numbers, arranged to meet the following afternoon, and walked to the pickup point together. Ben set the finished novel between them while they waited on a bench. Harriet opened it at the misplaced chapter and folded a spare receipt around the first page so its next reader would have a fair chance. Then she closed it and took his hand again. She had no objection to an unexpected beginning. She simply liked to know when she was in one.