Ghosted

Sarah meets Rueben and Kaia at a café. Kaia is friendly, and Sarah can’t find anything objectionable about her, describing her as purely good. Kaia makes conversation, but Sarah becomes distracted by a typing bubble that appears when she opens her messages with Eddie. She puts her phone down and tries to concentrate. When it vibrates, it’s only a message from her father saying that her grandfather’s caretakers have already quit; her parents will be bringing him home to care for him, so they’ll need an extra day before she returns. She receives a text message from a number that she doesn’t know which reads, “stay away from eddie” (126). This is later revealed to be from Carole Wallace. Sarah calls Jo who tells her to come over and that they’ll call this number together.

Sarah writes another letter, asking, “You started writing to me earlier [...]. Why did you change your mind?” (127). She then continues her life story where she’d previously left off. She tells Eddie that she was in a car accident after turning 17 in which she lost her sister, but she does not provide any more detail. Soon after, Sarah realized that she could no longer live in Gloucestershire and called Tommy, who told her to get on the next plane to LA. She describes his amazing home in Beverly Hills, which Tommy said that his family couldn’t afford. Sarah reports being concerned to find that Tommy was experiencing traits of disordered eating and excessive exercise. She asks him directly if he is gay, and he says that he is not. She also describes the beginning of their friendship with Jo. Sarah reports having been unable to return to England. Although she felt selfish at how much her parents missed her, she couldn’t face it. Her parents visited, which she found difficult as well. She then recollects meeting Rueben and starting her charity. Sarah signs off the letter and lets Eddie know that she’ll be back in Gloucestershire with her parents the next day and invites him to call her.

Having returned to stay with her parents, Sarah goes for a run, describing it as feeling like a mental health crisis. She sees an older woman (who is later revealed to be Carole) who stops and stares at her before turning around. Sarah turns back as well, thinking about how much she misses Eddie, then about how much she misses Hannah. She starts crying as she arrives back at the house, then meets her grandfather, who tells her to come to his room. Finding his silence comforting, Sarah tells him the whole story, suggesting that he was lucky not to experience technology in romantic relationships. He replies that he does understand her feelings, having fallen “in love with a woman for whom [he] would have torn down buildings” (142), then revealing that this woman was not Sarah’s grandmother. He tells Sarah that he regrets having given up on his love, and then curtly tells her that he needs to go to bed.

Sarah continues her life story in a letter to Eddie, telling him about taking on cleaning and odd jobs for Tommy’s mother’s friends. When one of their daughters broke her arm, Sarah accompanied the girl to the hospital. The girl was so afraid that she wouldn’t speak to the doctors, and when Mrs. Garcia arrives, Sarah went in search of a joke shop to find something to amuse the child. She met Rueben, who was entertaining at a children’s birthday party, and she asked him to come to the hospital. He did, and they eventually discussed the idea that became their Clowndoctor charity and began dating. Sarah signs off by telling Eddie that meeting Eddie made her realize how love should feel, and she asks him to write to her.

In a short, deleted email from Eddie’s drafts folder, he writes that his relationship with Sarah wasn’t a fling but “a lifetime,” but he says that she needs to stop messaging him because he isn’t who she thinks.

On the train to Central London, Sarah spots someone in an Old Robinsonians football kit getting off the train. This is the same team for which Eddie plays. She finds the website of the football club and finds that they have a match starting in just over an hour. She stops on the platform at her stop, nervous at the possibility of confronting Eddie.

Eddie addresses Alex (both still unidentified) in a letter addressed to “[y]ou” on the latter’s birthday. Eddie remembers having been terrified for his newborn sister. Eddie imagines Hannah having a nice birthday with her favorite things and concludes, “Maybe you’re everywhere. I like that idea most” (155). The letter includes the detail of “reading girls’ magazines in [the] den up on Broad Ride” (155)—a detail that could apply to Hannah as well as to Alex herself.

Having decided to try to confront Eddie at the football match, Sarah vacillates between imagining seeing him and berating herself for doing something that she finds appalling. Eddie isn’t there, but one of the other players realizes her identity. He tells her that she should stop trying to find Eddie.

At Tommy’s apartment, a sleepless Sarah attempts to go for run at three o’clock in the morning, but meets Jo, naked, in the kitchen. Sarah asks Jo what’s going on and receives several excuses before Tommy comes into the room, and the two eventually explain to Sarah that they’ve been having sex. As Sarah continues to question them, Jo announces that she loves Tommy, which she hadn’t told him yet. Sarah offers to leave so that Tommy and Jo can have some privacy, but Jo insists that she stay, and Tommy confesses his love for Jo, too. As Sarah’s departure for LA becomes increasingly imminent, Tommy asks if he needs to be worried about her, and she tells her friends that she isn’t sure. Tommy tells her that he remains suspicious of Eddie and wonders why he was there on the anniversary of the car accident when they met.

In another letter, written from the airport, Sarah apologizes to Eddie for her persistence in attempting to contact him. She tells him that their meeting has brought up some of her feelings about the accident and suggests that that has contributed to her actions. She shares that she feels both sad and relieved to be returning to LA, asks him to think before he ghosts another woman in the future, and thanks him for the time they shared together.

In another deleted email from Eddie’s drafts folder, he asks Sarah not to go and that he plans to watch the sky, knowing that her plane is likely in the air.