A few notes here:

This is not a sequel to The Morning After (if anyone even remembers that story!) It was heavily implied in the revival by Luke and Jess's brief exchange about the wi-fi password that he did come home and stay in Stars Hollow sometime between 2007 and 2015 for at least six months. I've kept that part of the story because I consider that canon. However, for reasons that will soon become obvious, I've chosen not to have Rory and Jess not hook up during that period in this version of events.

I've messed around with the AYITL timeline a lot here. We're led to believe that Lorelai and Rory's estrangement takes place in late July/early August, at which point Lorelai fights with Luke, decides to go to California to figure her life out, and . . . time apparently stops until late September (based on what the trees look like). Then Lorelai spends half a week in California while we're led to believe that Rory's plotline takes place over a time period of about six weeks. Then it's magically November when Lorelai comes back home and she plans her wedding in four days?

No. Nope. Nada. Not happening. I'm fixing it here. If the original writers couldn't hire someone to check for logic and consistency, I guess I'll have to make some things up. Hope you guys enjoy it, and any feedback is much appreciated.

Four years was a long time to go without seeing Jess Mariano in person.

The two of us had floated between huge changes in the status of our relationship to each other in much less time in the past. He'd been so many different things to me – the guy I secretly pined for, the first boyfriend who I felt really got me, the distant guy I didn't know anymore because he was too busy drowning in his own anger and self-loathing to let me help him, and finally the ex-boyfriend begging me to run away with him that I angrily turned away because I knew I couldn't trust him. Then a year and a half went by and I met him as a totally different person. He became the guy who knew me well enough to know that I would never be happy pretending to be a cosseted society girl. Unfortunately, he also became the guy I wanted to use to piss off my own boyfriend but ultimately knew by that point was just too good for me to treat him that way. That was seemingly the end of our romantic involvement with each other. After playing out all of those different roles in my turbulent adolescent love story, Jess finally evolved into something better and more permanent. He was just my friend, and I think both of us needed that for a while.

I wasn't terribly good at relationships after I left college. I was never in one place for long enough to make them work, and the few times that I tried it they always ended up being buried under my desire to catch the next story, the next new adventure, the next place or experience or cultural disaster that I hadn't tried yet. I'd always had such a hard time letting go of these attachments in the past that it was just easier not to form them.

Oddly enough, Jess was the opposite of me. He settled down in Philadelphia, slowly took over the book press, and had a couple of steady girlfriends that he'd occasionally bring to family functions or that I'd meet for a few minutes when I visited his city. Then his business fell apart and he ended up back in Stars Hollow for about eight months, living in the apartment above the diner and nursing his wounds while he attempted to put things back together. I know Luke helped him get the seed money to get things started again (though Jess did tell me that he dithered over giving him the wi-fi password at the diner for months and months) and that Jess re-opened the book press himself with an eye out to avoid questionable business partners in the future. Soon he had a profitable business that was wholly his own, a townhouse he was buying himself, and a live-in girlfriend to share it all with.

Meanwhile, my career was starting to wind down. I'd decided the best way to handle it was to switch continents and take up with an almost married ex who only felt comfortable treating me like his girlfriend when the person he actually planned to spend his life with wasn't around. I still e-mailed and texted Jess occasionally, but I'd stopped dropping into Philadelphia three or four times a year, and I kept missing him at family functions. He didn't send me books quite as often, and I'd stopped calling him to talk about assignments or newly published articles. Instead of being the friends who understood each other enough to want to share the things we were passionate about, we'd become what I never thought we would be: the kind of extended relatives who circle away from each other until they only become the kind of people you vaguely know on Facebook.

So it wasn't any wonder that Jess didn't realize what a shell of myself that I'd become when he found me offering him Scotch in the Gazette Office. I could feel those same brown eyes looking at me and knowing me, understanding me, questioning what I'd become – and then slowly, steadily driving me back to the person I wanted to be again. No one else had been capable of that – not Logan, not Lane, not even my mom. Jess always felt what really inspired me and what I needed to feel like myself again.

I'd already started to let go of Logan by that point. I'd felt so out of place at home during April's visit that my first instinct was to find an excuse to run back to him and insert myself into that pampered world again, but it was already too late. The fiancé I often tried to pretend didn't exist had finally become a permanent fixture in his life, and I couldn't pretend that I belonged there anymore. I still continued to talk to him; he was as supportive of me writing the book as he had been about all of my other projects, although he didn't really understand why my mom didn't want the more embarrassing details of our early poverty to become something that was shared well beyond just the two of us. It wasn't until I had to bite down my impulse to call him and vent about how frustrated I was about not having her full approval to write about all of it that I began to understand that I needed to finally stop living in denial. I couldn't pretend anymore that I was sharing any sort of life with him. I wasn't the fun girlfriend who comes to visit at the penthouse every couple of weeks. I was the woman standing in the way of someone else's marriage, and I couldn't be that anymore.

I let him take me on one final grand adventure, and that was it. It was early August by that point, and the town had grown so weary of the summer heat that they had started to put up fall decorations a full month ahead of time. The trees were still mostly green, but Taylor actually commissioned fake fall foliage to be inserted at random places around town to try to fool the seasons into transitioning before their time. I knew Luke would be furious and my mom would be delighted – except I didn't really know, because my mom didn't want to talk to me, and Luke seemed distracted when I ventured into the diner and tried to talk to him. I had been staying at Lane's, but it was really difficult to concentrate at her house. She and Zach practiced a lot when they were home, and there were musicians coming in and out of the house constantly. The combination of the music in the background and the ever-present din of two energetic nine-year-olds running from room to room fighting over light sabers and Legos and whose turn it was to play on Mom's drum set today did not make for a productive writing environment. I didn't have a car, and had to borrow Lane or Zach's if I needed to go anywhere (though Lane finally forced me to go to the DMV after she found out I had been doing this for two weeks straight without actually having a license). My supposed freedom of movement had turned into quite the opposite, and I was getting absolutely no work done.

I needed one last respite, one night of debauchery and carefree delight with my old flame before I sent him on his way. I'd enjoyed playing in his wonderland, but it was time to become an adult now and leave him behind. I needed my own life, not the bits and pieces I'd cobbled together from everyone else's.

Maybe eventually there would be someone else to share it with. I hadn't let myself think about that for a long, long time, but now that I was piecing everything together, I realized that I actually missed it.

I'd decided to decamp myself to my grandmother's empty residence to begin working on the book.

Maybe the planned move to Queens was a more logical plan, but I just couldn't make myself do it yet. I didn't want to make such a permanent move until things were right between my mom and me, and I was beginning to realize that it probably wasn't a judicious use of the money that I had left to me. Jess and I were talking regularly about the project, and after hearing about what profit I could reasonably expect to make as a first-time author, I decided to hold back.

After a half dozen coffeehouse/diner sessions (we'd switch between Luke's and Weston's) hashing out a game plan and twice as many late-night phone conversations, Jess met me with a formal-ish book contract and an offer to serve as my editor. I reminded him that he would actually be in the book. His response to toss me his trademark smirk and tell me that he could handle it.

"There's nothing that's transpired between us since that couldn't make up for what happened when we were kids," he said.

I knew that, too, but I felt a little sad about it. Because I was remembering the good stuff that we had shared before, in a way that I hadn't let myself think about for ten years of friendship and shared manuscripts and bantering over the Christmas dinner table, and I missed it. I knew it was silly to think like this – not only were we somewhat vaguely related, but he was my editor now. But sometimes his hand would graze my knee or I'd catch him looking at me with that half-quizzical, half-mischievous look and I'd be transported back to that time when I was eighteen and in love with someone who was interested in everything I was and didn't expect anything else of me than what he had always known me to be.

I just wished there wasn't such a big gap between now and then.

For right now, though, I liked the way I'd come to depend on the interplay between the both of us, whether it stayed the way that it was or not. I still wasn't talking to my mom, and as August gave way to September it started to bother me more and more. The Gilmore estate (I could never let myself really think of it as a mansion) was an ideal place to write: it was somehow the perfect combination of pure silence and a reminder of memories that didn't quite hurt as much anymore. I felt comfortable being surrounded by my grandfather's books and furniture and thinking back on all the years I had spent there as a mediator between my mother and my grandparents.

Jess knew my Stars Hollow life, and he knew me as a writer, but he hadn't really known that part of me. As I got further and further into the project, I found myself still wanting to talk to my mom about it. Maybe it wouldn't make everything between us better, but if she understood why I needed to tell that part of it, maybe the rest would come a little easier to her, too.

I was thinking of just that when Jess unexpectedly came to the doorstop that September evening.