Though the forest cocooned us enough for the Jeep’s headlights to reflect off wet fronds, I couldn’t see his eyes, but I felt his presence keenly, just as I had this whole long day. If he hadn’t been with me, what I thought to be challenging would have been ten times more so. This was what he and I had.
“I’ve always loved you,” I admitted, “but that is not the issue.”
“It is.”
I knew he was thinking that if we loved each other, we would get through whatever came our way. Only, we hadn’t after Lily died. We had failed spectacularly.
“The difference,” he finally said when he turned to me after parking at the house, “is that back then we got trampled by the outside world. We lost sight of what we wanted.”
“We wanted Lily,” I reminded him, feeling a visceral ache in my gut.
“We wanted each other first,” Edward countered. “Lily came from us, but if there hadn’t been a ‘we,’ she wouldn’t have existed at all.”
I killed her, I thought but knew not to say. Edward didn’t like that wording, and maybe he was right. Technically, I had been responsible for her death. But I hadn’t planned the accident. Had I seen it coming, I would have slammed on the brakes.
There was some consolation in finally accepting that. Still, a weight remained. “She was our child,” I said. “She didn’t ask to be born. We decided that. We took the responsibility.”
He brought my hand to his mouth, kissed it, and held it there. The whiskers above his lip chafed, then soothed. His breath was warm, his voice sad. “Some kids are born with medical conditions and die within hours. Some grow big enough to be riding their bikes on the sidewalk when a car jumps the curb. There’s no sense to any of these things—or maybe there is. Maybe Lily wasn’t destined to live beyond five. Maybe she was a lesson we had to learn.”
That sounded merciless. Affronted, I asked, “What kind of lesson?”
“Humility. Vulnerability. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. My mother said that all through chemo.”
“Actually, chemo killed her.”
“Actually, cancer killed her, but maybe I didn’t take my part of the lesson to heart. As hard as my mother’s death was, Lily’s was ten times worse, a hundred times worse. I never expected to have to live through something like that. But I did. And it didn’t kill me. I’m here. And I have choices. I want to be better, Maggie. So yes. I’m trying to be stronger.”
The strength of his belief resonated in his voice, which seemed suddenly deeper and, in that, soothing. I couldn’t disagree with him, at least not entirely. Strength had been my major goal for the last five years—well, for four really, after that first year during which I’d been a hot mess. But weighing life lessons against cruelty was a toughie.
“When you talk about destiny, are you talking about God?” I asked.
He considered that with my knuckles to his mouth, then breathed against them. “I don’t know. I struggle to find an explanation for what happened, and He’s all I get.” He looked sharply at me. “Don’t you ever think that?”
I didn’t. I was still angry at Him. But I tried to hear Edward. “You’re saying we should be grateful for the five years we had.”
“Yeah, I’m saying that. When we lose someone we love, we can either die with them or live on to celebrate their life. I’m tired of focusing on what we lost, Maggie. I want to focus on what we had.”
I was about to argue that five years wasn’t enough, that Lily had been a key part of our future, and what about her dreams—when I heard his words—and even then, it was another minute before they fully registered. When they did, though, they went straight to the soul of the person I was trying to become. He was talking about the photographs neither of us could put on a desk. Or nightstand or bookshelf. He was talking about the memories I had so fiercely locked away. He was talking about the same things my therapist had, until I got tired of failing at it, and stopped seeing her.
And where was I now? My ex-husband had stolen back into my life, my brother was occupying my loft, and my mother had become my responsibility. The past was crowding in. It was unexpected and, in many regards, daunting. And yet, there