the space to piece myself back together again.”
“That was never my intention,” I replied. I didn’t know how to explain that I’d been immature and stupid, that I’d convinced myself everything would be okay, that somehow, I’d deluded myself into thinking that she’d still be there when I got my shit together. I honestly hadn’t even realized back then that I’d had the power to break her.
“Intention matters less than people think,” she said quietly. “I needed you.”
“I know.”
“Do you know what it was like?” she asked, her voice still quiet. “Calling your mom’s looking for you, only to find out that you’d left? You didn’t even tell me.”
“I was afraid you’d talk me out of it, and I knew it was the right thing to do,” I said hoarsely.
“No,” she hissed with a jerk of her head, the Cecilia I knew finally shining through. “The right thing would’ve been to tell me that you were leaving, but that you’d be back. The right thing would’ve been to say that we were in it together, even though you had to leave for boot camp or whatever the hell it was called. The right thing would’ve been to grow a pair and tell me to my face that you’d made a decision that was going to completely change our lives, and let me decide what I wanted to do about it.”
“I know that now.”
“I would have followed you to the fucking moon,” she said, her voice almost pleading. “And you left me without a word.”
I could feel my pulse pounding in my head as her words sunk in deep. I’d known it all along. I’d known it, because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have assumed that she’d be waiting on me with open arms. I’d taken advantage of that fact, deciding to ask for forgiveness instead of permission, because I’d been so fucking weak and unsure of myself that I’d been afraid that her disappointment would make me change my course. I’d known, and that’s why I’d been so blindsided when I’d come back and she’d wanted nothing to do with me.
I’d known my entire adult life that I’d screwed Cecilia over and I had no one to blame but myself for our relationship imploding, but it wasn’t until that moment that I realized just how deeply I’d betrayed her. My breath sawed in and out as I tried to drag enough air into my lungs.
“Looking back,” she said, her voice steady, “we weren’t ready for a baby, not even if you’d stayed.”
I swallowed hard against the bile rising in my throat.
“Please don’t feel guilty about that,” she said softly, looking down at Olive. “It wasn’t meant to be.”
“For fuck’s sake,” I whispered, gripping my hair in my fists. “Stop, Cecilia.”
We sat there in silence as I tried to get myself under control. I’d deliberately pushed those memories to the past for so long, convincing myself that, sure, I’d fucked up—but it just hadn’t worked out, that the realizations hitting me made it feel like it had happened yesterday. The shame of what I’d done was suffocating.
“How can you even be in the same room with me?” I asked in confusion.
“Because I love you,” she said with a small huff. “And you came through when I needed you.”
“Don’t fucking say that,” I replied.
“What? That I love you?” she asked, tilting her head to the side. “So you can say it, but I can’t?”
“I don’t have anything to be angry about,” I said. I remembered the day I’d come back for her, how pissed I’d been that she would barely look at me. How much I’d hated her in that moment, believing that she’d moved on, not having any idea that it was self-preservation. That hate had been the only thing that had kept me going in the following months, the only way I’d justified what I’d done. At some point, that feeling had faded completely. I hadn’t owned up to what I’d done, but I hadn’t been able to blame Cecilia. Not for any of it.
“I don’t know that I’ll ever forgive you,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that I stopped loving you. Loving you just is, it always has been.”
I let her words sink in. Our relationship may have imploded years before, our lives going in completely different directions, but in this one way, we were still the same. Loving Cecilia wasn’t a choice for me either, it just was.
Finally, I nodded. “You know, you scared me there for