weeping gently and hugging Audrey tight.
Her gaze crossed the foyer to where I stood, still in the doorway where Audrey had left me, and she smiled gently as she mouthed, “Hi.” I lifted a hand in a wave before approaching the door with hands in my pockets and a smile gradually tugging at my lips.
“Blake,” Vanessa greeted me as she took a step back from Audrey’s tight embrace.
“Doc.”
She grinned and shook her head. “I think you can call me Vanessa here.”
Shaking my head, I wrinkled my nose and said, “Nah. You’ll always be Doc to me.”
She hugged me then, wrapping her arms around my neck tightly and I wrapped mine around her waist. She pressed her cheek to mine and whispered, “Merry Christmas, Blake,” like it was a secret, a sentiment shared only between us. I nodded, hugging her tightly, and whispered back, “Merry Christmas, Doc.”
To anyone else, that hug would’ve appeared as nothing more than an embrace between friends, close friends even. But to us, it was the end of a very long journey, one of anger, disbelief, and a deep-rooted sadness, too heavy to carry alone. It felt like a goodbye, but … maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was simply the beginning of something else—a friendship, maybe even a family. But for now, we hugged and hugged until Audrey laid her hand against my shoulder, and I found myself laughing as I took a step back. I wrapped an arm around my girlfriend, my savior, and pressed a kiss to her temple, as Vanessa smoothed her hands over her sweater and smiled fondly into my eyes.
“Well,” she said, “I guess I’ll go say hi to Ann. Is she upstairs?”
Audrey nodded. “Yeah, you want me to take you up there?”
Vanessa shook her head. “No, I’m fine. I remember the way.” There was a bittersweet melancholy in her smile as she took Audrey in, standing at my side, and she said, “I wish Sabrina could see you so happy.”
Audrey’s smile faded as she tightened her arms around my waist. “She does. And after all, none of this would’ve happened in the first place, if it hadn’t been for her.”
I thought about that all throughout dinner, sitting at a table full of Audrey’s family and friends. I thought about how wrong I’d been all this time, assuming that it was all Audrey’s doing, and her tattoo. Her refusal to leave me alone and her presence in my life ever since. But where it all began, where it truly all began, was with her sister.
A dying girl who wanted a tattoo of a butterfly.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“WHOA, WHOA, WHOA! I don’t think so, mister!” Audrey shouted from the kitchen before racing into the living room.
Looking up from cutting our Christmas 2.0 ham, I found Jake in the middle of an attempt to get up from the couch on his own. Audrey slid her shoulders beneath his arm, holding him up while coaxing him to sit back down. His leg was still in the cast, with at least another month and a half to go. Jake was dependent in so many ways, ways even he didn’t understand, but mobility had never been one of them. It had easily been the most challenging thing about having him home. In my home.
I dropped the knife and fork to hurry over to assist Audrey. “Hey, buddy, what do you need?”
His eyes shifted to Audrey, then back to mine, acting as though he had a secret to tell. She immediately got the gist and smiled at us before returning to the kitchen. Now alone, Jake whispered, “I gotta pee.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “Of course, you just gotta say something.”
“Audrey said I can’t stand up. I stand up to pee, Blake.”
“We’ll figure it out,” I told him. We’d been figuring it out for over a week now, and I’d say we were doing pretty good.
The doctors had given Jake clearance to leave after he’d spent six weeks in the hospital, with him being awake for about half that time. It’d been tough keeping him content there, if you could call it content at all, but my parents and I had managed while taking turns sitting with him. It became a full-time job in itself, albeit a temporary one. The worst part was hearing him talk about Mickey and how excited he was to see him again. Telling Jake that Mickey had passed away, while he was still in the hospital, would have upset him too much, so in a jointed