Page 128 of When We Had Forever
“Hawaii?” I could spend another night on the beach with him. I could hold that man in my arms again. “Really?”
“Sure. I could ask my doctor for some Xanax. That’d make the flight easier, don’t you think? I’ll just take so much I won’t even notice getting on the plane. And we’ll have even more fun this time.”
“That would be impossible,” I say automatically.
Michael’s smile flickers, but soon recovers. “Let’s do it.”
“Okay,” I whisper, all thoughts of cancer scares and foggy dreams forgotten. God, I love him. More than ever.
Except the trip never happens. For months, Michael resists my efforts to pin down a date, and when I finally do, a crisis at work forces him to reschedule.
Then, in February, less than two weeks after his thirty-ninth birthday, I get a phone call.
One that changes everything.
AFTER
In the weeks after I get home, Kate does her best to nurture me through the Grayson incident, like she did right after Michael died. She brings over kettle corn and marathonsLuciferon Netflix with me. She alternates with my mother to leave dinner on my doorstep every week, which is incredibly thoughtful, but really, I don’t need caring for this time. Each passing day only solidifies my conviction that what happened with Grayson at the cabin changed me. Or maybe it helped me to change myself.
Maybe those aren’t actually two different things.
I light the lantern nightly. It illuminates a place inside me that does more than admit he was right. It believes him, for my own sake.
Iamstrong. Which means someday, I’ll think about him and Michael without dissolving into pain and doubt.
Someday, I’ll open that damn office door.
I take up hiking again.
I pull all my gear out of the storage closet and acquaint myself with the trails that crisscross the mountains around Seagrove. Out in the woods, summer makes a slow surrender to autumn. I soak up September’s sunshine and watch the squirrels stash acorns for winter.
I revel in the beauty of the woods, and even though it’s not the cabin, forest bathing proves almost as restorative as it did when I was fifteen.
One evening at the end of September, just moments after I send off a medical article, the old, haunting question returns.
At what moment did I cease to be a wife?
It floats up from my subconsciousness, almost tentative at first. Yet I reach out and grab hold. Examine it from every angle.
And promptly decide that shouldn’t be the question at all, because I never belonged to Michael the way I did to Grayson. Of course I didn’t receive some cosmic broadcast from the universe at the moment of his death. I’m no longer sure that what I was doing right then even matters.
No, when I sift back through the years, the event around which my life pivoted didn’t pass unnoticed, after all. I spent it in front of the windows of Michael’s condo, frantically calling what I thought was his phone, so choked with fear that I couldn’t have swallowed a grain of rice if I’d tried.
Because I knew. Somehow, some way, IfeltGrayson leave my life.
I sit back in my desk chair, the knowledge hollowing out my stomach. Everything changed for me not in the bathtub, but in front of a rain-streaked windowpane in Seattle, and I spent the next fourteen years besieged by a longing I had no way to understand.
Which means maybe I never really ceased to be a wife.
Maybe I never truly was one in the first place. At least, not the way I thought.
At the beginning of October, my Travelique article goes to print, then goes viral. Two weeks later, Siobhan Monroe calls to ask if I can come up to Seattle to discuss the “future direction” of my career. She barely finishes asking before ayesbursts from my lips.
When the day arrives the following week, I make the long drive to Seattle and parallel park outside the Travelique headquarters. I can’t help but notice that Grayson and I once lived a mere five blocks from here.
Michael and I did, too, of course. For far longer. But it’s that month with Grayson that carves out space in my thoughts, and to my surprise, I let it.
Inside, I punch the elevator button for the sixteenth floor and emerge into a sleek office space done in hues of greige that showcase the stunning photography and article reprints decorating the walls.
