Page 185 of Break Away
“Do not make that girl beg for a door you already unlocked.”
The room went quiet.
I could hear my own heart. I could hear my mother breathing. I could hear the ugly click of everything inside me trying to rearrange around something I had been too angry to look at.
Maybe forgiveness wasn’t the door.
Maybe acceptance was.
Maybe I had been standing on one side of it, my fist bleeding against the frame, calling it locked because opening it meant stepping into a room where Aura’s pain and mine both had to exist without one erasing the other.
“What if she doesn’t want me now?” I asked.
“Oh, honey.” Her voice softened. “Then you survive it.”
I closed my eyes.
“But if she does,” Mom said, “do not make fear sound like pride and call that strength.”
The words stayed. They lodged somewhere beneath the bruises.
“I love you,” I said, and my voice barely worked.
“I love you more than your ability to fix things,” she said. “Remember that.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“You’ll call me after you eat actual food.”
“Mom.”
“I am still mothering.”
I huffed out a tired laugh. “Fine.”
“And Easton?”
“Yeah?”
“Get your shit together before you lose the good parts of yourself trying to punish the broken ones.”
I stared at the rain. “Yeah. I heard you.”
We hung up a minute later, after she asked about my hand twice, my ribs three times, and whether Ryan had fed me like she had somehow sensed him through the universe.
I told her yes because he had shoved a breakfast sandwich into my bag after practice and threatened to call her himself if I didn’t eat it.
For a while, I sat there with the phone in my hand and the apartment around me looking exactly the same. Nothing had moved. The coffee table was still crooked. The rain still struck the window. The couch still sagged in the middle. My hand still throbbed. My ribs still burned.
But the spiral had a name now.
Acceptance.
Not excusing it. Not erasing it. Not making what happened clean. Accepting that the ugly thing was real and deciding what came next.
I didn’t go to Aura’s apartment that night, and it was the first decent choice I made.
I wanted to.
