Page 63 of True Blue

Just that little touch makes my chest stop hurting.

Grief is love with nowhere to put it, and maybe that means I can pour mine into Teddy.

Maybe that is what Ellie would want.

February

Death by a thousand papercuts was an understatement.

Death by a million papercuts is more accurate.

Teddy stays at his parents’ house two to three nights a week now, whenever Dawn has a meltdown or says, in that trembling, helpless voice she has perfected. “Mommy needs her son.”

And Lily just always seems to be there when he is. She has been folded neatly into the family unit, while I feel myself being pushed out.

Or did I ever really belong?

Lily has a crush on my boyfriend.

It’s clear as day in the way she brushes her hand against his bicep and laughs a little too loudly at something he’s said. She’ll try to pull him into a conversation about a childhood game, or a high school event that only they would remember, purposefully excluding me.

Teddy, to his credit, either never remembers what she passionately recounts or just brushes it off with a “oh, yeah, I remember,” and then moves on.

Lily seems to deflate every time her cherished memories don’t seem as important to Teddy as they are to her. And I want to be empathetic, because it seems like she’s going through a lot.

Lily has tearfully talked—multiple times now—about her divorce from her ex-husband. She filed for divorce the second she caught him cheating, and now she’s back living with her mother next door, heartbroken and acting like the universe itself dropped her back into Teddy’s life for a reason.

“I call that fate,” Lily told Teddy, tossing her pretty hair over her shoulder and batting her pretty eyes at him. “I need my best friend now more than ever.”

Teddy had just smiled tightly at her, not fully engaged, but not wanting to be rude.

I barely even have the opportunity to speak at dinners anymore, unless Teddy asks me something directly. Lily sits on the other side of him, placed there by Dawn. She drags him into conversation or speaks over me to keep his attention. Dawn speaks over me. His aunts speak over me. His father and uncles act like I’m not even there half the time.

And when I try to speak up for myself, the way I watched Ellie do a hundred times, they ignore me completely.

Or Lily laughs like I’ve said something funny.

Without Danielle and Stephanie around as much, and with Nana gone, I feel more alone than I ever have.

Even with my boyfriend sitting right next to me.

Grief has hit Teddy incredibly hard.

This loss cracked something open inside him, and I can see it every time his eyes go distant, every time his mother calls and he stiffens before answering her.

Sometimes he’ll come to my apartment from his mother’s house with swollen eyes and say they were just talking about her again. Sometimes we’ll be brushing our teeth side by side in my tiny bathroom, and he’ll start crying out of nowhere.

I never tell him to stop.

I encourage him to always ride it out.

The only way out is through.

When I bring up The Vacation or The Move, he brightens. We spread my carefully planned itinerary across the bed, or I’ll sit in his lap on his couch with my laptop open in front of us.

I’ve already booked our tickets to every art museum, gallery, cathedral, garden, and hidden gem we have time for. I can’t wait to see Teddy’s face when he sees it. In London, in Paris, in Florence.

He hasn’t opened his sketchbook since Ellie passed, so I hope it inspires him, and we have our fresh start in New Jersey with his creativity fired back up. I know it’s a release for him, an outlet to channel his emotions. He never seems to have time to process his own emotions anymore while managing his mother’s.