Page 116 of Life’s Too Short

I wouldn’t get to say goodbye to Grace…

I couldn’t go back. I’d lose my nerve.

This punched me right in the heart, made me feel like I couldn’t breathe.

My baby…

I’d seen her for the last time and I didn’t even know it. I’d kissed her face and snuggled her and smelled her head and I didn’t savor it, I didn’t hold it in…

She was more mine than she ever was Annabel’s. She’d always be mine, even when she didn’t remember a thing about me.

And that would have to be good enough.

I had to hope that the tiny pieces she’d gotten of me would be enough to last a lifetime.

I’d call her case worker and my lawyer and make sure they knew where she was.

I wiped the tears off my cheeks, looked down at my phone, and cleared the address from the search bar. And suddenly the road ahead was a giant question mark.

I’d set off all those years ago to live my life. To be a butterfly in the wind. I’d left on my quest alone. No cameraman to mic me up and follow me and edit my footage. No production assistant to book hotel rooms and plan agendas. Nothing but a single suitcase and the clothes on my back. I had that in the car now. I even had my passport. I’d embarked with a goal to laugh and see the world and live like I had one year left. And now maybe I actually did.

I wasn’t ready to give up my love for life. And I wasn’t going to spend one more day looking at the sun. I’d never do it again. I chose living—because anything else was just waiting to die.

I started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot. When I had to make a turn, I went wherever the wind took me.

CHAPTER 30

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO SURVIVING A BREAKUP (THAT’S YOUR FAULT)

ADRIAN

Nothing had changed about my place. The tree was still up and lit, Grace’s swing was still next to the sofa. Even Vanessa’s throw blanket was where she’d left it, balled up on the couch, smelling like her. But everything was different now. Like the lights had gone on in a nightclub.

I hadn’t heard from Vanessa in two days. Since she hung up on me on New Year’s Eve.

The second it happened, I knew I’d fucked up.

I’d turned my car around, called Lenny and asked him to go in my place, and drove straight to Stillwater. But Vanessa wouldn’t answer my calls or texts and I didn’t know where to go. I googled bed-and-breakfasts in the area and drove to each one, looking for her car, but I couldn’t find it.

That was the last time I spoke to her.

I betrayed her. I made her choose: me or herself.

And she’d called my bluff.

That ultimatum was an act of desperation from a despondent, sleep-deprived man who was descending into madness at the thought of losing her. It was manipulative and wrong, and I could have never in a million years acted on it. I knew that now more than ever. I wasn’t capable of leaving her, no matter what her position on the end of her life continued to be.

Everything in my universe had been forcefully ranked all of a sudden. My shortcomings laid out with the clarity of hindsight—I was so afraid of being left again by someone I loved I couldn’t even wrap my brain around what was right and wrong.

I should have done what she said. Gone to grief counseling, joined a support group, found a therapist, talked to someone. Anything other than what I did. Anything other than shutting down and giving her an ultimatum because I couldn’t handle the choice she made—and it was her choice to make. She was an expert witness on ALS, giving her testimony, and I’d refused to listen because I wasn’t emotionally capable of accepting it. I was as damaged as they came and I’d never done a fucking thing about it, I’d never dealt with any of it, my abandonment issues, my need for control.

I was no different from Richard. Only I left my family without going anywhere.

I didn’t think things could possibly get worse than they already were.

I’d been wrong.

This was my rock bottom. This.