Page 114 of All the Beautiful Things
She wouldn’t tell him.
She’d save herself.
Again, with no thought to the pain of her child.
I stared at the sheets of the bed, in another world while a tsunami of pain slammed straight into my heart.
“He’ll be fine,” I said, my voice now wooden and cold. Hudson slipped the phone from my hand and said nothing.
He sat with me. For hours, with a movie on the television, the only sound in the room, and I quietly, finally, said goodbye to parents who didn’t love me.
But more importantly… didn’t deserve me.
And it was finally time I lived with the realization of what Hudson and even Melissa had tried to tell me for so long.
I deserved better.
And damn it… I would finally live like it.
I turned, tilted my head back, and looked Hudson right in his angry, dark eyes. Pressing my hand to his cheek, his expression softened as he took mine in.
I hoped like hell he saw everything I’d just realized, but if he didn’t, that was okay.
I had forever to prove it to him. “I love you, Hudson Valentine.”
His forehead fell to mine and a puff of breath skated over my cheeks.
“Always,” he whispered, “I will always love you, Lilly.”
Epilogue
Lilly
Almost Seven Months Later
The sun beat down,bursting onto my bared shoulders and the tip of my nose. In the far-off distance, a line of cars behind a hearse were visible. Mourners crowded near a patch of grass, many bundled together beneath a forest green tent, the color of the rolling, grassy area of the cemetery. Even from this distance, the grief of those who hugged themselves to each other was palpable. Tears dripped down my cheeks as I took them in. I felt their pain from a quarter-mile away, sensed their despair, and my eyes dropped to the granite stone before me.
“I miss you,” I whispered, choking over the words I’d kept to myself for so long.
For years, I’d imagined this moment.
Next to me, Hudson’s firm grip on my own hand was a steadying contrast to the wobbling of my knees.
“He would love you,” I rasped out. My head fell to his shoulder and his hand holding mine let go to wrap around my waist and press me against him. His body was warm from the sun and all that was him.
“I would have liked to know him,” Hudson said, and his lips pressed to my temple.
“He was a mess. Always a mess, but such a damn good guy.”
“He loved you. In his own way.”
“I know.” I nodded because I did. I knew that now.
Stepping forward, Hudson’s hand fell from my back and I took the slow steps toward the stone in front of me. The stone I hadn’t been around to see when it was installed. The burial and funeral I hadn’t been allowed to attend.
Joshua Nathan Huntington, Jr. was scripted in elegant lettering above the dates of his life.
At the right corner was a fresh bouquet of flowers I’d brought with us. Red and white roses that burst with color against the gray slab.
