She was still legally married to Will. What did a new relationship look like now? Between two people who had already raised their kids, one who had lost a spouse to death, and her, who had gone through this reckoning. Who had questioned everything, coming to the conclusion she wanted her life to change.
That she wanted Logan. For more than just sex.
Will didn’t even know that yet.
Did Logan want to spend the rest of his years with her?
Should she make that kind of proclamation now? With things in her life still so messy?
Her kids would freak out.
What about Chloe?
They had time. They had three weeks of this trip. A month until the end of this. This summer apart from Will and her life.
She wanted to sit with this realization. Because it was beautiful and terrifying. She wanted to turn it over. What it meant. How it was the same to love as she had experienced it before. And how it was different.
Because she needed to be able to tell him. When she had kissed him in Boston, she hadn’t been able to give him the answers that he wanted.
Now she wanted to give him every answer she possibly could. Every answer that existed inside of her soul.
She needed to create those answers. She needed to know them, so that when she told him that she loved him, she could say exactly what she wanted from him.
It terrified her. So she needed this moment to last.
This moment to be just about them. Nothing more. Nothing less.
She had realized that she needed to look to the future, but this was where the future was bringing her.
To this sort of terrifying place. That was filled with wonder and something she had never thought she would find.
This was a passionate kind of love.
This was something she thought was reserved only for movies. She wasn’t rewriting her past.
She was not foolish enough to create a story about how she and Will had been unhappy. About how their love had been fake, or hadn’t been real. But it had been young. It had been founded on immature feelings, and forced into a very mature place out of fear. They had been forced to grow up quickly, and because of that, they hadn’t grown in a way that was intentional or on purpose. It had just been wild and desperate. They had needed to survive, and they’d done it. They’d created a life and a family, and they had created a measure of real happiness.
But she had fallen in love with Logan without boundaries. Without expectation. Without the influence of anyone else.
It was this mad, wonderful thing that she had never expected to find. That she had never in her wildest dreams thought existed for her.
No, she was not foolish enough to rewrite her life, for better or for worse.
She had loved Will. Their love hadn’t faded. Not because of familiarity, or any of the things that you normally blamed waning passion on.
That wasn’t them.
Their love was like a flower that had been put in a pot that was far too small.
The roots were stifled. It hadn’t been able to grow. Eventually, a plant like that withered away.
It could never be all that it might’ve been.
But that didn’t mean it wasn’t real. It didn’t mean it hadn’t flowered. That it hadn’t been beautiful. For all the seasons it had lived.
But it was done growing.
By the time it was dark, the chili was done, and she and Logan sat next to each other in lawn chairs while she made worried comments about bears.
