And to Beck, the one who had died, not the one in my arms. To honor him, and the sacrifice he’d never known he was making. I hoped he was up there somewhere, knowing that he hadn’t had to become a doctor to save someone. Two someones.
As we turned back toward the car, Aurora’s small hand slipped into mine. I thought of an old Springsteen lyric about madness and salvation, the kind that had once felt like prophecy. But the words that rose through me now were different. Wiser. Gentler.
“We learned to live with the sadness,” I said quietly, mostly to myself, “and to love without the madness.”
Wendy heard me anyway. She always did.
“Springsteen?” she asked, grinning wide.
“Modified Springsteen,” I said, and her laughter rose brightly and effortlessly into the desert air.
Wendy
The drive home wound us through the heart of our little desert city, past the coffee shop where we’d somehow survived our second first date, past the bookstore where Theo had first read me poetry, past all the ordinary places where two broken people had slowly remade themselves.
Aurora sang breathily in her car seat, turning the morning into a fairytale of flowers and lizards and “the road where Mommy and Daddy met.” Beck slept on from his infant seat, dreaming in the quiet rhythm of the drive.
I caught their reflections in the rearview mirror. Our children, born from love instead of pain, named for hope instead of grief… and felt a deep, unshakable peace with the beginning that had once almost broken me. Beck Foster and Delaney Lewis had not left us with a shrine; they had left us with a doorway. A first chapter. A reason to become the people our love needed us to be.
Theo’s hand found mine across the console, his touch calloused, familiar, and warm.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, one hand on the wheel.His wedding ring glinted in the sunlight.
“About all of it,” I said, absently turning my own wedding ring on my finger. “How close we came to losing ourselves trying to find each other. How we had to learn the difference between being saved… and saving ourselves.”
“And?”
“And how grateful I am we were brave enough to start over. To do it right.”
“It led to them,” Theo said, glancing at the rearview mirror. At our children. Our babies. Still small, still so impossibly young. And yet, their existence had given us new purpose in life, a new reason to keep fighting for tomorrow.
“Yes,” I agreed. “It did.”
Our home waited at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, painted sage green, surrounded by the desert garden Theo had been coaxing into bloom: marigolds and brittle bush, palo verdes spilling golden petals into the walkway. A place where life thrived against all odds.
Inside, the walls housed my new paintings. Landscapes awash in light. The canyons where we had hiked. The overlook where Theo had finally kissed me again, choosing joy over pain. The sunrise from our bedroom window, painted in the hush of early feedings with a newborn Beck, when the world felt boundless and new.
Aurora sped off to her playroom, already mentally planning her next story. Theo carried our son to his crib, and together, we watched the small miracle of his breathing in the dappled afternoon light.
“Do you think we’ll ever tell them?” I asked. “The whole story?”
“The parts that matter,” he said, drawing me against his warm, wide chest. My favorite place to be in the world. “That sometimes the worst things lead to the best things. That love is worth fighting for. That healing is possible.”
“Together,” I added.
“Together,” he echoed.
I leaned into him, into this life we had built by choice, by courage, by the hard, quiet work of healing.
This was the gift we had made from our loss: not a shrine to sorrow, but a home filled with laughter and art and history, with small hands reaching for ours, with love that no longer burned us alive.
Theo sometimes quoted that song, the Springsteen one which featured a different Wendy, a Wendy like the one I used to be. But we weren’t the people in that song, not anymore.
Because we had learned to live with the sadness—and in the dazzling light of this life we’d built, love had no need for madness at all.
