Because she loved him. And she had all the years before. She would have all the years after too. And she wished... She wished that it would look different. But it was the same as loving people who were gone, she supposed. She wished that it could look different too. But it couldn’t. And yes, it was much more within his control to make this something that was happy instead of sad and painful, but... But it simply was. It simply was what it was.
It was painful. But there was beauty in it too, and he couldn’t take the beauty away.
It was part of who she was. And what she had to trust was that it was part of who he was too.
Enough that it would never really go away. Enough that he would never really be able to be rid of her.
Of course, that cut both ways. And she would never be able to get rid of him either.
But she didn’t want to.
Even if it hurt, she didn’t want to. And that was the difference between the woman she was now, and the girl that he had found crying by the creek. She had needed to be different. She had wanted to escape. Had wanted to fight and run away.
And the woman she was now didn’t want to do any of those things. She was ready to stand firm and tall. He had said that he had tried to grow his roots around her, and he had dragged her down. But the reality was, her own roots went deep. She knew who she was. And it would take more than a storm to knock her over.
She knew who she was.
She was a woman who loved a man who wouldn’t love her back.
And it hurt.
But she wouldn’t falter or dissolve, or hide from the pain in drugs and in other meaningless relationships the way that her mother had done. Or just... Simply not show up the way her father had done.
And she wouldn’t let it steal her hope, the way grief and pain had done to Jace.
And it wasn’t because she was better. It was simply because... She had been given enough love in her life, that it sustained her now.
She walked up the stairs to the bedroom that she had shared with Jace. And she wasn’t afraid of it. Wasn’t afraid of seeing anything potentially spooky. Because there was nothing scary about it. She couldn’t see the future. But there was nothing scary about that either.
Because she could believe that there would be something better.
She had to.
She had to.
Well he’d done it. He’d broken everything. He’d broken the world. Utterly and irrevocably. It was like he had reached up and hammered a nail into the sky and let it all shatter. Then it all rained down on him.
And that was more fanciful thinking than he ever allowed himself. Because he never allowed himself to... To hope.
She was right about that.
The other thing he had never allowed himself to truly believe was that he had the potential to be hurt more than he already had been. He thought that he had a clear-eyed view of life. And here he was, standing in the middle of a screwed up situation that he had created, feeling like he would never sort out the wreckage. Feeling like he would never be able to stand up straight again.
What had he done?
He had lost his sister. She had been the single most important person in his life. His best friend. And he had met Cara, and being with her, being near her had done something to finally soothe the ache inside of him. And now... He’d sent her away. He’d chosen to not have her. And he had...
It was him. It was his fault. He ruined it. He couldn’t stand to sit here for another minute. He didn’t sit. It wasn’t the thing that he did. He was decisive.
And look where it got you.
He didn’t look ahead because all he could see was blackness. Bleakness. Blank despair.
He walked out of the house, and he started to walk down the trail that went behind the place. The moon was full, so he could see just enough to walk without tripping over anything. The trail wound up the side of the mountain, through a thick copse of trees, where it all went pitch-black.
And this... This seemed right. It seemed fair. It seemed like a look at his life. A look at his future.
But he pressed on through, and when he came to the top of the mountain, he looked up and there were stars. Because, impossibly, the world was still turning, and everything was still up in the sky, and he hadn’t shattered it at all. It just felt that way. Because it was him. Because it was his heart.
