Page 78 of Only Fate

Essie: Hi. I’m sorry we haven’t talked much. I’m really struggling to find the words to explain myself. Please don’t be upset with me.

Please don’t be upset with me.

Is that a prologue to rejection?

I feel like I’m breaking down, and if I read a message from Essie that’s bad, it’ll completely crush me. I drop my phone on the floor, stand, and smash it with my foot.

Then, I do it again.

Again.

Again.

Until it’s nothing but fragments.

I pack my bags and drop out of college.

Delete all my social media.

I sleep in my car for a few nights. That’s hard because it has so many memories of Essie.

A couple of days later, a friend from Cali sends out a mass email that he’s looking for a roommate. So, I move there and work for his father’s construction company.

I avoid my mother.

She sees me as a substitute for something she lost.

Eventually, she and my abuela find me. That’s when my mother shows me a letter my dad wrote to her before he died. In the letter, he apologized for treating her so horribly when he found out she was pregnant. He confessed his fears of being judged as a bad father for bringing a child into the world, knowing he was terminally ill and couldn’t raise him.

I feel sorry for him after reading the letter … until I find out he left my mother pregnant and alone for eight months. She didn’t see him again until his funeral.

After going through his things, she found he’d saved all my ultrasounds she’d mailed to him while pregnant. Each one hadMy sonand a smiley face written on them.

I’ll always wonder if his love was real or if he wrote that in guilt. But my mother has always worked hard to keep his good name and convince me he loved me.

A week later, I decide I need to go back to who I was.

I enroll in a school in California, start therapy, and graduate from law school.

Essie is always on my mind, but I’m scared of rejection.

I regret smashing my phone after reading her text.

It takes two years before I finally search her out.

She declines my friend request and blocks me.

She wants nothing to do with me.

I spend six months working for a California law firm before moving back to Iowa. I shamelessly stalk Essie online and find out where she’s working. I apply to the firm, not expecting a response, but a week later, their call feels like fate. Charles wentto law school with a partner at my old law firm, and he gave me a strong recommendation.

California became my healing haven after I left Iowa.

But that healing cost me the one thing I wanted.

It cost me the girl I loved.

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