Page 112 of Things You Save in a Fire

“I just wanted to have some fun while we could.” She gave me a smile. “This kind of news can be so depressing.”

I gulped a little unexpected laugh.

“I just wanted to see you,” she said, squeezing my hand. “I just wanted a little taste of how it used to be before… I knew Wallace was dyingwhen I married him. But sometimes I wish I hadn’t known. It’s so hard to feel happy and sad at the same time.”

Suddenly, I felt for her. For the first time ever, I looked at that moment when she drove away through her eyes—and with her heart. What must it have felt like to give up her husband and child for a man she knew she would also have to lose?

It must have been agony in every direction.

For the first time, I understood. In all the times I’d remembered that story, I’d experienced every single part of it from my own perspective, standing in my own sixteen-year-old shoes. Now, for the first time, I saw it unfold from a new angle. Hers.

And it changed the story.

I felt a wash of forgiveness through my body.

Now it was me, suddenly, who wanted forgiveness.

“I’m sorry I was so angry at you for so long,” I said then.

She was ready for it. She patted me, like,Nonsense.“You were a kid. Sometimes it’s easier to be angry.”

“I was so stupid. I blamed you for things that weren’t your fault.”

“You were standing up for yourself. That’s a good thing.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

She went on. “You thought I had rejected you, so you rejected me harder. It was very sensible, really. Self-protection. I admired it.”

“But it was more complicated than that.”

“You did what you needed to do to be okay. I always believed you’d come back to me. I just ran out of time to wait.”

“I get it now, I think,” I said. “I get what you said about love being powerful.”

She nodded. “I bet you do.”

I rubbed my eyes. “I wasted so much time.”

She squeezed my hand again. “That’s just the human condition, sweetheart. We’re always doomed to waste our time.”

My brain was circling around, trying to put all the new information together. “That’s it, then? You’re not doing any treatments?”

“Did the doctor show you the brain scans?”

I nodded.

She gave me a look like,Well, there’s your answer.

“I don’t know what to do now.”

“Just be here,” she said. “Just be nearby.”

More tears from me.

“It’s okay. It’s better in a way,” she said. “We aren’t meant to last forever. I wouldn’t have wanted to spend my last year getting cut up and drugged. I’d much rather be in the garden. Or painting pottery. Or walking by the ocean.”

Of course, you can’t argue with walking by the ocean, but when the end result of that is dying, it sounds a little less ideal.

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