Page 98 of Paper Hearts

Isn’t it funny how life kinda moves along with or without you?

After years of being separated, my parents finalize their divorce.

Theo moves to Charlotte. Theo can jump off a damn bridge for all I care, and I do not allow him to be alone with Eddie. He’s seen her once, and Eddie wouldn’t even let Theo hold her. She ran away from him. Can’t say I blame her.

I find out Ender is deployed in Kuwait that winter. Nobody has talked to him though. The only reason Arya finds out is because Greer tells her. Apparently he knows where he is but hasn’t talked to him. I suddenly want to befriend Greer, but I don’t. I fear Ender knowing we have a daughter. Arya doesn’t tell him about Eddie and neither does Myles, who is the best uncle ever. Though we think he uses her to pick up chicks at the park because he always comes back with a number or two.

I take up hiking with Arya and Eddie. My little adventurous baby loves every second of being outdoors and in the woods.

Arya and I experience a hurricane when we take Eddie down to Florida for summer break. Eddie is not a fan and though it was only a category 3 storm, I’m pretty sure she will have that night marked in her brain permanently. I feel like a bad mom too because I had the time of my life.

Eddie gets her first haircut. Her long dark brown locks are kept safe in a photo album, and I cry the entire time. She gets bigger every day and has the best, craziest personality and loves to be tickled until she can’t breathe. She hates vegetables of any kind, will eat a cookie for breakfast every day if you let her, and every time she scowls at me, I see her father staring back.

My sister Brenna has a son in the spring. Ben. He’s a bad child. I love him, but he’s a jerk of a kid. Hazel marries the football player and Becca ruins another relationship. Or two. Nobody knows anymore, but she moves to Charlotte so maybe she’s seeing Theo now.

Wouldn’t fucking surprise me.

In April, I stop writing my book and show it to my creative writing instructor my senior year.

“It’s beautiful,” my creative writing instructor says to me when I hand in the first half for her to read.

I smile, but does “beautiful” do our story justice? No, I don’t think it does. Tragic. Raw. Sad. Those are the words I’d use but maybe I’m focusing on the ending too much.

I stare at the journal in my lap. “It was therapeutic for sure.”

Beneath the torn battered edges of where I existed in Ender’s life, I lost myself writing our love, and through his memory, he showed me how to leave the piece of myself between the pages. My heart was paper thin and he turned it to ash with a blink of an eye.

I think about the dedication in the beginning and wonder if he’ll ever read it.

This is how I bury my wounds. I set fire to them and burn the existence of you from my memory.

“Is it a true story?” Mrs. Drake asks.

I nod, his face in my mind haunting me as usual. “Unfortunately.”

“Hadleigh, the best stories are.” Mrs. Drake smiles, pushing her thick-framed black glasses up her nose. “They come from a place of love and hate and to write a story that’s going to evoke a reader, you have to know extreme sadness, and pain. You can attempt to portray it all you want, but until you know that gut-wrenching feeling, you can’t portray it.”

She’s right. You can’t. Before Ender, I wouldn’t have known what it was like to be pushed to the very edge of my sanity. I mean sure, four sisters do that to you, but not in the ways Ender did.

When I started writing Ender and my story, I didn’t know where it would go. I wrote it for me. And to pass a class, but it was a way to get out everything that happened in those five summers on paper. If I did that, I thought for sure I’d pinpoint where it went wrong. Why he left me. I wrote it all out in my journal, each page covered in silly drawings and countless acts of love, hate, worship, and regret.

In the four years I wrote it, I saw what I was to Ender Nathan James. The hotheaded boy with sad eyes, who was never willing to do what anyone else wanted. Material possessions didn’t define him, and he taught me parts of this world no one ever showed me before, including heartache.

But I taught myself how to live with it. Older—not necessarily wiser—everything I wrote is true. My thoughts, memories, doubts, confessions, demands for answers, and my summers.

Believe me when I say writing it, reality began slipping away, but I had to do it. For me. For Eddie. Maybe even for Ender.

I graduate from college that spring with a creative writing degree, a passion, a reason, and I’m ready move forward with my life. Eddie turns three and we move out of my mom’s house and into my own apartment. Arya moves in with Roman, and life after college flows. With the help of Mrs. Drake, I find an agent and submit my completed manuscript to sixteen different publishers.

Two offer me a publishing contract.

I take the one that offers me more flexibility with my writing.Paper Heartsis published the following year, two days after Eddie turns five. It’s at her birthday party when Arya hands me an invitation to her and Roman’s wedding. That’s when I realize that I might have to face Ender in the near future. For so long I’ve wanted to keep Eddie from him, and my writing. I knew this day would eventually come. I’m best friends with his sister, and his mom and Myles are a huge part of my life now.

But am I ready to know his truths?

40

WHEN I REGRETTED WHAT I’D DONE

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