Page 60 of When You're Gone
“I’m not making accusations. I’m not making assumptions. But I am asking—demanding, really, that you figure out what you want. Who are you now? What’s your vision for your life? You never had a chance to think about what you wanted beyond getting those damn surgeries. You just reached out and grasped for what you needed.”
“You! I need you!”
She couldn’t take it anymore. She crawled across the mattress and closed the space between them. She circled her body around his forearm, silently begging him to hold her. But he didn’t move or raise his arms or return her embrace. He only turned his head and offered a sad smile.
“I know that. It was the privilege of a lifetime to be what you needed for all these years. But now I need to know if I’m still what you want. I can love you through anything. But only you can decide if my love is enough.”
He reached out—finally—to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. It was such a familiar gesture. She closed her eyes, willing the caress to calm her. But his hand didn’t linger.
“One of the nightmares I have all the time is about the night of the accident. I’m stuck. I can’t move or make sense of what’s happening around me, but somehow, I know you’re trapped. I’m desperate to save you. It takes all my strength to break free. Then, when I finally get to you, I realize I had the key the whole time. I was the one trapping you all along.”
“Please,” she sobbed as she tugged on his arm again. “Please just stop talking, Ev. Let’s just take a step back. We’ll figure this out.”
But he just kept going.
“I think there’s some truth buried in that nightmare. The problem is, I can’t accept that. I won’t stand for it. I don’t want you broken. Not because I can’t love you that way. But because I can’t stand to think I’m contributing to that breaking. I love you too much to trap you, to keep you if you don’t want to be kept.
“I need this version of you to choose this version of me. I need you to want me, not because of our history, or what we’ve gone through together, or because of how much I love you. I need you to want me because of who I am now and where you see us in the future. I believe we can grow together. But we both have to commit to that—to decide thattogetheris what we still want.”
He leaned forward so fast she didn’t have time to process what was happening. He kissed her on the forehead, then pulled away just as quickly before rising to his feet.
“Everhett. No. You can’t go. Stay. Please stay. I don’t even know who I am when you’re gone.”
She could feel herself spiraling—babbling—sobbing through the tears that just wouldn’t quit.
“You owe it to yourself to figure that out,” he replied earnestly as he took two steps away from the bed. Her mind was reeling as she considered her options. Should she get up and follow him? Could she possibly beg him even more? He just needed to stop. He needed to stay.
“I’m going to give you space now.”
She groaned as he took another two steps toward the door. She could feel herself unraveling with each new step he took.
“Not because I want to. But because I love you, and I think it’s what we need. You have to figure this out for yourself, Tori. I can’t be the one to convince you that I’ll be enough for you forever, because you’ll just end up resenting me for the rest of our lives. I started this. I’m so fucking sorry I started this. But you’ll have to be the one to finish it.”
His hand was on the door knob. This was really happening. He was actually leaving. Then, without giving her a chance to reply, he backed out of the room, pulled the door shut, and walked away.
Chapter twenty-two
Tori
Shewasashellof a human, moving through her days without the unwavering, unconditional support of the person she’d always been able to count on. A dense fog had settled around her. It blurred her vision. It dragged her down. It taunted her with a wicked, dull version of what her life had become.
Rhett said they needed space. She didn’t want space. She hated space. At her lowest low, she had begged him to stay. He had denied her. It wasn’t the rejection that hurt the most. It was the steadfast determination in his eyes as he closed his bedroom door and walked away.
She knew she had to step up, but it was hard to know where to start. She was scheduled to meet with a new therapist, but her intake appointment wasn’t for another few weeks. Just getting through each day until then felt like trudging through a quagmire. She refused to fall back on some of her recent questionable coping mechanisms—namely, working ten-hour shifts and drinking alcohol in excess—but now her days felt even emptier than before.
She had made an effort to fix one of the few things that was still in her control: her fractured relationship with her dad. She tried to be home more during the day, even though she wandered back to the Wheelers’ house every night. She couldn’t help it. She was drawn to Rhett’s bedroom, to the bed they shared. If all she could have of him was the scent of his sheets, that’s what she’d cling to for now.
Even when she slept at the Wheelers’ house, she made sure to have breakfast with her dad each morning. That used to be their thing, after all, and now that she was faced with the prospect of not having constant access to him, she wanted to make the most of their time together.
She had apologized to her dad, and he had instantly forgiven her, just like she knew he would. That kind of unconditional love was something she didn’t feel like she deserved after the way she’d been acting, but she had enough self-loathing already on her plate.
For weeks she had been lashing out at him, but once she’d really thought about his reasoning, she couldn’t hold him at fault. She was married now. She was married to a man who had a full-time job in Virginia. Her dad admitted that he’d had no idea she still viewed her childhood home as her place of residence; that he could have never predicted she wouldn’t move to Virginia after she got married. He was surprised she was still in Hampton, which forced her to examine her own justifications for digging her heels in and staying put.
Things were better between them now—better than they had been in a long time. They even came to a compromise about the Pyrex dishes: she bought him a brand-new set as a housewarming gift, and she got to keep the original set.
She’d come to realize that the house felt like one of the last real connections she had to her mom. She no longer had to worry about how the genetic mutations that had been passed on could possibly affect her future. Biannual scans, waiting rooms, and test results were no longer her reality. Tori had had the surgeries her mom wasn’t able to have. She had changed the course of her own life in a way her mom never could.
Without the threat of cancer constantly nagging at her subconscious, Tori found herself thinking about her mom less often. Shehatedthat. But she hated her misplaced grief more. She’d done years of therapy; she volunteered at a bereavement camp; and yet she had been letting her own unacknowledged grief spiral out of control because she had so much baggage tied up in the genetic mutations that no longer mattered.
