Page 34 of The Making of Mila and Blake
Swinging open the front door, I step out onto the porch. It’s after eight and the sky is a navy blue, broken up with the sparkle of stars, and the Harding Estate is as eerily silent as it always is once night falls. Crickets chirp, the breeze rustles the long grass. What is even more silent, however, is Blake Avery.
The moonlight casts a shadow across his face as he leans against his truck, hands tucked into the front pocket of his hoodie. The lights from the house reflect in his dark eyes.
“Blake. . .” I take the porch steps slowly, almost like I’m afraid to get too close to him in case he’s just a figment of my imagination, and step down onto the dirt path in my slippers. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought maybe you’d like to see Bailey,” he says in a low, husky voice. “He wants to show you his battle scar.” The corners of his mouth pull into a gentle grin, creasing his dimples, and he opens the back of the truck.
A mass of golden fur dives out from the backseat. Bailey does a little shakeout and startles when he notices me, then immediately bounds over, full of energy and back to his usual self. He presses his damp nose into my palm and wiggles his butt with excitement.
“Oh, Bailey!” I exclaim, kneeling to bury my face into his fluffy chest. “I think someone is feeling much better. Let me see.” As he licks my face, I steal a peek at the stitches on the roof of his mouth. “Wow! You definitely have a story to tell at the dog park.”
Blake laughs at my high-pitched childlike voice, but I just can’t help it. Anyone who can talk to dogs in their normal tone is straight-up weird and cannot be trusted.
I scratch behind Bailey’s ears and stand. “So that’s why you drove over here?” I ask. “To let me see Bailey? That’s all?”
“No,” Blake says. He shuts the door of the truck and stuffs his hands back into his hoodie, catching his lower lip between his teeth as he stares at the dirt beneath his sneakers. “I thought maybe you might want to see me too.”
I tilt my head. “Cocky, much?”
“Okay, fine,” he says, glancing up. “Iwanted to see you.”
My stomach flips and the butterflies wake all at once. I was prepared for a relaxing evening, scrolling endlessly through TikTok while working through my skincare routine, but now I am standing outside in my PJs with Blake. Before, he had to climb the walls to get in here to see me. Now Sheri lets him drive straight in through the gate. Oh, how different things are.
“I thought maybe we could take a walk,” Blake continues, though I notice the nerves creeping into his voice, his words shaky. He gestures to the fields behind us. “Just around here. You don’t need to get dressed.”
I look down at my robe and slippers. This poor ranch has seen me in every state over the past few years, both at my best and my worst, but at least these fields don’t judge. “Okay,” I say. “This way.”
I wrap my arms around myself and walk ahead, the dirt crunching beneath my slippers as Bailey dashes off to sniff out all the different scents lingering in the long grass. Blake hangs back a few steps at first, but then picks up his pace to match my stride.
“There’s something you keep asking me,” he says through the darkness, and we are so alone out here in the fields that his voice vibrates through the still atmosphere. “You keep asking why I never answered your calls. Why I never tried to work things out between us. Why I just. . . let you go.”
As we walk forward, Bailey circling our legs, I watch Blake out of the corner of my eye. “So whydidyou let me go so easily?”
“Because I convinced myself we would never have worked, regardless,” he confesses. Exhaling into the fresh evening air, he moves his hand to his forehead and rubs his temple, but he keeps his gaze trained on the ground below as we forge a path through the grass. “My life took a complete nosedive after you left, and so did my head. I was a Vanderbilt reject, nursing my dad’s hangovers and disappointing my mom. My confidence was here—” he holds his hand down by his thigh “—and I was in a bad place. I didn’t have an ounce of self-esteem to even tryto fix things with you.”
I loved him. HeknewI loved him. I could have been there for him. “Blake. . .”
He holds up his hand. There’s still more he has to say, and he continues: “But seeing you again these past couple weeks, I realize just how fucking wrong I was. I shouldn’t have let you leave the way I did, and I shouldn’t have ignored you every time you reached out.”
“You’re right,” I whisper. “You think I really would have cared that you didn’t get into your dream school? You think I would have judged you for your dad’s drinking problem? You think I would have done anything lessthan support your music every damn step of the way?”
“I know that now,” he admits, swallowing the remorseful lump rising in his throat. “And I’m sorry. You didn’t ruin things between us. That night of the gig. . . You made a mistake, but I made an even bigger one.Iruined us.”
A weight lifts from my shoulders. This is what I knew all along, that Blake and I could have saved our relationship if he had chosen to, and to hear him admit it out loud validates my feelings. But the reality doesn’t anger me; it saddens me.
“Are you still in a bad place now?” I ask delicately. I remember the mental anguish I suffered when the news of Dad’s affair broke and my family fell apart. It felt like I was losing my mind, treading water yet never quite able to reach the surface.
“Getting better,” Blake says with an uncomfortable shrug. “Those weeks I stayed with my dad in Memphis before he agreed to move back here, I could barely sleep at night. My mind just wouldn’t shut off. Ever. It was like all this anxiety hit me out of nowhere and it only got worse in the fall. Everything started to feel so hopeless. School, my parents, my music.”
I very nearly reach for his hand, but I refrain. No matter how much I want to comfort him right now, to squeeze his hand and reassure him that I’m here, I’m listening, I know he has Olivia. I’m not the one who gets to hold his hand through the hard times anymore.
“I spoke with my doctor,” he says, then as though he wants to shield himself from the world, he pulls his hood up over his head and shies away from me. “He wrote me a script for Prozac.”
“Prozac?” I repeat. “Isn’t that—”
“An antidepressant? Yeah,” he says, then releases a loaded breath of air. “I stopped taking the pills after a year once I felt like myself again, but I never did tell my parents. It’s not an excuse, I know, but I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind to get in contact with you after we broke up. My head was the problem, not you.”
We naturally come to a stop as we reach the Harding Estate perimeter, the towering walls looming before us, and Bailey cocks his leg and pees all over the stone with an innocent glance back at Blake and me. Dogs have such an easy life. Except maybe when they choke on sticks.
