Page 102 of Canadian Boyfriend

I told the truth, as hard as it was. That’s what I was doing from now on. “Yes. And I told him that.” Her eyes widened. “And then I dumped him.”

“What!” she exclaimed, nearly choking on her tea.

“Remember how you said I was settling with Ian?” She nodded. “I realized I was doing it again. Mike is not Ian. Obviously. And I did a shitty thing to Mike. I’ve apologized, but there’s no getting around the fact that I made a huge error of judgment and that it hurt him terribly. That’s all true. But it’salsotrue that I got to the point where I couldn’t accept the terms of our relationship anymore. I realized I loved him too much to keep doing the casual-sex thing.”

“Because it wasn’t casual.”

“Exactly. Because I loved him—love him—too much. But here’s the thing: you can love a person, and that person can be, fundamentally, a good person, but you can still enforce standards for what you will and will not accept.”

Gretchen made a noise that was a cross between a wail and shriek and hugged me—hard. “Well, damn, my little Rory is all growed up.”

“I don’t know. Those northern lights. It was like they… changed me.”

“I don’t think that’s exactly right. You know how when you get a gel manicure, there’s the nail polish, but then it cures under a UV light in a few seconds?”

“Yeah?”

“I think you did the work this past year or so, with all the therapy, confronting your mom, all that stuff. The northern lights just sealed it.”

That was such a generous way of thinking about it, it made me cry. But they were happy tears. Well, no, they were happy-sad tears. But close enough.

“So the lights in this metaphor… are lights,” I teased through my tears.

“I might need to work on that.” Gretchen grinned and got up. “I’m going to get you some bedding for the sofa, then we should both try to get some sleep. You can stay with me as long as you need to.”

I spent the next day mostly staring into space. I tried to turn on the TV to distract myself, but nothing stuck. Around dinnertime, a text arrived that extinguished any hope I might have been harboring. I hadn’tthoughtI’d been harboring any, but… hope is a tricky thing.

Mike:I’ve extended your insurance through the end of the calendar year. Thanks for all your help with Olivia. I’m going to block you now.

And wasn’t that just like Mike Martin, to take the time to do such a kind thing for me before casting me out of his life forever? I wanted to howl. I was heartbroken, which wasn’t a new state of being for me.

But the difference was, I knew I would survive this.

24—DEAR AURORA

MIKE

The next few days were brutal. It almost felt like the time right after Sarah’s death. Like the ground was shifting beneath me and I might fall at any moment. I was gutted to feel that I had backslid so badly. Had all the progress I’d thought I’d made been an illusion?

It was possible. Everything I’d believed about Aurora had been an illusion.

Then something strange started to happen. Everyone began suggesting that I was wrong.

It started with Olivia. I’d told her that Aurora and I had had a disagreement, and that she wasn’t going to live with us or babysit her anymore, but that it had nothing to do with Olivia. The next day she had a dance class, and I let her out at the studio and told her I’d meet her in the parking lot when she was done. I would have liked to have been cool enough that I could handle seeing Aurora in a professional setting, but I felt too… I wasn’t even sure what. Angry, betrayed, scared? All of the above.

But on the first day of school, as I was scrambling to get Olivia’s lunch made and her backpack sorted, she let her spoonclatter into her cereal bowl and said, “Dad, will you tell me what Aurora did that was so bad that you had to send her away?”

I said I couldn’t, that it was grown-up stuff. It was a cop-out. It should have been possible to distill it into something a kid would understand. But when I tried to do that in my head, I got all confused.

Next up was Ivan. We were fishing, and I was telling him about the nannies I was going to interview. “This time I’m doing it the right way. One hundred percent official. They’re from an agency, so there will be Social Security numbers, contracts, all that.” And if a promising candidate turned out to be a fan, I would have zero reaction. Because as upset at Aurora as I was, I recognized that everything she had said to me about our Tim Hortons trip had been true.

It was an uncomfortable feeling, to realize that while Aurora had been lying to me this whole time, she had also been right about me.

“So Aurora’s out and some agency nanny is in,” Ivan said as he cast his rod.

“Yep.” Ivan glanced over at me, and there was something in his look that made me go, “What?”

“Look, I don’t know what happened between you—”

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