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But I didn’t have to continue being an idiot, which is exactly what calling him would be.
A strange sense of resolve took root inside me and I said, “No, Marissa. It’s done. I refuse to live in the past anymore. I can’t.”
I wouldn’t.
No matter how hard it was to say goodbye to Blake and my past one final time.
* * *
Marissa stayed the whole night.
We ate noodles and dim sum from The Oriental Garden and watched reruns ofFriendson cable.
She didn’t mention Blake again, and I didn’t bring him up.
I did heed one piece of her advice though. I texted Mary to let her know that, as of Monday, I would be able to pick up shifts again, requesting local jobs where possible.
I just hoped she would be okay with that.
If she asked why, I was prepared to stick with Tara’s cover of a family emergency. I needed the job, but I didn’t need to run into Blake or Brittany anytime soon.
I needed to put him firmly in my past again. Which is why before we went to sleep, I’d retrieved his note and set it alight with one of the lavender-scented candles burning in the room.
It was time to cleanse him out of my life for good.
As the paper caught fire and burned into oblivion, a deep sense of acceptance washed over me.
Maybe it was all the fortune cookies or the MSG overload or even the fumes from the takeout seeping up from the kitchen below, but I’d been doing well—too well—to let the revelations of the last week push me back into my mental prison.
When I woke, Marissa had already left, but not before pinning a note to my refrigerator. It simply said, ‘a lifetime of possibilities.’
As I stared at her scribble, I smiled to myself.
I’d had one summer.
One incredible summer.
Now, I had the rest of my life to live.
It sounded simple enough, but until the summer, living was something I’d only had glimpses of over the last twelve years.
Part of me had died the day a truck ran my dad’s car off the road and into a ravine.
Only I didn’t die.
I walked away from the accident with little more than a few scrapes and bruises. To the medical professionals and social workers, there was barely anything physically wrong with the eleven-year-old girl who watched her parents take their last breaths. But what they couldn’t see was the emotional damage—the damage on the inside.
My heart was broken, and I didn’t work right anymore.
Marissa had said something to me last night; she’d asked me to tell her about them, to tell her about Stephen and Alice Wilson, the two people put on earth to love me unconditionally.
All these years later, after countless therapists, I still couldn’t talk about them without breaking apart.
But when my tears were all dried out, Marissa had taken my hand in hers and whispered, ‘don’t you think they’d want you to live, Penny?’
She was right; of course, they would want me to live.
They would want me to date and get married and start a family. They would want me to take risks and make mistakes and fall down and pick myself back up again.
