“And you still came?”
“I had to see you,” he says hoarsely.
I don’t know how to feel or what to think. He did exactly what I wanted, just twenty years too late. After I’ve moved on. After I’ve lived an entire lifetime. Built a home with someone else when I desperately wanted it to be him at one point.
He’s here for me, right when my life hit an unexpected crossroad, leaving me confused and uncertain. But what if I decided to let Everett in? What if him coming back right now was for a reason? Those questions and all the wrong in my life swirl like a big scary tornado in my head, and I feel like the air around me is being siphoned out of the room. Facing this, my past, my marriage, my future, feels suddenly daunting, and I just want to step away from it. Out of sight, out of mind feels like the perfect solution right about now.
I start to push away from him and sit up, and he follows. “I should go. I left Sadie with James.”
“Yeah.” He sounds reluctant. Like he wants to convince me to stay but isn’t sure if it’s allowed.
I stand and walk to the door with Everett close behind me. When I reach the door, I turn to face him. “Thank you for…letting me tell you, I guess.”
“Teeny, you don’t have to thank me.”
I nod. “I know things are really complicated. For me, for us. And it’s all really confusing to me.”
“I know.”
“Okay.”
“Teeny.” I look at him, feeling so lost and scared. “I’m here,” he says, his eyes soft and gentle. “I know it took me a really long time to come back, but I’m not going anywhere.”
My fingers find his hand, tracing over the wrinkles lining his knuckles and the bumpy ridges of his veins. He lets me, giving me a moment to study the hands that used to touch me without permission. With his hand in mine, I look up at him, wishing I could find more than just the solemn look on his face. Maybe answers.
I expect him to do something. Anything that’ll help those confusing fitful thoughts to become quiet and hushed, but he doesn’t. Instead, he gently dips his head to place a small, gentle kiss at the top of my head before opening the door for me, and I’m left feeling bereft.
“I’ll see you at the wedding,” I say softly as I turn away to leave.
“See you at the wedding.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-FOUR
Everett
NOW
I never thoughtabout having kids. It didn’t feel like something that was meant for me, and I never really met anyone I could picture that life with. Weekend trips to the aquarium, after-school pickups, coaching the local youth basketball league, having make-believe tea parties in a room decorated in glitter and purple.
If the possibility of that life ever scraped my mind, it would’ve only been with one person.
Teeny was pregnant. With my child. And whatever path she chose for her future, that baby wasn’t a part of it. And neither was I. Not because she had a choice in the matter, but because I chose for her. I left and never came back. No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try to prove to Teeny that I should’ve been there, that I should’ve known, it won’t change the fact that the trajectory of my life changed the moment I left.
What if I was meant to be a father? Even at seventeen with nothing but our love for each other to fuel the rest of our lives.
I’m not usually a “what if” type of thinker. I make decisions based on reasonability and the likelihood of an advantageous outcome. I don’t tend to look back and second guess my decisions, wondering if I had chosen a different path, would it have led to a more favorable result. It’s gotten me this far in life, and to be completely honest, I’ve gotten pretty far.
Except with Teeny. I’ve spent the last twenty years wondering what if with her. What if I came back? Without my parents or the issues that tied me to them, but on my own. What if I realized sooner that I needed Teeny in my life? Instead of working through the heaviness of my anxiety on my own, those panic attacks, the long drawn out therapy sessions making me wonder what the fuck was wrong with me, all of it taking years and years for me to finally realize that I just needed the only person in the world who could ground me. I spent the last twenty years skimming the surface, hoping something would finally bring me back to a place where I felt solid. Where I felt like I could function without feeling like I was going to catapult into space and never find my footing.
All of those what ifs crashed into me the second Josh called me. His voice, full of nostalgia and genuine happiness for our reconnection, tethered me to something. He pulled me in until I finally found Teeny again. Now that I’m here, I don’t care about all the what ifs. All I want is for Teeny to be back in my life.
My phone rings on my bed, right on top of the goose-down covers rumpled from a restless night’s sleep, jolting me back to my hotel room.
“Hello?” I answer, recognizing the number from my old office back in Seattle.
“Everett,” I hear on the other end, the deep voice cautious yet somehow impatient and stern even with just the sound of my name. It’s Victor Storm, the executive chairman at InnoDex. A.k.a. the board of directors’s head honcho. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” I answer. While his name may sound like a fictional superhero, he’s anything but a child’s comic book character come to life. In fact, I don’t think he’s ever even flipped through a comic book or gone to see the latest Marvel movie with his commitment to his work. He has a no-nonsense attitude about a lot of things and is persuasive and direct in the boardroom, making me that much more wary about this call.
