My chest aches at the memory. I still want kids, but I don’t know if I could give them my love for hockey. And at this rate, I’m not convinced I’m going to find the person for me. No one feels like home yet.
“I know it’s only been six months since the breakup, but I’m scared it won’t happen for me. That I won’t have the chance to get married again or fall in love again. That I won’t get the chance to be a mom.” She stuffs her hands into her shorts pockets, biting the inside of her lip.
I want to tell her that she’s young, that she has plenty of time, but I know she knows that and she doesn’t need to hear it from me.
“I know how it feels to be scared about an uncertain future,” I say. “But I also know how resilient you are, how patient you are, and even if it doesn’t happen on the timeline you want, I know you’ll find your person. You’ll get the life you wanted.”
I could be the one to give it to you.
The thought rises from somewhere deep inside me. Something I buried when I made the decision to choose my career over this woman. I never stopped believing that we could have a future together—I just shoved it so far out of myconsciousness so I wouldn’t have to live with the guilt of ruining the best thing that ever happened to me.
I lived with it anyway, especially after my injury. And I have spent years believing this shared dream Abby and I held was dead. But flowers are starting to bloom on the cracked, dying soil of our relationship, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe old dreams can be resurrected.
“That’s…that’s sweet of you to say,” she says, but her eyebrows squish together, and she only holds my gaze for a second before looking at the floor, then around the room as if searching for something. She chews on her lip like she’s uncomfortable or confused, and I think maybe the nerve I touched is too sensitive.
Time to change the subject.
“Did you look at the bathroom yet?” I ask.
Her face lights up. “No, but I bet it’s the size of this room.”
“It is,” I say, and she runs over to the door and peeks in.
The room is flooded with light thanks to the two large skylights in the ceiling. It’s also not finished, so she can’t go all the way in, but she can see the deep clawfoot bathtub that sits between the large stand-up shower on one side of the room and the sauna box on the other side. Next to the shower is a Jack-and-Jill sink and a mirror that takes up the whole wall. The light fixtures are hung but need bulbs.
“Insane,” she says with a smile and a shake of her head.
“Ready to see the best feature?”
She nods enthusiastically and claps her hands together. “This is so exciting. What you do is so cool,” she says.
I swear my chest puffs up as she says that. It makes me want to take her around the country and show her all the houses I worked on, just to hear her praise me.
I lead her back downstairs and out onto the patio, past the grill and down a well-hidden set of steps. We remove our shoesbefore walking along a sandy, tree-lined path that opens up to the beach.
“Oh my god. Talk about beachfront,” she says.
“A house that expensive should be beachfront.”
“A house that expensive should clean itself.”
As we walk toward the water, I sway toward her, brushing my knuckles against hers just to feel her skin against mine. I swear I feel her fingers flex for more contact. But it’s over just as fast, and she veers off to the side a bit, losing her balance a little and correcting.
“It’s funny, you know. You working on a beach house. Bringing me to see it. It’s our first time ever being at a beach house together,” Abby says, her small smile and this reference cracking my heart in two.
One night, the summer before our senior year of college, she had come to stay with me in Pittsburgh for a week. We’d gotten in a fight—over something stupid, no doubt—and we were lying in bed, neither of us sleeping, neither of us speaking to each other. I’d asked her how we could resolve this. I asked her what she wanted from me.
“I want to know that you love me. That when we fight like this, you aren’t just going to call it quits. I know, Miles. I know how you feel, but I need to hear it. I need that reassurance.”
I tried. I tried so hard. Because I did love Abby; I felt it in my bones. I loved her more than I’d ever loved anyone. I almost loved her more than I loved hockey. But when I tried to say the words, they’d get stuck in my throat.
So instead I told her that when we got married, I’d buy her a beach house in Rhode Island.
We had vaguely discussed getting engaged. There were veiled talks about the future, but this was different.
There wasn’t anything special about Rhode Island; neither of us had ever been. But when she turned to look at me, her eyesbright, I knew it meant almost as much to her as if I’d told her what she wanted to hear.
“With a yellow door?” she asked.
