When I love you, I'm not the addict or the abuse survivor or the broken kid who was more often lost than not.
I'm just Nate and you're just Nora.
And we're just two people who saw each other—really saw each other—and decided that was enough.
That's still enough for me. It will always be enough.
I'm sober and becoming someone who could stand beside you instead of in your shadow. And if someday you find yourself back in Eden—if someday you decide you want to know if I'm still here, if I'm still waiting, if there's still an us worth fighting for?—
I'll be here.
And if you walk through that door, I'll be ready.
Not because I've been frozen in time hoping you'd come back. But because some part of me will always be ready for you.
Some part of me will always choose you.
In every version of this story. In every possible world where we exist.
I choose you, Len.
I chose you at seven, with scraped knees and no understanding of what it meant—only that it was always you.
I choose you now, knowing exactly what it costs.
And I’ll choose you at eighty-seven, if the universe is kind enough to bring us back to each other.
But loving you can’t mean losing myself and I know you’d never ask me to break just to keep you. So I have to choose to believe that I am enough—with or without you. The same way I need you to believe that about yourself.
That’s the only way this ever works.
So this isn’t goodbye, I won’t let it be. It’s just the part of our story where we have to walk away—not because we stopped choosing each other, but because we finally learned how to choose ourselves too.
Because if we’re meant to last—if this is as real as it feels—then it won’t disappear just because we let go for a while.
It will wait. It will grow. It will find us again. Somewhere down the line, in a version of us that isn’t held together by hurt or timing or almosts—we’ll meet again.
And maybe then we won’t have to fight so hard just to make it fit.
Until that day, I’ll carry you with me.
In every version of my life, in every future I can imagine—there’s still a part of me that’s yours.
I love you, Leni.
— Nate
CHAPTER 43
NORA’S MIXTAPES #19 - #27
NORA
I can't seethrough my tears. I feel paralysed and can't do anything but hold this letter—the seventy-third letter—and feel the weight of two years of love I was kept from knowing.
While I thought he'd forgotten me, he was choosing me. While I built a life with men who didn't make me feel anything, he was writing love letters I'd never read. While I convinced myself I was better off without him, he was becoming someone who could stand beside me.
My eyes are burning as I gather the letters carefully and stack them like they're sacred texts.
