“I have time,” Stevie says.
“You literally don’t.”
“So I look a little tired in my wedding pictures. So what?”
I laugh, pull my legs up onto the bed.
Her face softens. “Are you in love with him?” she asks.
I force a smile, my eyes starting to burn. As soon as I saw him in the kitchen that first morning, lit golden, I knew. I tried to convince myself it was just some trick of nostalgia. But the feelings hadn’t gone away. As soon as I knew I loved him, they were never going to. “Of course I am,” I admit, nervous to be sharing this with Stevie. It makes the fact of me having wasted so much time, of us still not actually being together too real.
When Stevie came home after Sasha’s wedding, crawled into bed next to me and hugged me silently while I cried,or when she called me every day for months after I flew back to New York, always asking if I was okay and not pushing in her usual fashion, I felt like I was letting her down by not being able to share any of what happened with her. More than that, I was ashamed of what I’d done, how I’d handled things with Ren and everyone. And telling her this now makes it something to discuss, dissect, brings to light all the ways I could have been better. It means my conversation on the beach with Ren is confirmed, final.
“Took you a while,” she says. She leans back, mouth twisting to one side as she thinks. “I guess I just thought that when you and Ren finally got together, it would be forever.”
“Yeah,” I say softly. “Turns out it’s all a little more complicated than that.”
“Why?”
I shrug a shoulder, looking at my sister. For all of her idiosyncrasies, she always knows what she wants. To go to school in New York. To move back to Oregon. To marry Leo. “I don’t know what my life looks like anymore,” I say, though I’m not totally sure how true that is now. There’s something murky beginning to take shape in my mind. I just can’t distinguish its parts yet.
“Are you okay?” she asks. “Novo was everything to you.”
“Not everything,” I point out, because it’s true, even if it seemed like it. Even if I let it be, there were still so many other things that mattered. I just shut them out to make room for the thing that I felt like I had the most control over. “I’ll be okay. I just don’t think I can jump into something with the way my life is going right now. And I might have caused too much damage when I left last time. I don’t think he trusts me in the same way.” I glance down at my hands, back up at Stevie. “Maybe friends is all we’re supposed to be.”
Stevie rolls her eyes, not like she’s exasperated, but like she’s rolling them at what she’s about to reveal.She steels her shoulders, takes my hand in hers. “Listen,” she says. “I’m only going to say this once because I feel like I’ve doled out more affection than my weekly quota allows—you have something that’s kind of a miracle.” Her eyes are going watery now, and I need her to stop. If Stevie cries, I’ll cry, and then we’ll really be on Sasha’s shit list. “I’ve grown up watching you and Ren be this example of the kind of love I always wanted. You two are each other’s center in this way that doesn’t just happen. And look, I know someone might say it makes sense, you grew up together, but I don’t know if it’s just that. A lot of people spend their lives together without ever really knowing each other or ever really loving each other, but you two are this thing entirely your own.
“Neither of you have been yourselves since Sasha’s wedding. And I’ve felt like I needed to be neutral—not tell you when he moved in with Amanda, not tell him when you tried dating again—but you’re just half of yourselves without each other. You can still be happy like that, I know, but after seeing you two together, it’s like you just shut down when things fell apart. And I know I don’t know exactly what happened, why it fell apart. But I love you both so much, and all I’ve wanted for so much of my life is for you two to be together.” She sniffles, almost laughs. “I think that might be why I did what I did last night. I thought that maybe, deep down, I was helping.”
“I mean,” I say. I’m going to be a puddle soon, no longer a body, just raw emotion. Stevie’s announcement was abrupt, but it might have been the thing Ren and I needed to get everything out in the open instead of ignoring it until it blew up in our faces. “It did force us to talk.”
“I know that I’m getting married today, so I’m really into this love stuff, but I just think you should try, if you can. People spend their whole lives looking for something that comes close to it.”
I’m searching for a response to this when a light knock on the door saves me. It swings partially open, our mom poking her head in. “Can I join you?” she asks, and Stevie waves her over to the bed.
“Are you talking about—” she asks, and at Stevie’s nod, she quiets, reaching out to cup a hand under my chin.
I shrug her off, suddenly tense now that she’s here. “It’s Stevie’s wedding day. We don’t need to talk about me anymore.”
“Sweetie,” my mom says. “Why don’t you want to talk to me?”
There’s a reason I haven’t tried to have a conversation about our relationship with her. How do you tell someone their well-meaning worry is stifling you, pushing you farther away? If I didn’t give her anything to analyze, there was a chance she could just be my mom.
“I want to talk to you, Mom,” I tell her. “It’s just— Sometimes I want to be able to tell you things without you worrying it means I’m spiraling. I can handle my life, truly. And I appreciate your worry, I do, but sometimes it makes me feel like you don’t always trust what I’m telling you.”
There’s a glimmer of recognition in her eyes that thaws some of the distance between us. She smooths a hand over my head, grabs Stevie’s free one. “I love my girls,” she says. “I think that sometimes I worry I’m not doing enough.”
“Mom,” I say. “You’realwaysdoing more than enough.”
She gives me a watery smile. “I just wanted to help you,” she says. “When things first got bad. And when I couldn’t—I think I doubled down. I felt helpless.”
“You’re a great mom,” I tell her. “You do help me. But maybe we can all stop worrying about being the best version of ourselves and just, I don’t know. Talk to each other.”
My mom nods, then, almost sheepishly, asks, “Can I just ask one question?”
“Mom,”Stevie says.
“No, it’s okay.” I put a hand on Stevie’s knee. She’s right. I don’t let our mom in like she does. I’ve never given her all of me. And maybe I never will be able to, maybe that’s the point: that everyone is going to get some version of you, except for the person who gets everything, if you’re lucky. But I’ve been assuming so much on the part of the people who love me that I’ve held them at arm’s length. Even when everything fell apart. Even when I needed them most. I want my mom to ask me questions, just not question me. I want to answer them, but I also want to tell her when it’s too much.
