Sully was watching me carefully, his gaze filled with so much love and attention. And everything about it made my eyes well as I confessed, “I really wanted them, Sawyer.”
I watched as pain flickered across his face, and today, as much as I hated to cause him pain, there was also something comforting about it. He was an echo of me in every way. In some ways, he always had been. But I knew now there had been lapses, missing pieces to our foundation. Or rather, there were buildingblocks that had been misplaced early on. Things put together when we were young and didn’t understand them yet.
But we understood them now.
“I know, baby. I did, too.” He used a gentle hand to pull me down into him, wrapping me tight in his strong arms. His words were muffled against my hair, but I heard them. And they were the most comforting words in the world.
“I did, too.”
four years ago
ELLIE
I watched Sully graduate on a grainy livestream with my heart in my throat.
He looked good.
Everyone told me he was good, too, when I asked.
And I asked just about everyone, trying to decide if I should call or if I should go. Did he want me there, or was he better off without me?
I’d originally said I’d only be gone until he graduated, and then I’d come back.
But that was before we both said things we couldn’t take back. Before it felt like he didn’t want anything to do with me. Before he made it clear that if I left, it would break something. Everything. In a way that I wasn’t sure could be fixed.
Sully didn’t look broken, anyway. Sully seemed whole.
Everyone said he was good.
Which was all I’d ever really wanted, right? It was half the reason I’d left.
So I stayed in Boston.
And when Natalie flew home for her brother’s graduation, I didn’t go with her.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
sully
THE NEXT COUPLE OF weeks passed in tones of red and gold, in passion and in steady calm. I began measuring time in the flicker of a smile or the gasp of a breath, usually hiccupping from Ellie’s throat right before she broke apart for me.
A part of me had forgotten that life could be like this.
Another part of me decided life had never really been like this at all.
I’d never lived with Eleanor. Never got to watch her wake so many mornings in a row. Never got to study the way her mind worked from sunup to sundown. Never got to cook her so many meals or make her into one on the kitchen table quite so often, with her legs hooked over my shoulders and my head buried between her legs. She’d cut my hair, but it was still long enough for her to grab while she screamed my name.
She flitted around my childhood home with an ease and comfort that filled holes in my heart. Laptop in hand, she created different offices for her work every day—cocooned on the couch or the porch or beside me at the kitchen table, which did usually end in distraction.
I didn’t know how to stop touching her.
She didn’t seem to mind.
Today, my entire body buzzed like a live wire as I waited by the front door for her. She’d called down the stairs a few minutes ago, saying she needed a little more time to get ready for Noah’s football game, and I told her to take as much as she needed, even though I felt like I might jump out of my skin while waiting.
All of my siblings were coming home for the game. It was a rare event, having us all together. It was even rarer that it was happening more than twice a year. But everything had been wrong at Noah’s engagement party—for me, anyway. Ellie had been uncomfortable and uncertain being around us all, a thing that never should have happened. She never should have second-guessed whether she belonged there.
She belonged anywhere my family was, and she always would.
