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“Just live in the moment and focus on what you mean to each other,” she went on. “If someday you decide to have kids, great. And if not, that’s great, too. But you’ve been so afraid of taking risks that you’re not living. So today, just be happy, sweetheart. Do you think you can do that?”
Emotion threatened to make my words come out all wonky, so I cleared my throat and nodded. “Yes.”
“Okay, good.”
We went back to watching the skies, but I kept thinking about what she’d said. Maybe I had put too much pressure on the idea of having kids. Before my diagnosis, I’d always assumed that one day I’d be a mom. But not until after I focused on my dream. Ballet training is rigorous and takes a toll on the dancer’s body, so unless I was a principal at a major ballet company, I knew I’d retire in my late twenties or early thirties. Then I figured I’d become a dance teacher for children or something else dance related like I’m doing now, so taking time out at that point to have a baby would be fine.
After my diagnosis—after finding out that my genetic condition had a fifty percent chance of being passed on to my children—it became a hard no. And it wasn’t because I didn’t want to take care of a child with a genetic heart condition or some other kind of disorder. Instead, I didn’t want my child to struggle like I’d been struggling. What if they had dreams that didn’t coincide with their condition and were as crushed as I was when they had to stop? Or what if they never had any problems, but they lived in fear that they would develop them over time? I knew firsthand how hard it was to live with this fear day in and day out, and I hated the idea of one day telling them that they were struggling because of me. Because of a choice I made. It was a lot to wrestle with.
But Donna was right. I was making decisions based on fear and risk aversion and all these negative emotions, and there was no reason that had to be figured out right now. And I was grateful she’d told me that, because the entire concept of making decisions based on avoiding risk was something I’d probably have to work through before I was ready to be a mom in any capacity.
And she was also right about us working on our relationship now and in the future. This was Paul. We’d been through so much already, and on a ridiculously long timeline. However long it took us to figure this out, once we got it started, I knew we would make it work. We’d been partners in so many ways ever since we were fifteen years old. We could be partners in this, too.
“Hey, there they are,” Aria yelled as she approached us again.
She pointed at the sky, and I looked up to see five small dots falling from such a ridiculously great height that they almost seemed to appear out of nowhere. I knew Paul did this all the time but seeing him falling toward the earth was pretty surreal. I held my breath all the way until their parachutes opened, and one by one they started navigating through the air until they reached the drop zone.
I had no idea which one was Paul, of course, but as I looked at the faces of Donna and Aria, I knew we were all thinking the same thing.Someone I love is insane, and I need to learn to be okay with it.Well, in Aria’s case, it was her dad and brother, but still.
Paul, Will, Joe, and the instructors all zoomed into just the right area—how they were able to steer themselves to such a precise location from so high up was totally beyond me—and the three of us rushed out to meet them.
Adrenaline coursed through me as I studied the divers on my approach, trying to figure out which one was Paul before I accidentally launched myself on one of the instructors. When he took his helmet off and I found him, I ran up to him with a laugh, jumping into his arms.
He dropped the helmet and caught me around the middle, holding me against him, my legs bent back and arms around his neck. I pressed a kiss to his mouth and felt him smiling as he kissed me back with the energy and force one might expect after having just fallen from the sky. And then I pulled back and took a few steadying breaths, because wow, that might have been the best kiss we’d had yet.
