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“Have you seen me? I was born with baggage.” She sighs.
“What’s on your mind?” I ask.
“This,” she says, handing me a notebook.
“What’s this?”
“Mal’s journal. Read the last thing she wrote.”
She watches me intently, as I flip to the back of the journal. My eyes widen when I realize that her sister wrote her, what basically looks like, a goodbye letter.
“Oh, beauty,” I say, leaning over to kiss her forehead when I finish reading.
“It’s a lot to take in,” she says, wiping her eyes.
“My mom isn’t gone, but I know this feeling. This feeling of overwhelming grief. Like you’re drowning in it. I think it would be weird if you didn’t feel that way. She was the other half of you.”
“Sometimes I just miss her so much it physically hurts me,” she admits.
I lean down on the bed, putting my head next to hers, running my thumb across her hand.
“I wish I could take all that pain away from you. I would, in a heartbeat,” I whisper.
“You do take it away, without even realizing it,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her.
“For what?”
“For being a fucking tool. For wasting all this time dangling you along and not getting my shit together fast enough.”
“Look at me,” she says, and I do. “You have nothing to apologize for. You have so much shit going on in your life, and it’s not up to me or anyone else to determine when, how, or even if you should share any of it with anyone. There’s no timetable on figuring your life out. I’m not going anywhere. All that matters is that we’ve made it to here and now,” she says.
“There’s so much I want to say to you right now,” I tell her, referring to the fact that I want to tell her I love her and that she’s mine now, and that will never change.
“You don’t have to say it,” she says, cupping my face with her hand.
We sit in silence for a while before she finally drifts off to sleep. Once I’m sure she’s asleep, I call Mitch.
“Is everything okay?” he asks, picking up immediately.
“Yes. I got to the hospital before he did. They wouldn’t allow him into the room. I was calling to make sure you were okay.”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I got a room for the night. I’ve been checking in on my security camera. It looks like someone showed up about an hour ago, but when they realized I wasn’t there, they left pretty quickly.”
“I’m so fucking sorry,” I say, running my hand through my hair.
“Stop apologizing. This isn’t on you.”
“You sound like Marley.”
“She’s smart.”
“She’s in pain.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the back of Mal’s journal there was a letter for her. A goodbye letter.”
