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I wanted to run to her, but she had her back to me and I didn’t want to scare her. As soon as I was close enough for her to hear me, I said something about being too old to be on the swings. It was probably a stupid thing to say, but it’s all my mind could think up. It was racing with thoughts of how she ended up here, what happened while she was gone, and if she was okay.
She wasn’t okay. I could tell the moment she looked at me. I saw the tears in her eyes, the look on her face, and knew it was bad. I knew whatever she’d been through since the last time I saw her was really bad. Worse than Ted dying.
And now, as I hold her in my arms and she sobs, her whole body shaking, I’m not sure I want to know who or what hurt her this much. I don’t even want to think about it.
“It’s okay,” I whisper, keeping her in my arms. We’ve been like this for several minutes and she hasn’t tried to pull away. I assume she’s still mad at me, and yet she’s holding onto me like she’ll never let go.
After another few minutes, her tears slow and I hear her whisper, “What are you doing here?”
“Something told me to come here. So I did.”
She looks up at me with her red eyes and tear-stained face and my heart nearly breaks. I hate seeing her sad, but this is worse than sad. All I see when I look at her is pain and loss and the deep scars from her childhood that she still carries around. It’s almost like they’ve come back to the surface.
“How did you know I was here?”
“I didn’t. I just had a feeling I needed to be here.” I rub my hand over her ice cold cheek. “I keep trying to tell you we’re meant to be together. After three chance encounters, maybe now you’ll finally believe me.”
She looks to the side, like she’s counting them up in her head. The diner. The ice rink. And now, at the park. All three times we were brought together after being apart. I get chills when I think about that, but it makes me even more certain that Nova is the person I’m supposed to be with.
“I had a feeling too,” she says. “But I didn’t know why or what it meant. I just felt like I should come here.”
“Nova, look at me.” I wait for her eyes to meet up with mine. “I’m not someone who believes in signs, but we’ve been brought together too many times to call it a coincidence. You and I are meant to be together. Maybe it’s just as friends or maybe it’s more than that. I just know we can’t lose each other again. When you took off and I couldn’t find you, I finally knew how you felt when my parents adopted me. You didn’t know where I went. You didn’t know the people I was with. I know how that feels now, to have the person you love more than anything just disappear, never knowing if you’ll see them again.”
A tear slides down her cheek. “I didn’t want to go.”
“But you didn’t think you had a choice.”
She nods.
“Let’s go sit down.” I take her hand and walk her over to the bench we sat on before, the one where we shared our first kiss. That seems so long ago now, but it was only a few weeks.
As Nova sits down, I see her shivering.
“It’s too cold out here,” I say. “Let’s go in the Jeep.”
She shakes her head. “I want to stay here.”
“Hold on.” I run back to the Jeep and get the blanket, bringing it back to cover her legs while my arm goes around her to keep her upper half warm. “Is that better?”
“Yeah.” She looks at me and smiles a little. “Thanks.”
“Nova, I need to explain what happened on Thanksgiving. I’ll keep it short because we can’t be out here forever in the cold, but basically, Paris was there because my mom invited her. Her family was having Thanksgiving dinner later that night so my mom invited her to eat with us since we usually have our dinner in the afternoon. Nothing happened between Paris and me. I swear to you, I broke up with her weeks ago and nothing’s happened since. As for not telling people about you, that was just me being stupid.”
“Why didn’t you want people knowing?” Nova asks, gazing down at the ground.
“I didn’t want them judging you, or judging me. The world I live in now is nothing like where I came from, and I don’t just mean being rich versus being poor. I mean how I have to act, the person I have to be.”
“Is it that way for everyone?”
“No, because they were born into that life. They don’t know anything different. But I do, which made me feel even more alone. What was even worse is that I couldn’t tell them.”
“What do you mean?”
I pause. “Nobody knew.”
Nova looks up at me. “Knew what?”
“That I was adopted. Nobody knew, not even my sister. Only my parents and a few of our relatives knew.”
