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She’d let go of a lot of things. She’d been so afraid of being
flawed and marked by the passing of her parents, of not being
able to recover and find herself again, but that hadn’t
happened. It had for Giana, who spent most of her teenage
years and her entire twenties being locked away in a cage of
grief. They’d recovered together, along with the many ways
they’d changed together.
“Do you ever feel like we were in the same orbit, even if we
were on totally different paths and came from totally different
places?” Giana asked. She turned, her moss green eyes
drinking in Coralyn’s face. “I always felt like there was this
pull between us.”
That pull was the only way she could explain the force
she’d felt that night she didn’t walk out the door but had
chosen to go through with the marriage instead. Yes, she’d
used the necklace as an excuse, but she knew there was
something more. Some compulsion that made her stay.
“Yes,” she responded. “Yes, I do.”
Giana slipped their hands out of her coat and studied them.
Their fingertips were red with the cold. She was holding
Coralyn’s left hand and she turned it around, knuckles up, and
studied it. “You know, next week is the anniversary of that
day.”
The day that they got married. They’d annulled the
marriage
shortly after, because it felt like the right thing to do, but
they’d never wavered in their commitment to each other.
Through their grief classes, Giana had slowly gravitated back
to her family. They’d been having dinners together.
Taking her mom out for girls’ afternoons. Giana called her
