“But what if I—” He swallows a word he can’t say. “What if I can’t walk away.”
“Then you’ll just have to bet your top dollar.”
I sense his smile, remembering his mother’s misuse of the phrase as I walk away. It almost makes me pause.
But I don’t. I walk away.
And he doesn’t stop me.
Gramma Elle
“You’ll look back on life wishing you’d done some of it differently. But don’t let that change your footsteps. It all shakes out how it should.”
“HEY, GRAMMA,” I SAYwith tired steps as I reach the rocking chair next to her.
“How you been, honey?”
I collapse, burying my face in my hands. “Confused. Doubtful. And wishing that every moment with JP didn’t make me feel like I could fall in love with him again.”
She snorts and continues knitting. “That’ll never happen.”
I glare at her through my fingers. “I’m serious, Gramma. I’m done, done with him.” I lean back, resting against the wooden slats of the chair. “You know what it is? I’m hooked on him because of potential. I never got to see how he takes his socks off under the covers or doesn’t separate his whites out of his laundry and washes everything on cold.”
“No, he probably just wets his toothbrush before he puts toothpaste on it, which will end up being more endearing than annoying,” she comments, focused on the sage green yarn in her fingers.
“He does do that,” I remark, and she shrugs. “But you get what I mean, we haven’t actually been together for a long enough period of time to know what’s going to drive us apart.”
She presses her lips into a frown and nods, but not in a way that tells me she agrees, just that she understands. “Have you ever thought about just diving in? Circumstances be damned?Because even if you crash and burn, at least you’ll finally have your answer.”
I peer over at her. “Answer to what?”
“Whether or not you’re his one love like that fortune teller said...”
“I didn’t tell you that part,” I query, though I could be wrong. This is a dream, after all.
“Didn’t the fortune teller also say you have a very important woman in your life? Older and wiser.” She lets out a long laugh, throwing her head back and raising her hand to her mouth.
That’s when I see it. The taco tattoo on her wrist.
“Gramma?” I ask, breathless and mystified. “What is that?”
“What’s what?” she asks with a knowing expression.
I grab her wrist and stare at the tattoo.Mytattoo. Emotion rises in my chest. “You’re not Gramma?”
She smiles a smile I’ve seen every day I’ve looked in the mirror. “No, honey. I’m you.”
Tears cloud my vision. “What do you mean? This whole time?”
She nods, reaching out and holding my hand. She has the same beauty mark on her right thumb as I do on mine. Her hands are weathered and the skin is soft and thin but the size is exactly mine. My eyes dance around her face. The same brown eyes. A soft dimple on the left and a more prominent one on the right. Her hair is gray and her skin is filled with lines marking each and every year of her beautiful complicated life.
She squeezes my hand, then reaches out and holds my face in her hands. “Sometimes we need to hear from the older version of ourselves if only because we need to know it wasn’t all for nothing. But I want you to know it is all for something—and it’s beautiful and complex and wonderful like the most beautiful things in life are. I want you to trust your heart, honey. Even if you’re scared. I want you to believe in that feeling deep down inyour gut that’s making you wonder and question. I want you to hold onto it. I want you to trust it. Because that’s some version of you guiding you through this wild and unpredictable life.”
A sob escapes my chest and I fall into her embrace. “So it’s time to go all in with JP?”
She laughs, a sound I know all too well. “Well, honey, I would never spoil the ending for you. But he’ll prove it to you. Just you wait.”
forty-three
