“Is Frankie here? I’d like to explain everything to you both, if that’s okay.” Charlie asked. He unzipped his jacket and held it out to Robert. “You can show her this.”
Awe morphed Robert’s face into something much softer and kinder. “You can give it to her yourself,” he said gruffly, opening the door and waving us in. “Come inside. She’s been stress-baking since four this morning.”
The mouth-watering smell of cinnamon rolls greeted us first, along with the pleasant warmth of a crackling fire. Most of the chairs were still on top of the tables in the empty dining area, except for one.
A woman sat with her back to us, facing the fire. She’d wrapped her cardigan tightly around herself, as if to shield from what was to come.
She turned at the sound of our entry. Charlie stopped in his tracks next to me with a sharp inhale, his tight grip on my hand going lax.
Frankie’s hair was a beautiful, dark shade of salt and pepper. She wore the years of her life on her face, both in laughter lines and in the deep, endless amber of her eyes. But even with forty years separating them, the resemblance was striking.
“Charlie?” she breathed. “Is that really you?”
He swallowed through his tears. “Hi, Frankie.”
She stood at the same time he stepped toward her, meeting in the middle of the empty room in a hug so fierce, so long overdue, I almost felt like Robert and I should look away.
The stoic man from five minutes ago was gone. Together, we wept for the people we loved most in this world, who’d finally reunited with each other.
Explanations would come, along with more tears and promises to meet again soon. Time wasn’t easy on either of them, and yet there they were, on the other side of decades of grief.
I hated when people mindlessly parroted the old saying, “Everything happens for a reason.” Sometimes, terrible things happen to good people, and there is no explanation for it.
They didn’t deserve it. In fact, life may have been easier if the bad thing hadn't happened.
I understood better now, though, exactly one year after that fateful day I was left in an airport, the day my life changed forever, that even when life wasn’t fair, it could still be beautiful.
It could still be endlessly full of love, joy, and celebration, as mine was every day I woke up next to Charlie.
It could stillbe.
Would I have agreed to take the lookout job, had a life-changing diagnosis not forced me to grapple with a future I was never promised to begin with?
What would Charlie’s life have looked like, had it not been tragically cut short?
We’d never know. But in the aftermath, we’d found each other. We’d fought for each other. And if given the chance, I would never go back.
I’d choose him. Over and over.
And wasn’t that the most beautiful thing of all?
