She clears her throat and blinks several times as her gaze focuses on me like she just remembered where she’s at. “I think so,” she says hoarsely.
“Okay.” We remain hesitant, unsure of where to go from here. I wonder if I crossed a boundary so far beyond repair, and this is it for us. No more Teeny. No more Andrew. Just me and all the remains of my ruined relationships. “If you want to just go, I get it. I understand if you’re mad and don’t want to?—”
“What? Grace, I’m not mad at you.”
“You’re not?” I ask dubiously.
“No,” she assures. “It’s a lot to take in. I mean, you and Andrew. And holy shit,Frankie, but…I’m not upset.”
I don’t know why this heap of emotions causes my throat to tighten, but I blink through a wave of tears and ask in a wavering voice, “Even though we were keeping it a secret from you this whole time?”
“I mean, I wish you would’ve told me sooner, but I get it. You were scared.” She places a consoling hand on my arm, and I turn away just as a tear slips down my cheek.
“And I don’t even understand why,” I tell her honestly, quickly wiping at my face. “Every time I felt like I was ready for people to know about us, I’d get this impending doom kind of feeling. Like everything was going to come crashing down, and things just wouldn’t work out.”
“Kind of like how things ended with Frankie?”
“Yeah, something like that.” The resemblance throws me a little off guard, yet I can’t believe how right she is. As different as Andrew and Frankie are, the fears I had stepping into another committed relationship were the same. Only this time, I was bracing myself for the downfall with no actual cause for it.
“Do you think…that maybe you’re not quite over it?”
“What are you talking about? You mean Frankie?”
“No, not Frankie, just the whole divorce. How he treated you, how badly it all played out.” She pauses, like her next words might be too much to bear. “Do you think that’s why you didn’t want to tell me? Or anyone?”
I ruminate over her words, the possibility of them and how it still affects me now. It seems ridiculous to let something from my past dictate so much of my future. “But that sounds so silly. Me and Frankie were so long ago.”
“It could be some kind of post-divorce trauma you never got over. You might be over Frankie, but you might not be over the actual divorce.” She gives me a moment for this new revelation to sink in before adding, “He put you through a lot, Grace.”
I consider everything Teeny says, wondering how after almost four years, all the ways Frankie tore apart my confidence only left me ashamed and vulnerable. As if no one could ever love me the way I am, and if I wanted the things I wanted in life, I’d have to settle. I’d have to settle for someone who never put me first. And I believed it was what I deserved with my entire being because Frankie engraved it into my brain every chance he got. But then Andrew came along, trying to prove to me how none of that’s true. Yet, I couldn’t find it in myself to believe him.
“I think he’s…really mad at me,” I confess. “I think he wants to end things.”
“Just give him some time. He might just need a little space.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Andrew
The most vividmemory I have of growing up in my childhood home is watching my two older brothers share a room. While I had my own filled with bins of plastic toys and their hand-me-down electronics, they bonded over sleeping a few feet from each other. They’d connect through video games—ones I didn’t quite have the hand-eye coordination for yet—and odd fashion choices like baggy jeans and puka shell necklaces. All while I played with my LEGO and action figures.
Now, looking at the dusty treadmill and elliptical machine from my door through theirs, I wish it was their two twin beds I was looking at. Thankfully, my parents didn’t turn my own room into a home gym—if you call two exercise machines and a lone yoga mat a gym. Instead, my parents left my twin-size bed intact, swapping out the old navy bed sheets for pretty floral ones for guests. But the Star Wars decals my mom strategically placed on both sides of the window are still there. A nice little reminder of my childhood while I stay with them.
“Are you all settled in?” My mom is by the doorway, a stack of towels in her hands.
“Yep.”
“Where are you keeping all your furniture?”
“It’s in storage,” I answer.
“So, it’s just your clothes?”
I nod. “And a few other things,” I say, loosely gesturing at the boxes I brought along with me.
She sighs, suppressing it with a placating smile. “Well, it’s nice to have you back home.”
I nod, the only response I have to offer that isn’t ungrateful or dispirited. She and my dad are putting me up without charging me rent after all. But there is the narrowing margin of my freedom with the probing “Where are you going?” and “Are you going to stay out late?” I’m sure to expect in the coming weeks. Just last night, after coming home at one a.m. from the Coldplay concert I went to with my friends, I was hit with an impassive lecture in the morning about the hordes of drunk drivers on the road past midnight. It was my last hurrah before what feels like a sanction for falling for the wrong girl. I just hope this isn’t a permanent situation.
