“I still do. You’re the most independent woman I know. Today won’t change that.”
“I’m soaking your shirt with my tears.”
“You’re being honest. You’re giving me the first chance I’ve ever had since I met you to be here for you.”
“It’s mortifying,” she repeated.
“I love you,” he told her, undaunted.
Her crying shook her shoulders.
“I’ve been all over the world,” he said, “but you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. You’re my treasure and my compass. If you’d died last Thursday, then my life would have been over, too.”
Britt hadn’t known her body could contain this much splendor and grief simultaneously. Since the moment she’d met Zander, she’d wanted to use her strength to rescue him. But now he was leveraging his strength to rescue her.
“Have I made myself clear?” he asked.
She nodded against his chest.
Then she sobbed for an hour straight.
He massaged her scalp. He smoothed the long fall of her hair. He rubbed her back.
She cried for the things her family members had suffered, things that had left their marks upon her childhood.
She mourned the death of her close friend Olivia.
She sobbed because she’d been wrong to go kayaking after a flood and wrong to not tell Zander about her injuries and wrong to not accept comfort or help from the people who loved her. She cried because her kayaking injury had hurt and because it still hurt sometimes.
She mourned because she’d felt so wretchedly powerless last week in the parking lot at The Residences and later in that room at the warehouse. Her sense of security had been yanked away and she was sorry, very sorry, that it had.
She cried because Zander loved her and she loved him back, and she wasn’t worthy of his devotion or this astonishingly wonderful bond that existed between them.
She sobbed because her ridiculous pride had kept her from relying on God, the one—the only one—she should have been relying on all this time.
When she finally spent all her tears, her eyes were puffy but the sin, the anxieties, and the lies she’d told herself had beenexpunged from her soul. Her body could relax. At last, her mind could settle.
She’d been driven low, and it had humbled her. But when she’d been driven low, she’d found God there. The God she’d known since childhood had gently lifted her chin. He was on her side. She could afford to let go of her own tattered competency.
She drifted to sleep in Zander’s arms.
A few times during the night, she became aware of him shifting. Closing the curtains. Turning out the lights. But he always returned immediately, and thank goodness for that. Because as soon as he came back and she felt his arm beneath her head or his fingers enclosing hers or his heartbeat beneath her ear, she tumbled back into deep, restful sleep.
Letter from Zander to his mom two weeks after he started high school:
Dear Mom,
I know you were worried about me making friends. I don’t want you to be worried. I have a friend. A girl named Britt Bradford. She sits beside me in English and walks with me from English to art. She saves me a place at her lunch table, and we talk after school when we’re waiting for our rides outside.
She grew up in Merryweather, so she knows everyone and introduces me to everyone—which is more people than I even want to meet.
She lives in this big mansion, and I went there yesterday to eat dinner with her parents. Then Britt and I made brownies, but not out of a box. They turned out really good.
I’m okay, Mom. You don’t have to worry about me.
Chapter
twenty-seven
