Of all the things she’d lost, her reminder that today is not forever was at the top of the list. Hanna touched her pen to her journal, surprised by how easy the words flowed from her.
1. I’m good at my job, good enough that they haven’t fired me after a year of working from bed.
2. I bought my dream fixer-upper, largely thanks to life insurance money, but whatever. In this economy, a win is a win.
3. I can be in the same room as Logan without dying, though it’s not much better.
4. I’m eating again. My curves have started to come back now that I live with people who don’t miss meals.
5. I’m meeting new people and making new friends.
Hanna snorted. She did not include that one of those new friends was a source of constant anxiety, but her mother didn’t need to know who she thought about late at night.
6. I didn’t die when you did.
That last point surprised Hanna a bit. It had rolled around in her mind, of course, that her life ended the moment her mother drew her final breath.
But it didn’t.
It changed.
She did not die.
There had been many nights in the year following when she’d gotten into bed and hoped she would wake up and it had all been some sort of awful nightmare or, worse, that she wouldn’t wake up at all. She wished more people talked about those ugly hours, the ones when slipping away to wherever your person went and confronting them face to ghostly face seemed better than waking up in the cold light of morning and continuing on.
A tear dropped onto her journal. She hadn’t felt it fall.
Hanna was about to start number seven when someone crested the hill in front of her, a bright yellow bucket hat framing their face.
Off we go, she thought, shoving her journal back in her bag.
She followed them for long enough that she worried about being mistaken for a stalker, so she fell back to the other side of the street and put in her earbuds. She found the sad-girl playlist she'd been curating since college, through a lifetime of bad dates and Big-T traumas, and let it rub salt in her wounds for a few more blocks.
Twenty minutes later, her bucket hat-bearing guide darted into an apartment building.
Well, shit, Hanna thought, looking around for her next spot of sunshine.
She choked on a laugh when she glanced up and read the sign above her head. Tucked between The Roxie theater and a Money Mart, The Sunflower hovered over 16th Street. The windows glared in the midday sun of the hole-in-the-wall restaurant.
She debated if it was too early for lunch.
“Hanna?”
The hell? Hanna spun, a familiar figure hanging out under The Roxie’s unlit neon sign, waving to her. Chloe, clad in tight, acid-washed jeans and a cropped t-shirt of a band Hanna had never heard of, darted forward from the shadows.
“Chloe?”
“How funny! Did Milo invite you?” She hugged Hanna quickly, her very cool perfume drowning her senses.
“Um, no, actually, I was just on a walk and ended up here.”
“Crazy,” Chloe said, her head tilting. “Well, hey, it must be meant to be! Milo and I are playing hooky and catching a matinee. You should join us!”
She looked far too earnest in her invitation.
“Oh no, that’s okay, I don’t want to crash…” She almost said ‘your date,’ but then remembered that Milo doesn’t do the dating thing.
“No, seriously, it’ll be fun! There’s almost never anyone here midday. They play old movies during the week.”
