Can you meet me tomorrow? At the river. Our spot.
My finger hovered over send. This was either the bravest thing I'd ever done or the most cowardly, I genuinely couldn't tell which. Both options felt like betrayal. Letting her in meant tying her to a sinking ship. Pushing her away meant losing the only person who'd ever made me feel like I was enough. But with the way my tremors and memory worsened at an unpredictable rate this week, pushing Charlotte away felt like a great idea.
"Just send it," I muttered to the empty room. "Stop being a coward."
I pressed send before I could talk myself out of it.
Her response came almost instantly, like she'd been waiting.
Charlotte
Yes. What time?
Me
4 PM.
Charlotte
I'll be there.
Three words. No questions, no hesitation, no demand for explanation. JustI'll be there.
I set the phone down and pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars. Tomorrow, I would either let her in or push her away forever. I had twenty-four hours to figure out which choice was love and which was self-destruction.
"They might be the same thing," I told myself as sleep slowly washed over me. "Has that occurred to you?"
I spent the early morning rehearsing speeches in my head, which is a completely normal and healthy thing to do.
By noon, I'd mentally prepared approximately twelve different versions of "here's why you should run away from me as fast as possible," each more dramatic than the last.
Thirty minutes after that, I'd scrapped them all. By three o'clock, I was sitting in my car in the parking lot near the river, my hands trembling on the steering wheel, no closer to knowing what I was going to say.
"Come on," Nerves were eating me up inside. "You're a lawyer. You argue for a living. You can do this."
Arguing for a living was very different from arguing against the only woman I'd ever loved. But I got out of the car anyway.
The old oak tree stood sentinel by the water, its branches bare against the gray November sky. Fifteen years ago, I'd kissed Charlotte under those branches for the first time, nervous and clumsy and completely certain I was the luckiest person alive.
Now I was back, carrying a different kind of insecurity. The setting felt appropriate. Poetic, even, if you were into that sort of self-inflicted symbolism.
She was already there.
Charlotte leaned against the trunk of the oak, her arms wrapped around herself against the chill. She wore a dark green coat that made her eyes look like deep forest pools, and her expression was careful, not quite worried, not quite calm.
Watchful.
Ready.
"Hi," she said as I approached, my footsteps careful on the frost-tinged grass.
"Hi." I stopped a few feet from her, the space between us feeling vast and charged. "You came."
"I said I would." She tilted her head, studying me. "You look like you haven't slept."
"I haven't."
"That's not great for someone who's supposed to be managing a chronic condition."
