Maybe this cabin will become something to you. I’m hoping you can use it even just as a refuge from real life, like I did.
When I first found out about my diagnosis, I was out here all the time. Just thinking. Figuring out where my life went, and how it slipped through my fingers so fast.
I wouldn’t take a second back — not helping out your mom or being there to see you grow up. You were my best friend, Bug, and it was an honor to see you become such a bull-headed, passionate woman. I still remember the day you were born, and how scared your mom was to let me hold you. Which was fair. I was seventeen and fucking terrified.
You made me step up. You made your mother step up. You weren’t the glue that held us together, you were the fucking fire under our asses.
But once you got old enough that I didn’t have to worry (so much) about you, I just started to coast. Which is fine. Don’t let the point of this be that you have to be doing something all the time. Don’t even let the point of this be that, just because I’m (I assume) dead now, that I’m a philosopher or something. I don’t know any more about life than you do.
I just wish I’d stopped to think about it more. To enjoy the moments. Take those mental pictures and store themsomewhere safe. Because sometimes now, when I look back on when you were little, I wish I could see more of it.
Anyway, that was a lot of rambling. Should have thought this through before I picked up the pen, I guess. But it feels good to write. Especially knowing you’ll be so tortured about my death that you’ll have to read the whole thing.
(Kidding).
(Only a little).
Anyway, I love you, Bug. My hand is starting to cramp, and I’ll have to leave for my flight soon, anyway.
Do me a favor and be there for your mom, okay? She’s going to act like this doesn’t bother her because she wants to be there for you, just like she’s there for me. Like she’s there for everyone.
Don’t let her. Make her grieve, and be there for her when she finally allows herself to.
You’re going to need each other. We always have.
Love,
J
When I lower the pages, I have to suck in a great, heaving breath. At some point, I started crying without realizing it, and now my lungs feel flat and empty. Tears and snot stream down my face.
And, like some great cosmic timing, I hear the front door of the cabin open.
“Lacey?” Max starts when he comes to the threshold of the study and sees me sitting in the middle of the room on the floor, papers scattered around me. In a second, it’s like he knows.
Instead of asking questions or trying to pull me out of it, Max walks to the center of the room, lowers down to sit next to me, and tugs me into his chest, holding me tight as I cry my way through everything that letter made me feel.
CHAPTER 20
MAX
In the fifteen years that I’ve lived here, my place has never felt like this before.
For the past week, Lacey and I have continued to work on the projects for her cabin, but in the early afternoons, we’ve packed up and come down to mine so I can work on a dining table. I never thought a dining table — and the chairs I made to go along with it — would be a project for my cabin, but we needed somewhere for Warren and Vanessa to sit, needed somewhere to place the meal.
During this dinner party.
Which I am hosting at my cabin right now.
I stand in the kitchen with a beer in one hand, watching the three of them laughing and talking at the table. Warren and Lacey are drinking the wine he brought, while Vanessa also has a beer and is leaning back in her chair confidently.
Sheis not what I was expecting. After meeting Lacey — the girl who always wears dresses, gasps at everything she thinks is cute,and asked me which highlighter best complements her freckles — Vanessa is not who I would have imagined as her best friend.
Vanessa knocked on the door, wearing an actual leather jacket, holding her helmet under one arm. When she stepped inside, she complimented the build and shrugged off her jacket, revealing a skin-tight black tank top that showed off her tattoos snaking down both arms.
Vanessa had an aesthetic to achieve, and achieve it she did. Lacey teased her for renting a motorcycle for the weekend, and Vanessa said the roads here were too fun not to try them on the bike.
Lacey shot me a look and mouthedtraffic policeat me, which made me smile. The moment Vanessa mentioned riding her bike on these roads, I’d bristled, but I kept my opinions to myself. So, instead of sharing them, I’d leaned over and said to Warren, grateful for the chance to tease him for once, “Close your mouth, bud. You might make it obvious.”
