“Very funny,” she grins. “Oh, and in case you didn’t get the memo, your little princess is nine now and will have no part in you calling her a princess. You can thank me for the warning later.”
Girls.“I’ll just thank you now and get it over with,” I say, pressing my lips up against her neck.
“Ugh, gross,” Ashley says, pointing her finger into her mouth. “Get a room.” Yep. I do not miss this age.
“Excuse me, Princess Ashley,” I tease.
“Oh my God, Dad, get a grip. I’m nine,” Ashley says, flipping her auburn hair behind her shoulders.
“Good morning to you, too,” I grin at her.
Placing my coffee mug down on the kitchen table, I jog down the wooden steps, finding only the corner light on near the back part of the stairs.
“Olive, what are you doing down here?” I ask as I find her rummaging through an old box.
She collapses with frustration, throwing her hands down by her hips. “Ugh, I was looking for a purse to bring with me tonight and I thought maybe Mom would have had something cute I could use.” I see now that she’s rummaging through one of Ellie’s boxes of clothes. I wonder how often she does this, considering this is the first I’ve seen her doing it. She definitely looks as if she’s done this before.
“Oh,” I say. “Honestly, I don’t know if any of her purses are in there. I didn’t really have the heart to go through her stuff and separate it. I just knew I couldn’t get rid of it.”
She ignores what I say and continues digging around. “I’ve seen it in here before,” she says. I guess that answers my question of whether or not she has searched through Ellie’s items in the past.
“What does it look like?”
“I don’t know, it’s black and—ah, I think I got it.” She pulls out a small black bag with a gold chevron pattern embroidered into the leather. I remember now, it was the last thing Ellie grabbed on the way out the door when she went into labor. I remember questioning why she would need a purse while giving birth but I assumed it’s one of those questions a man just shouldn’t ask a woman.
“I’m glad you found it. I’m sure she would have loved to know you were bringing it to your prom tonight.” Olive stands up, her head now up to my shoulder.When did she get this tall? This beautiful.Her long, blonde curls are a mess and she’s still in her PJs, looking somewhat like a young girl and somewhat like a girl on the verge of womanhood. “You’re up pretty early, thinking about a purse,” I tell her.
“I’m just excited for tonight and a little nervous since Lana isn’t here to go with me.” This whole year has been a difficult transition for Olive with Lana off at her freshman year at college—a preview of what I will go through next year when my little girl leaves me. Lana does come home once a month or so but Olive misses her like crazy and doesn’t do much to conceal her true feelings on the matter. Teenage hormones are a warning I wish someone...anyone could have given me.
“You’re going to have a great time tonight. I promise,” I tell her.
Olive inspects the purse and unzips it to look inside. She sweeps her hand around inside as a weird look flickers through her eyes. There shouldn’t be anything in there since I had to remove Ellie’s wallet when we were at the hospital, and I don’t remember anything being left inside. Olive pulls her hand out of the purse and a note is pinched between her fingers. “What’s this?”
I take the note from her hand and unfold it as fast as I can, finding that it unfolds six times before opening up into a full-size sheet of notebook paper.
“Can you hit the main light?” I ask Olive.
My heart is already aching and I can’t make out any of the words in the dark. But as the light illuminates the room, the writing becomes clear.
“Is it from Mom?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say, breathlessly.After all these years, this woman still knows how to steal my every breath.
“Read it out loud.” Olive’s arms wrap around me and her head rests on my arm as I begin to read.
My Hunter,
Okay, so, I don’t know when you’ll see this note and I’m actually kind of hoping you never do because if you do, it’ll mean something has happened to me and I’m probably not with you anymore. It will also mean you’re going to be pretty upset with me when you find out some of the secrets I have kept from you, considering I knew something horrible was going to happen and decided to keep it from you. It really does sound worse than it is. I think.
Before I tell you any more, though, I need you to know how much I love you. From the first day of school when you took my hand and walked me onto the bus and dried my tears as I waved good-bye to my parents, to the second day of school when you had to do the same thing, and actually, every single day the entire first year of school. By June of that year, I kind of knew you would forever be my best friend and it’s nice to know that my six-year-old-self was right.
Life without you wouldn’t make sense. Growing up with the man you want to spend your life with isn’t something every girl is lucky enough to experience. But I was lucky. So very lucky—the kind of lucky a girl gets when a guy drags his girl into a garden at night and carves her name into a tree with his.
I suppose this would have been easier if I had told you that my chances of surviving past the age of twenty-five were unlikely. I could have told you all of the things I wanted to tell you—like, please don’t stop living your life because I’m gone, and I hope you find a second chance at true love, even if you don’t know the woman for twenty years first.
The moment I found out about the aneurysm after our car accident, I was left with two paths to take: I could tell you I wasn’t going to make it or I could keep it from you and pretend like everything was going to be okay. Most people might have chosen the more honest route but I couldn’t fathom the idea of telling you what my expected outcome was. You would have spent every day worrying about me, caring for me, acting like I were a piece of breakable glass. You would have married me—I know that, but you would never have wanted a child with me if I told you that the one detail in our lives could be the most likely event to cause the aneurysm to rupture.
You know me; I am scared of blood, cuts, bruises, broken bones, illnesses, and germs, which became sort of ironic when the doctor told me my prognosis. From that point on, nothing seemed to scare me anymore. If I fell and hit my head, that could have been the end. But I overcame those silly odds and we did get pregnant and I’m about to give birth to our daughter. I know it sounds terrible to keep this from you and then possibly leave you to care for our child as a single parent, but I’ve thought this through. For years, actually. I wanted to leave you with a part of me. You can’t spend twenty five years with someone and then have nothing to show for it. I considered the fact that you might not agree with this theory but I also think I know you pretty well and you would want some part of me to hang onto because I would want the same if the tables were turned.
