Stone nods. “I wish we could,” he says. “I’d do so many things differently. I wouldn’t leave. I made too many mistakes, Laur.”
I think about the idea of mistakes. The idea that there is a right and wrong way to act, to feel, to be.
“I don’t know if I believe in mistakes anymore,” I say. “I think there’s just what we choose to do about what comes next.”
He blinks at me, and I think that maybe he’s going to fight me on it, or kiss me, or ask me, again, why we are here, but instead he keeps looking at me. In his face I see a thirty-eight-year-old and an eighteen-year-old. I see him at nine and twelve and twenty-five. I see every single version I have known and loved.
“What are you going to choose to do?” he asks me.
I think about my dad in the hospital, Marcella curled up against him. I think about Sylvia, standing at the front door. And Stone, right here beside me.
I take a deep breath.
“I’m going to say goodbye.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
I go home. Not to Malibu, no, to West Hollywood, to the place adult me lives. Our renter left early—the second season of her show was picked up and she bought a house—but still paid through the summer. The bungalow is ours again. All we have to do is collect Pea.
When I get there the driveway is scattered with leaves—debris from two months with no gardening. I take the stone path back and unlock the door.
The house is cold inside, and dark. I flip on some switches and set the heat to seventy-five. Leo and I don’t fight a lot, almost never, but the one thing that we can’t agree on is how warm it should be in here. Leo, even though he’s always sweating, likes it balmy. For once, I agree with him.
I flip the kettle on and settle into the couch. A small cloud of dust poofs out from the couch when I sit—was anyone here? Did anyone live here this summer? Or was the renter a mirage, an idea that belongs to what seems now to be a shadow life, a shadow summer?
I sneeze once, twice, and then the kettle begins to boil.
There were times in the six and a half years I’ve been at this bungalow that I thought about moving. What it might feel like tobe in the canyon or farther out east—Echo Park or Silver Lake, maybe. But I never considered leaving Los Angeles. It’s my home. It’s the place I still want to come home to. And it’s the place I thought I’d raise a family.
Infertility is a dual world. There are people who cannot get pregnant who then need to turn to IVF to create their family. And there are people who can’t get pregnant and then have to turn to IVF to create their family and it doesn’t work. You start on the train, as hopeful as the next couple, to only realize you are headed in a very different direction.
That was us. I don’t think we realized until we were a solid seven stops outside the city that we were traveling somewhere we couldn’t come back from.
I pour some peppermint and lean over the counter. The tile is ice-cold—the place hasn’t yet warmed up—and I slide my sweater down my arms and wrap my palms around the steaming mug.
On the counter is a photo of Leo and me. It was taken the day after our wedding: at a brunch my mom and grandmother threw at Broad Beach. We’re laughing on the deck, the sun behind us. Leo is looking at me, and I’m looking at the camera. We’re both wearing jeans. He has a watch of my dad’s—his wedding gift—on his left wrist.
Marrying Leo never felt like a decision, it just felt like the next right thing. Our wedding day wasn’t the happiest of my life because it wasn’t the pinnacle of anything, it was just a continuation. Of the rightness I felt—feel—every day being with him. The assurance I get not that we were made for each other but that our futures are.
I pick up my phone. I dial his number. He answers on the second ring.
“I’m at the airport,” he says.
“You’re coming?”
I hear the sounds of luggage, traffic behind him. “I’m already here. Just flagging down an Uber.”
I didn’t even know he was in the air.
“I’m at home,” I say, and I know he’ll know what I mean, of course he will. And then it comes out before I can stop it, before I can even think what I’m doing, what this will mean. “There’s something I really need to tell you.”
A car honks. A kid screams. From somewhere far off I hear the rumble of thunder. “I’m on my way.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
I tell him the truth as the rain pounds against the windows.
If Leo and I are going to move forward, it will be with the full awareness of what has led us here.
