Her eyes flicked over my face, wide and searching, like she was trying to decide if I meant it.
I’d never been surer of anything.
And she must have seen it, because that smile was back, her cheeks flushed, lips swollen. “Yes,” she breathed.
“Yes?”
She nodded.
And then she was in my arms, and I was spinning, feeling like I was on top of the world.
Leave It With Me
Ariana
Present
“Drops of Jupiter” played on the sound system as I slid a box cutter through the tape of another box. This one was markedbooks, and though I knew my husband would likely want me focused on unpacking the kitchen first, I reached for this box, instead.
I was trying desperately to feel some kind of joy.
I’d put on my favorite throwback playlist, one that reminded me of a time in my life where I felt full of possibility. And as I began plucking book after book from that box and placing them with care on the built-in bookshelves surrounding the television in our living room, I waited for happiness to hit me.
I’m so lucky, I thought as I pulled out my J.R.R. Tolkien collection.So many women would kill for what I have, I swore as I shelved my classics — Hemingway and Emerson and Salinger and Brontë and Austen.I have so much, I reminded myself as I thumbed my copy ofA Wrinkle in Time, the book that had served as my favorite escape as a child.
But each time I berated myself, it did nothing to change how I truly felt.
On the outside, I was the beloved wife of a successful man. I was rich in both money and love. I was beautiful and healthy and couldn’t possibly ask for anything else.
On the inside, I was dying a slow, merciless death.
This is because of Shane.
I knew it and refuted it all the same, that being reunited unwillingly to the first man I ever loved — and the first to break me — had ignited all these feelings. Truthfully, I’d felt them well before that man had crashed back into my life. I’d been trapped in my own personal hell for years.
But seeing Shane again, marveling at the way time had changed him, wondering what would have happened if only he’d chosen to stick it out with me instead of run…
It stirred up my insides like a storm over a muddy river, all the thoughts of the past swirling with the realities of the present and the darkness of the future.
My hand hovered over the spine ofAngela’s Ashesonce I’d placed it, and again I found myself remembering the first time I’d read it, when I was a teenager and felt seen by someone who also understood the reality of living in an unstable home.
I hadn’t meant to end up here again.
But life rarely unfolds the way you intend.
After Shane left, I did everything right.
My mother was gone. My brother was now in my care. And I was preparing to fight an uphill battle against my stepdad. If all of that wasn’t enough to bury me, the heartbreak I felt from Shane walking away when I needed him most would surely do the trick. Except, I didn’t let it.
Just like the case studies of children we’d covered in my sociology classes, I was resilient.
I stayed in school, worked nights and weekends to finish my undergrad degree and then earn my master’s. I poured every ounce of myself into becoming someone I could be proud of.I built a life for Georgie and me from the ground up. It was modest, but it was ours.
There were nights I fell asleep on the couch with his homework spread across my lap, the smell of burnt coffee in the air, student loan statements stacked on the counter. I was tired, but I was steady. I didn’t need saving. I told myself that over and over — that I could do this, that love wasn’t a requirement for survival.
But still, I’d catch myself lingering on other people’s lives. I stared too long at couples holding hands in grocery store aisles. The sound of laughter from a neighbor’s backyard would have my chest aching. The announcements from my college friends of engagements or babies made my eyes water. I told myself I didn’t crave it — but God, I did. I longed for security, for comfort, for the soft kind of joy that comes from knowing someone else was there with you to go through anything.
And then, Nathan Black walked into my life.
