“That he comes back.” Something catches in her throat. “He keeps coming back. You can push him away and run to the other end of the state and hide in a cemetery talking to a dead man, and he will still show up. Because that’s what love looks like, Delilah. Not perfection. Not guarantees. Just someone who keeps showing up, even when you make it hard.”
I can’t breathe. My chest is too tight.
“I never had that with your father,” Mom says quietly. “When things got hard, we both just…let go. We didn’t fight for it. And maybe that’s why you don’t know how to fight either. Because we never showed you.”
“Mom...”
“But Levi is fighting. He’s been fighting since he got back to Twin Waves. And if you let him go, if you push him away because you’re scared, you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life.”
I look at Dad’s headstone. The dates carved into stone. A life that ended too soon, full of things left unsaid.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I whisper.
“Nobody does. You figure it out as you go. You mess up and you apologize and you try again.” Mom’s voice is warm now. Gentle. “But you can’t figure it out if you’re not there. You can’t build something real if you keep one foot out the door.”
Ruffy’s head lifts from my lap. His ears perk up.
“I’m scared, Mom.”
“I know, baby. Being scared means it matters.”
A sound. Tires on gravel.
I turn toward the parking lot. And there it is.
A truck. His truck.
My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat.
“He’s here,” I say into the phone.
“Good.” Mom’s voice is steady. “Now stay.”
She hangs up.
I watch Levi park behind my Honda, watch himsit there for a moment, both hands on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead like he’s gathering his courage. Rehearsing what he’s going to say. Maybe just as terrified as I am.
I know that feeling. I’ve been gathering my courage all morning and I still don’t have enough.
He gets out of the truck.
He looks terrible. Rumpled clothes, dark circles under his eyes, hair that hasn’t seen a comb in at least a day. He’s wearing the same shirt he had on when he left for LA, wrinkled now, untucked, like he slept in it. Or didn’t sleep at all.
He looks like a man who flew across the country in the middle of the night and then drove five hours on no sleep to find a woman who ran away without explanation.
He looks like someone who showed up anyway.
Something cracks open in my chest. Something that’s been locked tight for years, maybe decades. The part of me that’s been waiting to be abandoned, waiting for proof that I was right to keep running.
He came.
He starts walking toward me. The morning fog is still clinging to the grass between the headstones, and for a second he looks almost unreal,like something out of the romance novels I pretend I don’t read.
Ruffy’s tail starts wagging. Traitor. Though I can’t really blame him. If I had a tail, it would probably be wagging too.
I stand up. My legs are shaky from sitting on damp grass for an hour, from no sleep and fear and something else I don’t want to name. I probably look even worse than he does. My eyes are definitely red. My hair is a disaster.
He stops a few feet away, close enough to touch, far enough that I could still run.
