“Friend crush?” I asked.
“Yeah, like, I have a little platonic crush on you. I want us to be friends.”
“Oh, well,” I said. “Uh. We are friends, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Good,” Allison said. “Then I wanna ask you something, as your friend.”
“Sure.” I shrugged.
“I want you to honestly tell me what you want to do right now. Forget whether it’s possible or reasonable or even… selfish or whatever you’re afraid of being. Just tell me what’s in your heart.”
What was in my heart?
“I want to go home,” I said.
There it was.
Home. I wanted to go home.
Home was Otter Bay. Home was the sweetest little cabin I’d ever seen.
Home was Ward.
My throat closed up at the thought of him, and tears stung at my eyes again.
Did he want me there? I hadn’t heard back from him since last night.
“I want to go home and curl up in bed with Ward wrapped around me. I want to hear his voice in my ear talking about whatever fun fact he last picked up, or the weather, or anything at all. And then I want to get up and get dressed and go meet Seth so we can plan out a real program for his theatre kids.Ourtheatre kids,” I said, the words tumbling out of me like I’d been possessed by my own most secret wishes.
“I wanna sit back and watch them in actual danger of bursting with pride. I want them to have everything I didn’t have, and I wanna fix the theatre roof and teach classes and then go home to Ward and curl up on the sofa and watch whatever he wants to watch until it’s time for bed. I want him to start having the dinner parties he’s been dreaming of with all our friends and I maybe even want those six kids Astrid threatened me with at the beginning of all this.”
Well.
That was a lot.
I was out of breath when I finished talking, staring down at my hands as I realized how true all that had been. How real it felt when I imagined it, and how happy it made me to think about it.
“I want my life to feel like it means somethingto me,” I said, which was what it’d all come down to.
I’d had a glimpse of it, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. About the way I felt when I was with Ward, about how much I’d wanted to help out Seth’s kids, about how I wanted Maisie and Charlie to love me. Everything had happened so fast that I hadn’t had the chance to do even a fraction of the things I’d planned to.
Everything had happened so fast that I hadn’t had time to think about whether or not Iwantedit to happen.
“I don’t want to die alone and unloved. And if the way I live means I can’t have Ward… I don’t want to live like this anymore.”
And I was crying again. Great.
Allison squeezed my hand so tight I could feel her nails sinking into the flesh, but I didn’t want her to let go, either.
“Some reason you can’t do all that?” she asked.
I snorted through tears, elegantly wiping snot away from my nose with the end of my sleeve. I’d teased Seth about being a messy crier, but he had nothing on me.
“Think I hurt Ward, leaving again,” I said. “Haven’t heard from him since last night. And you put me forward for this. I can’t just… not show up, that’s not fair on you.”
“Ward will forgive you because he loves you with his whole enormous heart,” Allison said. “And it’s fine with me. We’re friends, remember? We’ll stillbefriends. I’m expecting an invite to one of those dinner parties you mentioned sometime.”
I sniffed, and I’d planned to say something in response to that, but the sound of my buzzer going cut me off.
