I shifted so I could read it over her shoulder. It was shorter than some of the others, written on a form that saidV-Mailon the back.
Sunny read the last paragraph out loud. “‘Whatever happens, I want you to know that I love you, Bernice, and please relay my love for our particular friend, James, if you see this letter first. If I don’t come home, I hope that James takes care of you, and I hope that you take care of him. I hope that you don’t let sadness stop you from going on. I hope that you don’t go without love for my sake—’”
Sunny’s voice faltered and she stopped.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not bothered by it.”
“I know you’re not! But I am!”
I moved to face her. “Sunny—”
She closed her eyes, and then she said literally the last thing I was expecting her to say. “Isaac, I’m sorry.”
The wrongness ofherapologizing tomewas like my skin being turned inside out. “No, sunshine. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
She opened her eyes to look at me. Her dark eyebrows were pinched together, and her full lower lip was quivering. “I made up with my brother today,” she said.
“That’s great,” I said, but she kept going.
“I made up with him, and yes, it took over a decade, but the whole time, we had each other and we had Ruth and—and now I’m reading this and realizing that Bernice and James had each other too. And you were alone. And I’m so sorry that you had to go through it alone.”
“Stop,” I cut in, “stop,stopit. Don’t be sorry.”
“I don’t want to be!” she said tartly, and then sniffled a little. “I want to be furious with you forever, because you suckso hard, and now I’ve read this stupid letter and I can’t be.”
“I still suck so hard, sunshine. I didn’t have to do it alone. If I’d picked up the phone, I could have had my moms or my friends or even Brooklyn’s parents with me in a heartbeat. I just—” I slumped a little, sitting back and drawing up a knee. I swallowed and tried again. “It was too much, right after she died. One day, I noticed her eyes were strange, and a few weeks later, she was in an urn. She still had most of a tour ahead of her, and there were venue cancellations and ticket refunds and my manager wanted me to do all these interviews and she wanted to write an op-ed about Brooklyn’s death and all of these letters and emails and calls kept pouring in, not just from fans and haters, but from every celebrity she’d ever met, it felt like. And people were zip-tying teddy bears to our gates—she hated teddy bears, Sunny, absolutely hated them, called them Roosevelt propaganda—and leaving flowers and food, and it just felt like the cost of the world getting to mourn Brooklyn was my own mourning. And I couldn’t take it anymore. I just wanted to grieve in peace, and then somehow it started to feel like the griefwaspeace. The two things became the same, and I couldn’t pick apart being sad and being alone anymore. I couldn’t pick apart what I needed in my worst moments five years ago, and what I want now.”
“You seemed pretty clear on what you wanted a few days ago,” she pointed out. Not bitterly. But not gently either.
I wanted to take both of her hands in mine and kiss every inch of them until dawn. I settled for tugging nervously at my hair. “I thought I was pretty clear on it too,” I admitted. “But the truth is that I was scared. I’m still scared, actually. I was a giant jackass to you, and it’s because you terrify the shit out of me. When I’m with you, I feel like I can breathe, like I can live,like I cango. Go anywhere, do anything. I feel like I can start again. You make me feel like anything’s possible, and I’ve spent five years accepting that life is stupid and hopeless. And I’m so, so sorry for punishing you for that fear. I’m so sorry for making you feel like you were a problem or a distraction or anything like that, because the truth is that I am ridiculously in love with you. Entirely and painfully and incurably in love with you.”
Her lips parted, but I kept going.
“I thought loving someone again meant a journey or an ordeal—that I’d have to feel the same pain I felt when Brooklyn died—that I’d have to somehow go back to who I was before she died in order to do it. But I was wrong. I didn’t have to do anything else, I didn’t have to go anywhere, I didn’t have to fit myself inside a younger, more hopeful version of myself. I already loved you, and I don’t even know for how long. You were right that I was choosing myself over you, and that I was choosing what felt safest.”
Sunny looked like she was about to interrupt, to reassure me, but I shook my head.
“I was choosing myself, and I’m so sorry for it. I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry that I might have made you doubt, even for a second, that you are perfect and that you deserve everything you want. Of course you’re sexy, and of course you’re a loyal and incredible friend—but you also deserve devotion and adoration and all the promises you could ever want. You deserve the right to mess up and to be unhappy and to take risks and dream big dreams and have someone by your side throughout it all.”
Slowly—slowly enough that she could swat me away if she wanted—I reached for her hands. They were cool to the touch thanks to the chilly loft, and when I wrapped them in my own, she shivered.
“I’m sorry and I love you,” I told her. And then again, “I’m sorry and I love you. And I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m notasking for you to take a chance on loving me when I’m such a fucking mess. I just wanted you to know. I was wrong, and you were right. About us. About everything.”
Her lashes dipped and a tear raced down the apple of her cheek to the corner of her mouth. “‘You were right.’ The magic words,” she said, voice thick with tears.
We sat there a moment, and with patented Isaac Kelly not-trying-to-make-it-better-ness, we sat without speaking, without looking at each other. I rubbed the backs of Sunny’s hands with my thumbs, watching my skin against hers. She cried, softly, while the wind pulled at the cabin and whistled through the cracks in the walls.
“We should go downstairs,” I murmured. “It’s cold up here.”
With a shiny face and plenty of sniffles, Sunny nodded. Together we packed up the trunk as we’d found it, saying our silent goodbyes to the tiny, bumpy, and yet magnificent grains of what would become Christmas Notch’s miracle. To Bernice and James and Ronald, who’d loved one another, and kept loving, and kept loving, even when it hurt.
I sent Sunny down first, even though my obsessive brain would have rather gone down before her so that I could have made sure she didn’t fall. But neither did I want her climbing down in the near-darkness. I turned off the loft lights and descended the stairs to find Sunny already on the couch in front of the fire.
The red and gold of the flames were caught in her dark hair, and along the rise of her cheekbones and the slightly upturned tip of her nose. Tear tracks shone in the light, but when she spoke, her voice was steady, if a little breathless.
“Isaac.”
I came toward her, carefully, not wanting to crowd her, even as I also wanted to stretch myself face down on the freezingfloor and chantI’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I fucked upinto the floorboards.
