Eventually we step apart and begin to walk slowly back toward Sienna’s room. “Where’s Connor?” I ask.
“Becky came and took him to hockey practice,” Amanda replies. “It’s his first time back on the ice since the accident.”
“That’s good to hear.” I want normalcy for our family. But I know it will take time for Sienna to get there, physically, and I’m not sure how I’ll fit into their normal world. I’ve not been a part of it for quite some time. I only hope that Sienna can love me again like she used to, and that everyone can forgive me. Even if I’ve done nothing yet to deserve it.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Sienna
I’m back in bed, and it’s dark outside the window. Arthur stayed for a while, updating us on the situation with the police, but he left soon after.
Amanda has also left the hospital. She went home an hour ago with plans to return to school in the morning.
Now it’s just Nate and me. He sits beside me and raises my good hand to his lips. He kisses it for about the hundredth time.
“Amanda told me you made cinnamon toast for her,” I say as we watch the night nurse write her name on the whiteboard.
“It was nice to talk to her,” Nate replies. “She’s grown up to be strong, just like we knew she would.”
“We did a good job with her,” I add.
“No,youdid a good job. I was barely around.”
I appreciate his concession, but despite recent circumstances, I can’t take all the credit. “That’s not entirely true. In the early days, you were around more than I was, and she remembers everything about that—the donkey rides and the Halloween costumes. Do you remember taking her and Connor out when you were Luke, Leia, and Darth Vader?”
Nate chuckles softly. “That was one for the history books.”
I smile warmly as I remember them posing for pictures at the front door.
It’s remarkable how memories can become lost or distorted over time. Sometimes, through the lens of unhappiness, they make you see falsehoods. Or you remember only the bad.
Other times, they bring you back to the truth.
We sit for a moment, saying nothing, just watching each other until Nate reaches for his phone on the side table.
A familiar tension heats my blood. I turn my head on the pillow and look away from him. But I don’t want to fall back into those old habits where I feel slighted, when my knee-jerk reaction is to blame him and shut him out. I don’t want anything to taint what happened in the hall earlier, when our eyes first met and we were overjoyed to see each other. It was happiness in its purest form, just like it used to be, in the beginning.
I look at him again, and he’s scrolling. “Anything important?” I ask, hoping that after everything we’ve just been through, he’s gained the capacity to read me better.
His eyes lift and meet mine. I cling to a fragile hope that he won’t wave his hand at me dismissively.
“It’s a bunch of messages from the restaurant,” he explains.
“Is everything okay?”
He sets his phone on the side table again. “It’s fine. The staff is sending good wishes, saying they’re glad I got out of jail.” He takes my hand again and kisses it. “We’re closed tonight because of my arrest. You probably know it was on the six o’clock news yesterday.”
I shake my head on the pillow. “I wish that hadn’t happened.”
“I don’t,” he replies. “Seeing you in a coma and spending the night in jail was a huge wake-up call for me, and I needed it.”
“I needed a wake-up call too.”
I find myself thinking of Jacob and his wisdom in heaven—or in my dreams, whatever that was. If there was a part of me that continued to compare Nate with the perfection of my first love, in my youth, I feelready to let go of that, because Jacob was right. Life is messy. There’s no such thing as perfect. I understand that now.
Nate gazes into my eyes. “I don’t want to go back to how we were before.”
“I don’t either.” Yet I’m still hesitant, and I have to voice that. “But will you ever be able to step back from the restaurant? You’ve made so many promises in the past, and I always believed you were sincere when you made them. But the next day, it was the same old thing.”
