As if from far away, Tully heard the girl's voice. She turned slowly around, saw two young women roller-skating toward them. She'd been wrong before; they were older than teenagers. One was the spitting image of Chad—sharp features, black hair, eyes that crinkled when she smiled.
But it was the other woman who held her attention. Maybe thirty, thirty-five, with a bright smile and a ready laugh. She wore the colors of a tourist: brand-new jeans, thick pink cable-knit sweater, aqua-blue hat and gloves.
"My daughter. She's in grad school at NYU," Chad said. "And Clarissa. The woman I live with."
"You still live in Nashville?" It was like rolling a log uphill, pushing those words out. The last thing she wanted was to make ordinary conversation with him. "Still teaching bright-eyed believers about the news?"
He took her by the shoulders, turned her to face him. "You didn't want me, Tully," he said, and this time she heard the gruffness of deep emotion in his voice. "I was ready to love you forever, but—"
"Don't. Please."
He touched her cheek in a fleeting, almost desperate caress.
"I should have come to Tennessee with you," she said.
He shook his head. "You have big dreams. That was one of the things I loved most about you."
"Loved," she said, knowing it was foolish to be hurt.
"Some things just don't happen."
She nodded. "Especially when you're too afraid to let them."
He took her in his arms again and held her with more passion in that instant than Grant had tendered in years. She waited for a kiss that never came. Instead, he let her go, then took her arm and walked her back up to the road.
In the sudden coldness of shade, she shivered and leaned against him. "Give me some advice, Wiley. I seem to have screwed up my life."
Out on the sunny sidewalk, he faced her again. "You're successful beyond your wildest dreams and it still isn't enough."
She winced at the look in his eyes. "I guess I should have stopped to smell a few of those flowers. Hell, I didn't even see them."
"You're not alone, Tully. Everyone has people in their life. A family."
"I guess you've forgotten Cloud."
"Or maybe you have."
"What do you mean?"
He glanced down to the park, where his daughter was holding hands with his girlfriend; one was teaching the other to skate backward. "I lost a lot of years with my daughter. One day I just decided it had been too long and I went to find her."
"You always were an optimist."
"That's the funny thing. So were you." He leaned down, kissed her on the cheek, and drew back. "Keep lighting the world on fire, Tully," he said, and then walked away.
They were almost the exact same words he'd written to her all those years ago. She hadn't recognized the sad desperation in them when they were letters on a piece of paper. Now she saw the truth: they were both an encouragement and an indictment. What good did it do to light the world on fire if she had to watch the glow alone?
If there was one thing Tully had always done well, it was to ignore unpleasantness. For most of her life she'd been able to box up bad memories or disappointments and store them deep in the back of her mind, in a place so dark they couldn't be seen. Sure, she dreamed about the bad times, and woke occasionally in a cold sweat with memories on the oily surface of consciousness, but when daylight came, she pushed those thoughts back into their hiding place and found it easy to forget.
But now, for the first time, she'd found something she could neither file away in the darkness nor forget.
Chad. Seeing him like that, standing there in her adopted city, had shaken her to the core. She couldn't seem to dislodge the memory. There was so much she hadn't said to him, hadn't asked.
In the three months since they'd run into each other, she found herself remembering every detail, going over the seconds like a forensic scientist, looking for clues to the meaning of it all. He became a kind of marker for everything she'd given up for this life of hers. The road she hadn't taken.
And even worse than all of that was the memory of what he'd said about Cloud.You're not alone, Tully. Everyone has a family. Those weren't precisely the words, but they were close enough. The gist of it.
Like a cancerous cell, the idea replicated in her mind and grew. She found herself thinking of Cloud, really thinking. She focused on the times her mother came back for her instead of the times she left. It was dangerous, Tully knew, to hang on to the positive when so much negative existed, and yet, she wondered suddenly if that had been her mistake. Had she been so intent on hating her mother, on shelving and forgetting the disappointments, that she'd missed the meaning of Cloud's many returns?
