Page 31 of Worth the Fight

“I wish I could stay longer.” I need to take another red-eye flight back tonight. I’ll arrive sometime in the early morning, then get a few hours of sleep at home before a long day of rehearsal, company practice, and my own physical therapy.

“Don’t you worry about this ol’ biddy,” she says with a smile. “A couple more weeks and I’ll be right as rain, ready to go home and get back to my old routine.”

“Won’t you consider Dad’s offer to move in with them?”

She scoffs at that.

“Or maybe downsize, move into a senior living apartment, or, or, or somewhere that⁠—”

“Sssshhhhh,” she interjects, squeezing my hand. “We don’t need to talk about me and the future. I just wanted to say that I love you, and I’m so thankful you came to see me.”

“I love you too, Nana.”

“And you need to let Lukas drive you to the airport,” she adds, her eyes briefly flicking up to me. I can see the corner of her lip twitch, and I know she’s fighting a smile. “Talk to him.”

“I don’t know, Nana.”

“What’s there to know?” Her eyes dart back and forth across my face, a hand reaching up to smooth over my cheek. “For the last year, I’ve watched both of you mope around because you didn’t have one another. I’ve seen Lukas twice a week every single week since he got back home. Each and every time, I catch him standing in the living room, staring at the old photos of you on the wall. I see it on his face, sweetheart. He’s sorry. And I know he hurt you. I don’t know what went on between the two of you, and I don’t think I want to know. But if there’s any part of you that thinks he might be worth fighting for, I beg of you, plead with you, to fight for it.”

My eyes well with tears, and when the first one falls, she swipes it away with her thumb.

“Life is short, honey. And if you find someone who you love, who loves you so much it makes them crazy, why would you accept anything less? Why would you waste time with anything less than obsessive, gut-wrenching love?”

There’s a huge part of me that knows she’s right. There hasn’t been one day that’s gone by where I haven’t thought about Lukas. I think about him all the time. The good, the bad. I thought about him when I was dating another man. I thought about him each time I met someone new. Each time I forced myself to suffer through a blind date. He has apologized repeatedly, and I do believe he’s sorry for what he’s done. But I need more than an apology.

“I’m scared,” I whisper, and she drops her hand from my cheek to squeeze both of mine, which had been sitting nervously in my lap, picking at the skin of my cuticles.

“That’s okay. He’s scared, too. You both are so terrified to lose the other again that you’re not willing to jump in with both feet. But I think you should just talk to him. Just hear him out. At the very least, you’ll get a ride to the airport, and you won’t have to listen to your mom’s God-awful sixties disco music.”

I choke out a watery laugh. “I happen to like disco.”

She rolls her eyes at that. “No one likes disco.”

I blow out a shaky breath, exhaling it out through pursed lips.

“When will I see you again?” she whispers, and guilt rushes through me.

“I’m not sure.”

When I first decided to move to Paris, I knew that it would mean time away from my family. But the twenty-something in me only had her eyes set on the stage. On dancing my heart out in a French opera house in one of the most beautiful and coveted cities in the world.

Now, with each year that passes, I see my friends meet someone and fall in love. They make families of their own and spend weekends with those they care about. Some manage to make it work, balancing both the ballet life and family life. Some have taken a step back, opting to start the next phase of living.

It makes me long for Copper Ridge. It makes me long for simple family dinners and summer nights sitting on the front porch watching the sunset. It makes me long for a house of my own with a porch swing that stares off into empty fields.

It makes me long for a place to call home.

“It’s starting to suck being so far away from everyone. From you,” I tell her, and my chin starts to quiver, so I pull my bottom lip between my teeth. “I know that I can’t have both, not in Paris. I just…” I trail off. “I don’t know, Nana.” I let the tears fall freely now, and they trickle down my face, tickling the apples of my cheeks. “I feel like I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what’s happened to me.”

Nana reaches her arms out, opening them up for a hug, and I crawl in, lying down beside her in the bed. She wraps her arms around me, holding me tight to her just like she used to when I was a kid. Except now, I’m taller than her, stronger, but I still rest my cheek on her shoulder, letting her hold some of my weight.

“There, there,” she coos, swiping at my tears. “There’s nothing you need to figure out today, sweet girl. No decisions that need to be made. All you need to remember is that you’re my favorite person.”

I chuckle at that. It started out as a joke when I was a kid. My dad is an only child, and I’m an only child, so she used to tell me I was her favorite granddaughter. When I went through my teenage years and the hormones hit, and I thought my parents didn’t understand me, I’d run down the street to Nana’s house and cry to her about how hard life was.

As a silly hormonal teen, she would hug me and tell me that I was one of the lucky ones because I was her favorite. It’s become our secret to each other, that we are each other’s favorite person in the world.

I sit up, swiping the tears from my face with the sleeves of my sweatshirt, knowing that my blotchy streaked face matches the redness in Nana’s eyes.