Page 84 of The Long Way Home
When I reach for the other, she doesn’t wait. Her bare foot slides into my hand, warm, pliant and suddenly I can’t breathe as easily. My thumb brushes her arch as I pull the sock on, and her breath catches—so quiet I almost convince myself I imagined it.
I rise, my body humming with a tension I can’t release. She doesn’t look away. She meets my gaze, calm, patient, dangerous in her stillness, as if she knows every thought I have tried to hide. Heat climbs up the back of my neck.
She holds out her hand, and I take it, because saying no would require strength I don’t have. If I stepped forward half a foot, her knees would brush my legs.
If I leaned down just slightly, my mouth would find hers.
If I stopped fighting myself for even a second, everything between us could ignite. But I don’t. I can’t. I just hold her hand. And somehow, that is torture enough.
“You hungry?” I ask, trying to break the tension and distract myself from the sight of her. It comes out scratchy, so I clear my throat and try again. “I don’t have many options. I—uh, haven’t been home much with work, but I’ve got frozen waffles and peanut butter.”
She offers the smallest, tired smile, just a flicker of it, and I catch it. “That sounds disgusting.”
“It’s not the best,” I admit with a shrug, “but it works well to soak up the alcohol.”
I open the freezer, try to joke about my pathetic bachelor meals, but she just shakes her head. Her eyes are heavy, her body too exhausted to care. I manage to get her to drink some water, and I hand her Advil and wait silently until she swallows it with a long sigh. That’s all I can get her to take. It’s not enough, not even close, but it’s something, and right now I’ll take anything that helps.
We settle into the couch. A blanket covers her legs; her socked feet tuck under her. She pulls her knees up and leans into me, fitting against my side the way she always has. Her head slides under my jaw, and I shift, curling an arm around her shoulders. I rub slow, even circles into the side of her thigh, deliberate and patient, feeling how soft she is, how her breath evens under my arm.
She exhales, and I hope she feels safe here with me. I want her to feel safe. I want her to know she can need me, that nothing will keep me from being here with her. I want her to remember the Sunny I met at twenty, the loud one with the sharp mouth and the laugh that made everyone around her lean in, because she is still that girl. She is stillmySunny.
“Do you ever think—what if things had ended up differently?” she asks underneath her breath.
I tilt my head. “What do you mean?”
She curls tighter and presses her forehead against my shoulder. “Like… everything is a butterfly effect, right? All those tiny choices we make, what shoes to wear, which road to take, they lead us down paths.”
“Okay, I’m following.”
“Well, if I hadn’t followed Josh to college, I wouldn’t have matched with Margo for housing. If I hadn’t matched with Margo, she and Josh would never have met. If they never met, they don’t get married. If they don’t get married, he’s not on that road getting groceries when the car hits them.” Her words tumble out, urgent and fragile.
I swallow, because everything in me tightens at the edges of that logic. “Sunny,” I say slowly, “your choices didn’t put them in that car.” My hand moves from her thigh to her hand.
“But it feels like it. Like one tiny decision could have rewritten everything.”
“I get why you think that,” I tell her. My thumb keeps moving over her knuckles without thinking, and the motion steadies my voice. “But the world doesn’t work like a neat math problem where every small choice adds up to catastrophe. There are other variables, things that are outside anyone’s control. The guy who ran the light made choices. That’s not on you. Not on Josh. Not on Margo.”
“So you think it was random?”
“Not exactly random,” I say. “Messy, yes. Complicated, definitely. The small choices nudge us; the big ones, the out-of-character, reckless ones, can yank us off course. But you didn’t design that wreck. None of you did. I have to choose to believe that this all has to be for a reason, some bigger purpose that I can’t fully grasp. And that some small, meaningless, everyday choice didn’t decide the fate of my best friend.”
Her voice is so quiet I almost don’t hear it. “I wonder if somehow, somewhere else, there’s a life where he’s alive. Maybein that life, I never went to his college. Maybe I never met Margo. Maybe you never met Josh.” Her fingers twist the blanket, small, nervous motions. I can feel her almost say it. That in another world, with one small decision, she would have never met me. But I don’t want to imagine a life where I never met her.
I look down at her, at the way her mouth tightens, and I let the truth inside me push through before I can overthink it. “Listen,” I say. “Even if you took a different route, even if the map looks completely different,” I pause, because the honest thing is shorter and sharper than any careful argument, “I would have met you.”
She looks up, startled, eyes wide in the dim light. I can see the idea land, friction mixed with surprise, and maybe a tiny bloom of something like hope. I don’t soften it with caveats. I don’t dress it up. I just say it again, quieter.
“I think I was always meant to find you. Somehow. Somewhere. In this world, in this alternate world, I would have found you.”
“I like the idea of that,” she mutters against my chest.
I’m not sure how much of tonight she’ll remember tomorrow, but I hope she holds onto that.
“Hey, Rhett?”
“Yeah, Sunny?”
“I’m really sorry your mom couldn’t see the type of man you are.”
