Page 66 of Love All
And I turn and make myself walk the other way. Because it isn’t the time. And because if I went to him now, I’d be going out of pity or guilt or my own fear of watching him hurt, and hedeserves better than to be rescued by any of those. He deserves to be chosen, cleanly, by a person who has stopped running.
I’m not sure yet that I’m her.
***
Indie takes her hood down on a Monday.
I notice because I’ve been watching for it, from the careful distance I’ve assigned myself. She’s in the dining hall, and she’s stopped eating fast. When a table laughs next to her, she doesn’t check whether it’s aimed at her. Somebody from the swim team stops and says something to her, and she laughs back, and it reaches her eyes. The story has turned. The girl who was a cold schemer on Monday is, by Wednesday, the girl who was lied about, the wronged one, the sympathetic one — and I watch the whole campus revise her without a shred of shame about how fast they convicted her the first time.
I don’t go over. I haven’t gone over in nine days. I’ve done exactly one thing, on Monday morning, and I made myself do it right. I left a coffee outside her door, oat milk, the cinnamon — and then I turned around and walked away. No note engineered to move her. No sitting in my car to see if she took it. I left it the way she used to leave them for me: a thing with nothing attached. And I did not wait to find out if it worked, because waiting to find out if it worked is the whole disease, and the coffee only means anything if I can give it and let go of the outcome.
I don’t know if she saw me not-wait. I think she must have. Because on Thursday, she texts me three words.Come over Friday.
I do not reply with a plan.
***
I’m at her sister’s on Friday, on the edge of the couch when Cole knocks.
Indie goes still. So do I. And every instinct I own stands up at once and starts drawing plans, I could stay, I could referee, I could soften Cole’s opening or steer Indie past the part where she says something she’ll regret. I could run this the way I run everything. My hand is already reaching for the shape of it.
I put my hand down. I stand up instead.
“This one’s yours,” I say. “I’m not going to sit in on it. Whatever you decide about him, I want it to be yours all the way down, with nobody in the room to blame or thank but you.”
Indie looks at me. Something moves across her face — she knows exactly what it costs me to walk toward a door instead of a fix, because she’s spent fifteen years watching me be unable to. “Okay,” she says. Quiet.
I pass Cole in the entry. He looks terrible in the specific way Ben looked terrible — a person who stopped sleeping and stopped hiding it. He has flowers, and he has clearly been holding them so long they’ve gone warm and tired in his hands. He doesn’t try to talk to me. He just looks at me like a man about to walk onto a court he isn’t sure he’s allowed on, and I give him the only thing I have, which is: “She’s in the kitchen. Don’t lead with the flowers.”
I hear the start of it as I let myself out, and it’s the only part I let myself hear, and it’s enough.
“I’m not here because Coach cleared you,” Cole says. His voice cracks on the second word. “I need you to know that first, because it matters. I don’t want you thinking I only came back once it was safe. Once somebody proved it to me. I was wrong. I doubted you when I should have just — known you. The proof shouldn’t have mattered. I should have looked at you and not needed any.”
I close the door on the rest. It isn’t mine.
***
She calls me back over Sunday. Just us.
We sit on her sister’s kitchen floor, because that’s where we do our real ones, and for a while neither of us says the big thing. She tells me about Cole first. She made him sit in it. She didn’t fall back into his arms, she stood in the kitchen with her own flowers on the counter and made him say the whole thing out loud, and then she asked him the only question that mattered. Notdo you love me.She never doubted that. It was:when a stranger handed you an ugly story about me, why did you believe him instead of me?
“And he didn’t have an answer that made him look good,” she says. “He didn’t try to find one. He was just honest. He said he believed it because some part of him had always been waiting for the catch — waiting to find out he wasn’t enough for me. So when a guy showed up offering the catch, he grabbed it. Because being right about not deserving me hurt less than the not-knowing.” She turns her water glass in her hands. “Which is sad, and it’s real, and it’s also exactly the thing I can’t build a life on. So I told him. I said: the wound’s not your fault, but it’s your job now. I’m not going to spend time being auditioned by a guy waiting for me to prove I’m a con. If you want me, you choose to trust me louder than the scared part chooses to doubt me. Every single time. Forever. And you do itbeforeyou have proof, because that’s what faith is — it’s the thing you keep when someone hands you a reason to drop it.” She almost smiles. “He didn’t keep it, the one time it counted. But he looked at me like a man who finally understood what he broke, and he asked to learn how. I can work with wanting to learn. I can’t work with a person who thinks love is a thing you verify.”
And then she looks at me, and it’s my turn, and I do not have a plan. Which is the only reason it comes out true.
“I’m not going to manage this,” I say. “I know that’s my move. I’d apologize in the exact right order, hit every mark, land it soyou had no choice but to forgive me. I’m not doing that. You asked me for one thing, one time. You told me to stay out of it and let it be yours, and I said okay. Then I decided I knew better, and I did it anyway, and I lied to your face for four months while you thanked the sky for your luck. I don’t have a reason that makes it smaller. I did it because I can’t stand to want something for you and not reach in and secure it. And that’s not love, whatever I’ve been calling it. It’s fear wearing love’s coat.” I make myself keep my hands still. Keep my eyes on her. Perform none of it. “I’m not asking you to forgive me on a schedule. I’m not going to leave coffees until you cave. You get to take as long as you want, or not come back at all, and I will not manage you toward it — because managing you is the thing I did. That’s the apology. The apology is that I’m going to sit here and want you back and not touch the outcome.”
Indie is quiet for a while. Then she reaches over and takes my hand, and holds it on the floor between us, the way she has since we were eighteen.
“That,” she says, “is the first time in your whole life you’ve ever let something sit. You have no idea how long I’ve waited to see you do that. Not just with me. Withanything.” Her eyes are wet, and she lets them be. “I’m not all the way back yet. It’s going to take me a minute. We’re going to be okay. Slower than you’d schedule it. But okay.”
“For what it’s worth,” I say, when I can talk again, “I’d have loved you the same if you’d stayed a wreck about him forever and never said a word. I didn’t do it because I thought you couldn’t. I did it because I couldn’t watch you want something and not fix it. That’s on me. Not on anything you lacked.”
“I know.” She says it simply. “That’s the reason we’re on this floor.” She bumps my shoulder with hers. “You aren’t you mom, Lotte. She’d have out-apologized me and called it winning.”
I cry, just a little. I look at the ceiling for a while. She lets me, and she keeps my hand. And that’s the reconciliation, not a speech, not a fix. Just the two of us on a floor, and me finally strong enough to want a thing and leave it in someone else’s hands.
It occurs to me, sitting there, that I have spent my whole life certain that if I ever loosened my grip on the people I love, they’d float away, the way everything floats away in the cold-house math. And here is the person I love most, holding my hand tighter precisely because I finally let go. Nobody taught me that. Nobody in the house I grew up in ever once let go of anything and was rewarded for it. I’m learning it at twenty-one, on a kitchen floor, from a girl who learned it somewhere better.
