Page 115 of Yours, For Good

I threw myself in my bed and what did I do? I cried some more.

Fuck, this didn't bode well.

Eventually, I fell asleep. I woke up dehydrated like I had been out partying, and drank a gallon of water to recover. Or to fuel the next batch of tears; things were still up in the air that way.

I sneaked into the kitchen, made myself a sandwich, and left a note for Mrs. Semple not to worry.

I'm super tired. See you tomorrow! ~Nora.

I lay awake for hours that night, thinking of the past many months. How I'd been so sure that receiving Mr. Smith's offer was the real start to my life, yet having no idea how true that was. I was twenty seven years old now and I'd lived a hundred lives in a year— I'd been a bright eyed debutante to a world I never thought I'd get into. I had been a fearless businesswoman, laying the foundation for an organization to meet my wildest dreams. I had been a shy, eager person in search of her friends and found family.

One of my lives had been the one of a woman who found romance where she never expected it.

But had she fallen in love?

The galaxy-sized hole in my chest suggested I had.

"Fuck," I muttered into the night.

The room felt wrong. It didn't have beautiful architectural arches and an understated warmth to it. Worse, my bed was way too empty. It grated at my heart, and my hands itched with the need to find Javier's body next to mine.

And where was the glorious home library? It had my books! The start of my own collection.

I could see it so clearly. The headquarters for my company would find a beautiful home in Manhattan. I would find a small place in New York to live in and, out of practicality, I would ask Javier to let me keep my books in his bookshelves. He had so much more room than me.

Shit. I even had an office in his place already. If I ended up staying over with Javier and it was easier to jump into a videocall from there, I could do it.

Because I'd sleep over a lot. I'd have my set of everything there— toothbrushes and a section of his closet. I had already scoped it out. It had been his grandmother's walk-in and it was way too big for what Javier needed; there was plenty of room for my stuff to keep his company.

The fantasy of our lives together finally lulled me to sleep, leading into dreams where I gave up my lease only a few months later, because who was I kidding, I didn't want to sleep anywhere else.

My first thought the next morning was that I didn't want to live where Javier wasn't.

After a quick breakfast with Mrs. Semple, I went for a walk to the beach. I videocalled Sally and, once she reassured me that she could move a couple of meetings around— she had also gotten investments and was in the process of setting up her own business— I proceeded to tell her about my mom and Javier. Because fuck it. If I wanted to be as close to Sally as Javier was to his friends, I needed to trust her. Let her show me she would be there for me.

She was.

I told her about growing up with my mom, just the two of us, and her passing away. I skipped all about Javier getting me into the incubator, and talked about our friendship and me kissing him and his confession he had hidden something. Sally didn't ask for more than I could share, even when it didn't fully make sense.

"You know," I told her stunned face on the phone more than an hour later, "in one of my psychology classes, they said that grief is a process of adjustment. It's how you say goodbye to people and things, and find a way to go on living despite their absence. I had to do it with my mom and it hurt like nothing else. Eventually, I found a way to move forward. The grief isn't truly gone; it's a thread stitched to my heart that still tugs sometimes. It will always be there."

"I understand." Her bewildered light blue eyes and wild blonde curls filled the screen. "I was really close to my aunt who passed away. I can't imagine losing my mom."

I sat on the sand and gazed out to the ocean. "Going through this right now with Javier hurts so much but it's different…"

"Because he's two and a half hours away by car?"

"Right," I chuckled. "He's not gone-gone. But I miss him so much! It's only been a day and here I am, talking to my friend about this emptiness eating me inside, because I didn't get to say good morning to him!"

I didn't feel the tears until two of them rolled down my face.

Sally gave me a soft look. "And your friend is wondering, will you forgive him? Is this grief worth going through?"

I sighed and made no effort to stop crying. It all swelled inside like the sea building a wave, climbing to the sky and at the verge of cresting and breaking into tumultuous white water.

"I've forgiven him." The revelation wasn't louder than a murmur, but it roared inside. It was the deep rumble of the ocean. "Probably earlier than I knew, but fear didn't let me see it. He is worth the grief."

I dropped my head and heard another truth about us— about me. It thundered in my heart.