Ian shook his head.
“It was a pity kiss!” I went on. “You were just being nice! I’ll testify!”
Now he smiled at me like I was deluded—but in a cute way.
“You weren’t even technically my PT anymore!”
“Doesn’t matter. I worked there. You were a patient.”
It seemed insane. “That’s it? One kiss, and you’re exiled?”
Ian gave a half-smile. “Apparently.”
Ian suddenly seemed very close. Just inches away, really. Having him right here—so near—made the idea of his leaving feel excruciating. “You can’t go,” I said.
He gave a shrug. “I can’t stay. My visa was for a particular job that requires a particular license.”
“What will you do?”
“Go home. To Edinburgh.”
I felt a cramp in my chest.
He went on, “I’ve got four brothers there. Two of them are doctors. One’s already found me an interview at a hospital.”
I tried to keep my voice steady, like we were just chatting. “That’s good.”
But he didn’t answer. He just reached out and took my hand. At the touch, I drew in a shaky breath. Then he let it go.
“The interview’s on Monday,” he said.
I blinked. “This Monday?”
He nodded.
“So that means you’re going—when?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
Panic. I genuinely could not imagine my postcrash life without Ian in it. It was too pathetic to say out loud, but he was just about the only thing in the world that made me anything even close to happy. My whole life was in black-and-white until he walked into the room—and then everything bloomed into color.
Losing Chip? I had barely blinked. Losing Ian right now? I could barely breathe.
“You’re going to be all right, you know. You’re a lot stronger than you think—”
But before he could finish, I did something that shocked the hell out of both of us.
I said, “Marry me.”
His mouth opened, but no words came out.
It was kind of a great idea. “Marry me,” I said again, “and then you can stay.”
“You want me to marry you?”
I nodded.
“For a green card?”
“You want to stay, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s sunny here, and the people are friendly, and we have tacos. Do they have tacos in Scotland?”
“They do have tacos in Scotland,” he said, “but they’re not the same.”
Why were we talking about tacos?
I went on. “I had this great idea a few weeks ago about opening a summer camp for kids in wheelchairs.” I was thinking fast now. It was all coming together in my head. “Maybe we could do it together—build it and run it, I mean. We could be partners. You could mastermind all the PT stuff and do your thing and get all outside-the-box, and I could do all the fund-raising, and we could create, like, just, a utopia for kids who’ve seen so much pain—with a garden, and a wheelchair racecourse, and a splash park, and movie nights, and popcorn, and juggling classes, and cookie baking, and Pop-A-Shot, and therapeutic horseback. And a choir!”
I was on fire now. I went on, “We could have classes for adults, too, in the winter, and hold retreats, and sponsor art fairs and teach adults crafty things, like how to knit slugs, and help create a source of light and hope and connection for people who really, really need it. I know you kind of lost interest in your other business, but this would be different.”
I had some momentum now. I could see this idea really working.
Plus, and this is not a minor point, I was utterly, breath-stealingly in love with him. It suddenly seemed like I needed to tell him that. Whether I was ready to or not. If he was leaving the country in the morning—if I was truly never going to see him again—how could I let him go without stepping up and speaking the truth?
I’d done a hundred brave things since the crash, but I swear, not one of them was as scary as this.
“Ian,” I said then, my breath swirling cold in my lungs like water. “The thing is, I’m in love with you.”
Ian held very still.
I watched his face for some kind of response. Was this good news to him or bad? Was it something he’d been hoping to hear—or hoping not to hear? Most likely, of course, I was just a sad, shriveled client to him. But those kisses—those heartbreaking kisses of his—had given me a spark of hope I couldn’t ignore. I had no idea how he really felt, but there was no time to guess. He was too good at being unreadable.
Without a response, I just pushed on. “Like crazily, swooningly, heart-burstingly in love. Like the kind of in love I didn’t even know was possible. The kind of in love that makes every other emotion look tiny and dollhouse sized. The kind that feels like sunshine and fills you up with excitement somehow—even when there’s nothing to be excited about. The kind that makes everything better—no matter how bad it is—and even utterly ordinary things like brushing your teeth feel tinged with magic.”
It was hard to know how strongly to state my case. I could also have said, I think about you at night when I can’t sleep. Or, What I felt for Chip never even came close to what I feel for you. Or, You are the best thing in my life.
The longer he didn’t respond, the more I felt like I should push even harder. The more I felt like begging. I came very close to saying, Please, please marry me. It wouldn’t have to be love! I’d take him for less than that. I’d take him for friendship. I take him for anything—just to keep him close.
But I never said any of that, and later, I was glad. As the expression on his face finally came into focus, I stopped. If any part of me had been hoping for a yes, that was the moment when it disappeared.
He was holding his breath. He let it out, and stood, turned away, and shoved a hand into his hair, all at once.
“I didn’t ‘kind of lose interest’ in my business,” he said.
A huge confession of love from me, and that’s his talking point?
He went on. “The business was great. It was working out—growing, even. It was one of those impossible moments in life when everybody got to win. I was happy, my employees were happy, our clients were happy. Kayla was happy. We had moved in together. We were talking about getting married.” He took a shaky breath. “Then, one night—it was actually the night the Oscars were on—Kayla stopped by the store on her way home to pick up a box of microwave popcorn, because she had this rule that you couldn’t watch the Oscars without popcorn.” Ian paused. “And a boy—a teenage boy—walked into the grocery store with an assault rifle and opened fire. For no reason. Nobody ever figured out why—why that store, why that day, why that moment. He shot a security guard, two checkers, and two people standing in line. And the last person he shot, before he shot himself, was Kayla.”
I knew the rest without his even saying it.
I remembered that shooting. It had dominated the local news for days. I knew that nobody in that store had survived.
But even if I hadn’t remembered, I’d have known from the look on lan’s face—so indelible and so undeniable. The woman he loved—wanted to marry—had gone to the store for popcorn, and she had never come home.
There are facial expressions you can fake. You can fake a smile, for instance, or a frown. You can even fake tears. But certain expressions are so true and so directly connected to the heart that they are beyond description. That’s what I saw in Ian then. The most desperate, unspeakable, agonizing, indescribable despair.
I held still and quiet. What could I say? How on earth could I respond? It was beyond anything I had words for. At last, grasping for something—some acknowledgment of what he was telling me—I whispered, “I am so sorry.”
He nodded, staring at the floor like he was seeing something else.
After a while, quiet as I could, I said, “I remember it. Something like three years ago, right?”
He didn’t look up, but he said, “Three years, almost exactly.”