He nodded, hitting me with one of his slow smiles. “Yes.”
I started shaking my head rapidly. “Ben, are you serious? You can’t be serious.”
Doubt flickered over his face. “Valentine’s Day is coming up. Neither of us has a date. I don’t know, I thought it would be… fun.”
“That’s sweet, really. But, I can’t. I cannot go on a date with you. I can’t. I… can’t.”
“It was just a thought,” he shrugged casually.
I ignored the expression on his face. I couldn’t read it right now and frankly I didn’t want to know what it meant. “You don’t want to go on a date with me anyway. You don’t. I’m… I’m broken, Ben. My husband hasn’t even been dead a year. I’m done with dating. Forever. I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to make this awkward between us. I just care about you. I didn’t think you thought of me that way.”
His hands cupped my shoulders and held me still so that he could look into my frightened eyes. “Liz, you didn’t make things awkward between us. This isn’t the right time, I get that. Don’t feel bad. I’m not in a hurry. It’s alright. I can wait.”
“No, Ben, that’s not what I m-”
He leaned down and pressed a lingering kiss to my cheek. I shivered at the contact and whatever I had wanted to say to him dissolved into thin air. When he stepped back, my body swayed toward him.
“Goodnight, Liz,” he told me sweetly. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Thanks for dinner,” I squeaked. “And for babysitting.”
He gave me one more charming smile when I walked him to the door. I didn’t watch him walk to his house or wait for him to get inside. I closed the door and locked it as soon as he was through it.
I had to shut him out, shut him out of my house, my thoughts and my heart.
I climbed into bed that night more upset than I had been in a very long time. I reached out and clutched at the sheets on Grady’s side, desperate for him to be here.
“I don’t know what is happening to me, Grady.” The words fell out of my mouth as a frantic prayer. How could I love my husband so very much and still have these feelings for Ben? It didn’t make sense to me. “I need you, Grady. I need you to come back to me. I hate that you left me to do this on my own because I don’t know what to do. Come back to me. I would do anything to have you come back to me.”
Chapter Eighteen
March fifteenth. The one-year anniversary of Grady’s death.
I woke up that morning before the kids and stared at myself in the mirror for a long time.
I couldn’t find myself through the haze of grief and heartache. In the mirror I saw a stranger, a person I didn’t know and couldn’t tolerate.
Every once in a while I would glimpse a glimmer of my old self, but it was only a flicker, an echo of life and light.
Part of me accepted that this was the person I was now. I could never go back. I would never find my lost self. That part of me knew I could only go forward and I would have to discover this unknown person as the days went by.
And that same part was okay with finding this new version of me. I couldn’t go back, but I also didn’t know if I wanted to go back. The other Liz had been happily married to Grady. She had been a good mother that had things under control because she had the help of a good man. She built a life that revolved around her husband and her children and that was enough for her.
But I could never have those things again. And so moving forward I needed to let them go.
Yes, I still had my children and I would always do everything I could to give them the best life possible. But I wasn’t the mom that volunteered twice a week in their classrooms now. I wasn’t the mom that baked up a storm for fundraisers and teacher appreciation week. I wasn’t the mom that remembered every practice and had healthy meals on the table every single night.
I was just me. A widow struggling to keep them bathed and clothed.
And you know what? It worked for us. We survived a year without Grady. A whole year. Maybe it wasn’t pretty. Maybe our lives weren’t tied up perfectly with bows. But we still loved each other. And we were still alive.
There were dark times over the last year, but it hadn’t been all darkness. There were days I never thought I would live through and moments when I was convinced that it was the end of us. But we’d pushed through and we’d kept on living.
Best of all, it wasn’t all depression and hard times.
Somehow, we hadn’t just managed to go on living, but we’d managed to smile through some of it too. Our hearts hurt and our souls ached, but there was plenty of love and happiness left for us.
I pushed my blonde hair back from my face and made a mental note to make a hair appointment. The lines near my eyes were definitely more pronounced and my youthful complexion wasn’t so youthful anymore.
At almost thirty-three-years-old, I could say that I was happy with how I’d aged. I hadn’t found much time to run through the winter. I hoped to remedy that this spring. Still, I was in better shape than I ever had been before.
What mattered most to me about looking at myself for so long was that I could finally recognize some of what Ben saw in me.
I knew Grady loved me. I knew without a doubt he thought I was sexy. He told me I was beautiful nearly every day. But he had been married to me. We had spent ten years together. At some point he had made a conscious decision to see me that way and to continue seeing me that way. I had no doubt that he believed all of those things, but part of that was because he never looked any other direction. I was it for him, just like he was the end all, be all for me.
Ben had started as a complete stranger with absolutely no obligation to me. Our relationship had developed into a strong friendship and I was happy with that. Although, I knew he wanted more. He had told me so more than once.