“I don’t understand.”
“I wrote you back,” he says quietly. “So many times.”
“What do you . . . ?”
He pulls himself up to a sitting position, and his eyes find the bag that Shelby asked me to bring in. “Hand me that?”
I do, and with some effort, he reaches inside, brings out a bundle of letters held together by a rubber band, and holds them out to me. “These are yours.”
I look at the stack of letters in his hand, dozens of them piled up, sealed, and never sent, and I can’t form a single word.
“I couldn’t ever get it right,” he says, “not like I wanted to, or like you deserved. Nothing I said ever matched up to the way I felt, and the way I felt was like I didn’t deserve it. Like it was wrong that someone else had to die for me to live.” He shrugs. “I didn’t know how to say thank you for giving me life to someone who’d lost a person they loved. I couldn’t, so I didn’t. Just like you.”
He holds out the bundle to me again. “These are your letters, as much as that other one was.”
I look at them, and I can see the weight of his guilt, and of his heart, heavy with it. When I reach out, I know I’ll never open a single one, but I also know he needs me to take them from him. So I do.
We sit there quiet in the dim light of his room, our secrets and scars laid out all around us. For a moment I wish we could go back to that magic place where we were together, free of our pasts. But I know we can’t. We never really were free from them. As hard as we both tried, and as much as we both wanted it to be otherwise, we are made of our pasts, and our pains, our joys and our losses. It’s in the very fibers of our beings. Written on our hearts.
The only thing we can do now is listen to what’s in them.
I set the letters down on the table, and then I go to Colton. I ease myself onto his bed and lie down next to him. His puts his arm around me, and I rest my head on his chest. Listen to the steady rhythm that I want to keep hearing. “What now?” I ask.
“Now?” He laughs a little. “That’s a big question.” He pauses, and when I look up, I can see he’s smiling. “I think we might have to answer that as we go,” he says. “But right now . . .” He pulls me closer, kisses my forehead. “This is enough. This is everything.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“Thus, we say we ‘learn by heart’ that which we commit to memory or have understood thoroughly. And note, further, that the heart is believed to make possible a higher form of cognition, a level of understanding superior to that acquired by the brain.”
—F. González Crussi, Carrying the Heart: Exploring the Worlds within Us
WE SIT FAR enough offshore to see the entire cove in the golden evening light. On one end, the waterfall spills over the cliff in slow motion, its currents rolling and tumbling all the way down to the sand, where they meet and mix with the waves that rush up the beach. On the other end is the set of stairs where I stood watching Colton in the water, unsure of how we could ever make sense together, but knowing that we did. That we do.
“This is the day I want, over and over,” Colton says from behind me.
I turn to look at him. “Me too.”
He smiles and shakes his head. “I can’t believe you did this.”
“I had some help from your sister.” A lot of help, actually. When I called Shelby and told her what I wanted to do, she got it all set up for us: kayak, tent, campfire, s’mores, all of it.
“It’s perfect,” Colton says.
“Being cleared deserves a perfect day.”
He smiles. “So does being the fastest new runner on the team.”
It makes me laugh, but I really do feel good about it—so happy to have a plan, even if it’s just to run, and take a few classes, and see where it goes.
“I don’t know if that’s quite up there with yours,” I say, “but I’ll take it, just like I’ll take you coming with me.”
“You should,” Colton says with a smile.
He digs his paddle into the water, and we make our way onto the beach as the sunlight fades at our backs. After we rinse off in the waterfall, Colton lights the campfire and I watch the smoke curl up into the night, all the way to the stars. We roast marshmallows and talk about how many more perfect days we can spend together, about all the places we’ll see and the things we’ll do. All the possibilities for the future.
Later, when it starts to get cold, we pull our sleeping bags out of the tent and zip them together. Spread them out on the sand and lie there side by side, watching satellites and shooting stars cross the sky. I’m the best kind of tired from the sun and the ocean, but I don’t want to close my eyes. I don’t want this day to ever end, and I know Colton doesn’t either by the way he keeps talking. Keeps telling me stories of the stars, and the sea.
He stops only to roll onto his side and pull me into him for a kiss. And in that kiss is one of those moments like we had in the hospital that day. A moment that is everything. It’s a moment when I can feel the depth of the connection between Colton and me, between it all. I can feel the endless rhythms of light and dark, the tides and the winds. Life and death, and guilt and forgiveness.
And love. Always love.
We lie together, quiet, under an endless sky, beside a bottomless ocean, and we don’t talk about how these are all the things that brought us together. We don’t talk about how we wouldn’t change any of them.
We don’t have to, because these are the things we know by heart.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FIRST AND ALWAYS, thank you to my husband, Schuyler, who had my heart the day we met and who is the reason I can write a love story in the first place.