I had just unloaded my most personal thoughts on a man I had claimed to not like five days earlier. An arm of trust had been extended, and I had yet to find out if that would break me in the end.
I tried pulling out of his embrace, but he held me tight, so I whispered, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone off like that.”
“Have you ever told anybody this stuff?”
There had been so many times I wanted to discuss things with Chloe, but she had so much in her life to distract her—namely, Holly and Ivy. A year earlier, her grief had taken a backseat to teething toddlers and sleepless nights. The addition of Russ to our family actually seemed welcome to her—a relief, even. Having my mom married became one less thing for her to worry about. We’d talked about Russ and the uncomfortable feeling of watching my mom with a new man, but I’d never let myself unleash all my feelings. My own effort at keeping the peace. I’d talked a little bit with Millie at work, but my job was where I wanted to forget and focus on other things.
“No. Can you tell?” My attempt at humor fell flat.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. I’m sorry for you, too.”
His fingers ran up and down my arm for a few long moments before he said, “For what it’s worth, Russ seems like a decent guy.”
I laughed, the sound bitter to my ears. “He is a decent guy. That’s never been the problem.”
“What is the problem?”
“He’s not my dad.”
Miles nodded.
I drew in a breath, wiped away a rogue tear, and moved out of his arms. “Listen, I know that I need to give Russ a chance. My mom seems happy now, and that’s because of him. My brain knows all of this. I’m a grown woman. I’m not a kid still living at home. But I just…I can’t convince my heart to let my dad go. I can’t move on.”
“Why do you have to let him go to move on?”
I opened my mouth to explain to him how things worked, but the words became scrambled in my mind, like they might not fit as well as they used to.
“I know you’ve spent the last year grieving your dad, and I don’t want to make light of that. But you’ve also spent the last year trying to control your emotions. Even now, you’re telling me how you should feel. That’s bull. Your feelings are what they are. And there’s a reason for it. You don’t need to sugarcoat them. They’re valid.”
“But I need to be an adult about this. I’ve treated Russ like he was invisible for most of the time I’ve been around him.”
“He can handle it.”
My surprised eyes swung his way as a small bit of laughter bubbled out of my throat.
He laughed softly. “I’m not telling you to treat him badly, but Russ seems like a smart guy. I’m assuming he’s divorced or widowed?”
“Widowed. His wife passed away five years ago.”
“Yeah, see? He knows it’s going to take time. I’m sure his kids have had to adjust to your mom being in their lives as well. But you have the right to feel all the emotions you’re feeling without trying to push them away.”
“On paper, I know this. But I feel like I should have things figured out as an adult. I should still be able to function in society and around my family.”
“You have been functioning. But you’ve been grieving at the same time. Eventually, you have to decide to live again. And allow others to do the same thing. You and your family will always be grieving your dad. You’ll always miss what could have been. What should have been. But life can come at you fast. Moments don’t last forever. Sometimes we have to take opportunities when they come.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m wondering if that’s what your mom might be doing with Russ.”
My eyes glanced back up to his. “What?”
“She’s picking her moment and choosing to live again.”
I drew my eyes away from his, leaning my head back against the wall of the bridge. I couldn’t accept his words completely, but I sat with them for a minute and felt them out in my heart.
“How did you get so smart with all of this?” I asked eventually.
“Two years of forced therapy. My parents made me go after the accident. I didn’t want to, but they wouldn’t accept that. It was only supposed to be for a year, but I ended up going for two. For the longest time, I couldn’t get over the fact that I had taken Kelly out of school to go skiing. Nobody knew where we were. Her parents kept denying that it was their daughter on the ski hill, because they thought she was in school. And it was my idea. My fault. If I hadn’t asked her, she’d still be here.”
My heart dropped a tiny bit at that. I wondered if there was a part of Miles still in love with her. My selfish heart was now jealous of a woman who had been dead for years. I forced myself to push past the emotion.
“Any other day,” I began, “everything would have been just fine. You wouldn’t have second-guessed anything. But in that one moment, somebody else was in control. You couldn’t have stopped it because, for whatever reason, it was her time to go. You were never in control of her life. Or her decisions.”
Miles leaned his back against the bridge. I followed suit, our shoulders pressed against each other.
“Maybe you’re in the wrong profession, Oliviana. You sound just like my therapist.”
“Why is it always easier to fix other people's problems than it is my own?”
We sat that way for a while. The roar of the wind outside of the bridge provided a relaxing white noise as we both got lost in our thoughts.
“Do you think…do you think you’d be married to her right now if she’d survived?” I didn’t really want to know the answer, but I couldn’t look away from the train wreck of my thoughts.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. My brain wants to immortalize her as being perfect because I’ve blocked out everything else. But looking back, our relationship was pretty immature, which makes sense. We were eighteen, and I hadn’t dated much before. I was halfway terrified of her. So…probably not.”
The pieces of Miles’s puzzle were slowly beginning to come together.
“I remember you telling me a while ago that you didn’t start doing all the extreme sports until a few years ago. Was it related to her? To Kelly?”
He smiled and absently rubbed at a spot on his pants. “For a while, the accident made me scared to get close to anybody again. It took me some time to get past the trauma and stop feeling guilty. So, I decided to try to live my life like I thought Kelly would. My own way to justify her death instead of mine. She wasn’t afraid of anything except being still. She climbed every mountain chain in the Northeastern United States. When she turned sixteen, she begged her dad to take her white-water rafting in the Grand Canyon because she heard they had some of the best rapids. She went bungee-jumping and skydiving multiple times before she was even seventeen. She was fearless. I hadn’t been brave enough to do all of that with her when we were dating, but she got me into skiing. So, after she died, I made a pact with myself to start living moments for Kelly, especially if it scared me. The more out of my comfort zone, the better.”
“How was jumping out of an airplane the first time?”
He smiled. “Scariest thing I’d ever done up until I jumped. Then, it was amazing.”