“Yeah, I work out,” I joke, curling my bicep. I’m fooling around, but she’s biting down on her bottom lip. Okay, she shouldn’t do that. Please, stop doing that. How has it been so long, and at the same time it feels like no time has passed.
“I’m sorry I cut things off cold turkey,” she says, referring to our conversation before I left for Cancun. When I returned, I knew I had made a huge mistake and realized I wasn’t ready to give up the fight. She was, though. Cammy never answered another one of my calls again. “I had to, or it would have made things really hard.”
“Things were really hard,” I tell her.
She looks down at my hand and lifts it up in front of my face as she presses a finger into my wedding band. I’m trying to ignore the warmth of her fingers clamped around my hand, but it’s like a song that reminds you of a moment in time. Her touch brings it all back for me. “Clearly you’re doing okay now,” she says as a smile touches her lips.
What I want to tell her is, she has no idea how not okay I am, but it’s not the time to air out all of my dirty laundry.
With the focus on my marriage, the thought of what her life has become enters my mind. Selfishly scared to see something similar on her finger, I force myself to look down and take her hand, immediately intimidated by what must be a four carat diamond ring. “And you, not too shabby, Cam.”
“It’s…Cameron, now,” she says, breaking her gaze from mine.
“Cameron,” I repeat—not as a question but as a statement. I need to hear the way her name sounds on my tongue after never calling this person I thought I knew so well by the very name she was born with. “Suits you.”
She wraps a strand of her flawlessly curled hair behind her ear. “Yeah, I guess.”
“So, what brings you all the way back to this quaint little New England town? Surely, it can’t be me.” I laugh, because if it were me, why wait almost thirteen years?
Cammy—Cameron, looks down to her feet as I question her visit. “I am here because of you,” she says. As if six words couldn’t turn my life completely upside down, I create the space I think I need and take a seat on the couch behind us. “Are you okay?”
“Twelve—thirteen years, Cam. Do you know how many of those days you have crossed my mind?” She’s engaged or married…something, and I’m married with a son. This isn’t okay. But it’s Cammy. My Cammy. But, not my Cameron. Someone else’s Cameron.
She walks over to where I’m sitting and takes a seat beside me. “I’m here because I have something to tell you, something we need to talk about.” The lightness in her voice thickens and an anxious inflection coats the last of her words.
“Are your parents okay?” My mind races right to the thought that something might have happened to one of them, but even if that happened, why would she need to talk to me?
“Of course, they’re both fine. Still the same people, always in my business, always keeping tabs on me. You know them,” she laughs. Yeah, while I should know them—the grandparents of our estranged daughter—I only know of them. She places her hands over her lap and knits each of her fingers tightly together. Her pale skin brightens into a light pink, closely matching her polished nails, and I’m becoming anxious and impatient for her next words.
“I give up, then, what is it?”
Cammy takes in a sharp breath and closes her eyes. “Ever, she’s…she came to find me.”
“Ever?” I feel every muscle on my face tighten, questioning each word that spills out of her mouth. “Ever? You mean our Everything?”
She inhales, placing a long pause between my question and her answer. “It’s really her name, AJ. After you left the hospital room, when I made you leave, the adopting parents insisted that I give our daughter a name. “I could only hear your words playing through my head at that moment: ‘She’s my everything.’ Because of that, I named her, Everything. The adopting parents were a bit put off by my decision, but rather than argue, the woman asked if they could call her Ever for short. It sounded like the most beautiful name.” I want to tear through the house like a tornado with anger and resentment, after all of these years I’m only now finding out that Cammy knew our daughter’s name. But, I’m not moving, and I’m not unleashing because she named her a perfect name. Her name is short for everything, and I’m just short of Everything. “I didn’t tell you because you were already going through so much turmoil, and to be honest, I was seventeen, AJ. I wasn’t making the brightest decisions. I can apologize for the hormonal seventeen-year-old I was, but it won’t change anything now.”