This is the first time in my life I'm choosing. I held her gaze. Please don't make me do it alone. Something in her face gave way. Not the way it does when someone breaks.
The way it does when someone finally sets down a weight they've carried for years. Her shoulders lowered. Her hands stopped shaking. She reached out and laid one palm flat against my chest right over my heart and left it there. Okay, she said.
That was all, just okay. But I heard everything folded inside it. Relief and fear and a kind of stubborn hope she hadn't let herself say aloud in months. We made a decision that night, standing among the buckets under the flickering light. No more hiding.
No more running. We would go to the appointments together. We would walk into the grocery store together. If the town of Greenville wanted to look, it could look. I remember thinking that I had walked into worse rooms than this one.
I had never walked into one I wanted so badly to stay in. The next morning, I made the call I had been dreading. I sat in my truck outside the workshop and dialed Chelsea's number. I didn't rehearse. I didn't plan what to say.
I only knew I wasn't going to apologize for something I wasn't sorry about, and I wasn't going to argue about something that couldn't be argued. She picked up on the sixth ring. She didn't say hello. I understand you're angry. I said, I'm not asking you to accept this.
I'm not asking you to like it, but I want you to hear it from me, so you don't have to hear it from anyone else. Your mother didn't betray you. She fell in love with someone you let go of four years ago. The line went quiet. I counted the seconds.
1 2 5 9 I could hear her breathing and I could hear the faint sound of a trowelevision somewhere in her apartment. She didn't hang up. She didn't speak. At 10 seconds, she said, "You don't get to tell me what my mother did and she hung up. I set the phone on the dashboard.
I didn't call back. Some lines you draw and then you have to leave them where they are." A few days later, something small happened. I had stopped expecting anything else. A woman came into Walsh Florals, someone who had been a regular for years and hadn't been seen since the post.