Hope
Five Months Later
"That was your daddy on the phone," my grandmother announced in her thick southern accent as she stood in the doorway of my bedroom. "He'll be here in thirty minutes."
"Okay," I mumbled, concentrating on the stubborn zip on my suitcase.
Blowing out a breath when I finally managed to get the damn thing closed, I turned to my grandmother and said, "Grandma, I'm scared."
"It's okay to be scared, Hope," she said, tone gentle and laced with empathy. "We've talked about this, honey."
Yeah, we had talked – a lot.
About my past.
About my future.
About the baby.
About him.
"If you're not ready, you can always stay," Grandma urged. Walking over to where I was standing, she took my hand in hers and said, "You are always welcome in my home."
I knew that.
But it was time to go.
I had two weeks left before my due date, and as hard as I knew it was going to be, I had to return to The Hill.
I wanted to be close to him.
That hadn't changed in the past five months.
But what had changed was my mindset.
I had figured out how to cope – how to manage my pain.
The life I was sure I would never want to be a part of again jumpstarted in my heart the day our baby kicked inside of me.
No words could describe the emotions that had battered through me when I felt that tiny fluttering, that as the weeks progressed transformed into harder thumps and jabs.
Every time the baby kicked, I imagined it was him giving me a gentle nudge, telling me to get back up. To rise up from the ashes of my burnt-out heart and live.
During my stay at Grandma's, I found myself listening to a lot of Lana Del Ray's earlier music. The words in her songs, the melancholy lyrics, spoke to me. I downloaded every single one of her songs on my phone and listened to them constantly until I knew every single song by heart. Blue Jeans and National Anthem Monologue were my favorites – the two songs that completely shredded my heart.
I used music to express myself, and I channeled my pain onto the page, writing darker and deeper than ever before.
I wasn’t sure if I would ever publish another book.
But I wasn’t writing for anyone other than me.
Several hundred thousand words of my personal breakdown were captured on paper and safely stored away on my computer.
My grandmother had given me a safe haven to heal, and grieve, and then piece myself back together again.
And while I felt like I was close to crumbling at any given moment, I was living again.
I was talking and listening and holding down actual conversations with people.
When my family called me, I answered the phone.
When they text me, I responded.
I was doing that, and it was huge progress.
I'd even spoken to my mother a couple of times.
The conversations were short and vague, but I had healed enough to offer her some semblance of forgiveness.
In truth, I had done all the healing I could here.
Now, I had to make the leap back into the real world.
My world.
And that was in Boulder, Colorado.
"I'm ready to go home," I told my grandmother.
And then I wrapped my arms around her small frame and thanked her for helping me put myself back together.
"Are you going to stay at that big ole house your Daddy bought you?" Grandma asked, smiling affectionately at me.
"It's a cottage," I corrected, thinking about the outrageous Christmas gift my father had given me; my own three-bedroom cottage, on a two-acre site, less than a mile from Teagan and Noah's house.
Dad had every stick of furniture from the apartment moved to the cottage. When I had panicked, my father had assured me that every stitch of clothing that he owned was safely tucked in the cottage along with every cup, plate, and saucer.
"Yeah," I told my grandma. "I think I am."
I needed the fresh start.
I had to move forward.
But I was taking him with me.