CHAPTER 33
ABI
Love Broke Through
I wake to pain in my foot. It burns so badly it almost takes my breath.
Only it doesn’t.
I don’t let it.
Because, today, the burn feels different.
Sam is still holding me like he’s afraid I might escape to the lake, his arms wrapped completely around me. The hump of his bicep explains the ache in my side where I was sleeping over it. It cramps and spasms testily when I move, but I don’t care about that either.
As gently as I can, I disentangle myself from him and get up to hobble out of the bedroom. My foot is angry and red, flames licking up my calf, but I continue on through the living room and out the front door.
Dawn is breaking, beautiful reds and eye-popping yellows streaking across the sky like greedy fingers grabbing at the day yet to come. I smile. Despite the pain, despite the grief, despite the loss, I smile. Today is a new day, the first one I’ve had in a long time it feels like.
I limp down the steps and across the yard to the edge of the lake. I forego a chair and simply sit on the grass, the cool of it like a soothing balm to the fevered skin of my leg. I stare out at the water, at the colors reflected on it, at the calmness of its surface, and note that today it looks different. Everything looks different.
I glance down at the bracelet still circling my wrist.
Everything is different.
To my left is a cluster of dandelions, their heads white, puffy clouds awaiting the gust of wind that will tear them apart and send them into graceful flight. I pluck one and hold it close for inspection, or maybe for introspection.
Behind me, the screen door bangs and I hear one loud and panicked, “Abi!” followed by rapid, heavy footfalls.
I know the moment Sam spots me. I hear his running stop. I hear him let out his breath. I hear the desperation leave him. I can almost feel it.
And I smile again.
He resumes his approach, more slowly this time. His steps grow louder until they stop at my back and transform into the shuffling sound of fabric moving over skin. Seconds later, his legs appear beside mine on the ground and his arms fold around me. He scoots in close, rubbing his rough cheek over mine. “You scared the shit out of me.”
I don’t ask why. I know why. I didn’t do it on purpose. I just didn’t expect him to wake so early. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you doing out here?” There is suspicion in his voice. I understand it. He’s wondering if I’m planning, if I’m scheming, if I’m setting dates and times that will forever steal me away from him.
I’m not doing any of those things.
“I’m having a flare.” He stiffens behind me, and when he starts to move, I stop him with a hand to his arm. “No. Don’t.”
“But we need to get you inside. Get your foot up, get you calmed down, get you—”
“I want to feel this one, Sam. Especially this one.”
Tense seconds tick by, each one filled with more dread than the last. Dread on Sam’s part, not on mine. I can detect it in the way he’s breathing. It’s a tight, labored sound, like he’s bracing himself. “Why?”
“Because today is a new day. Today, pain means something different than it did yesterday.”
“What does it mean today?”
“It means I’m alive.”
He pauses, taking this in. “What did it mean yesterday?”
I twirl the dandelion between my fingers, examining the beauty of its form. “Yesterday it meant I was dying. Like this dandelion.”
I purse my lips and blow, sending half the white hairs scattering into the light breeze. Sam takes the weed from my fingers.
I follow it with my eyes until my head is turned and I can see him in my periphery. His expression is light yet pensive.
“That’s where you’re wrong. This dandelion isn’t dying. It’s finding a way to live.” Sam’s lips purse as he, too, blows on the dandelion, sending the remaining fuzz into the wind. We both watch them fly away. He nods to them as they go. “Every one of those has a seed of life inside it. All they need is a good place to grow. That’s not the end. It’s the beginning.”
He’s right, of course. Such is the difference between someone who sees through the eyes of hope and someone who has, until now, seen through the eyes of hopelessness. Sam sees something beautiful and life giving. He sees a beginning. Me? For years, I’ve looked at dandelions and seen death, the dwindling of life. I’ve seen an end.
But today…today I can see what Sam sees.
I touch my fingers to the bracelet lying warm against my wrist. I see the letters in my head.
Hope, Abi.
She didn’t add the comma; I did. When I saw the bracelet last night, that’s how the words read to me. Hope, Abi. A command. An order. A directive.
Have hope, Abi.
Find your hope, Abi.
Embrace hope, Abi.
Live, Abi.
Fight, Abi.
“Do you really love me, Sam?”
Sam lowers his hand and lets the empty stem fall to the ground before winding his arms back around me. Dropping his forehead to my shoulder, he mumbles, “More than I love my own life.”
“I love you, too, you know. I’ve loved you for over half my life. I never stopped, not even when I thought I had.”
“I know, Abs. I know.”
It’s not a cocky, overconfident thing to say. It’s simply the truth. He knows of my love for him as I know of his for me. It’s in every look and every touch. It runs just beneath the surface of life itself, like a secondary power source that sustains us. We piled lots of other things and people and circumstances on top of it over the years, but we were never able to drown it out. It’s too strong. It’s too vital. It’s too…eternal.
“I don’t want to hurt you. Not ever.”
“And I don’t want to hurt you. Not ever. But life happens, Abi. We can’t avoid living because we want to avoid pain. Life without pain is life without living. Like you just said, the pain lets us know we’re alive. Without it, we wouldn’t know pleasure. It helps us to appreciate the good. I’m not asking for you to be healthy every day or be perfect every day. I’m just asking you to say you’ll stay. Say you’ll try. Promise you won’t leave me on purpose. I couldn’t…I couldn’t handle that.”
I lay my arms along his where they cross my abdomen. “I want to try, Sam. I’m just so scared. I can’t lose anything else. It would break me.”
“I know you’re scared. I am, too. But I’m more afraid of living the rest of my life without you. I’d take a few years of happy with you over a lifetime of painlessness without you any day of the week.”
“It won’t be easy, Sam.”
“Anything worth having never is.”
“The only time I’ve felt lucky since I left Molly’s Knob was when Sasha was alive. Until today, that is. Today I feel lucky. Even though my body is betraying me and I’ve lost all the family that’s ever mattered to me, I feel lucky. Blessed. You make all the difference to me, Sam. I want you to know that.”
“You haven’t lost all your family, Abi. Family is who we choose, and I choose you. I chose you two decades ago, and I’m still choosing you. I’ll always choose you. I would like to make the family status more official one of these days, but…”
I start to lean away. “Are you asking me—”
“No!” he exclaims, pulling me back against him. “That was in no way a proposal. When a man proposes to the woman he’s loved for half his life, he opts for the grand gesture.” After a short pause, he kisses the side of my neck and I feel the smile on his lips when he adds, “But he might, on occasion, feel the need to put said woman on notice. Just so she knows he’s serious.”
I grin, the wounds and cuts and breaks in my heart feeling less raw, bleeding less profusely than they have in two years. “Okay. Just checking.”
“But if that man were to ask prematurely and in the least romantic manner ever documented, how do you think the woman in question would be inclined to answer?”
I wiggle in Sam’s embrace until I’m half leaning on his left arm, my face tilted toward his. I reach up to trail my fingertips along his jaw, marveling at how light his gray eyes are this morning, how unburdened. And how, after all this time, this man is finally mine. For real. Forever, or as long as both of us shall live.
“I’m thinking she’d be inclined to say yes to whatever you asked of her.”
I slide my hand into the hair at Sam’s nape and tug, pulling his face down to mine. Our lips touch tentatively at first and then with a hunger that’s been suppressed for far too long.
When Sam scoops me into his arms and carries me into the house, I notice that there is only a vague pain in my foot now, as though love and happiness have given me a tolerance that no amount of drugs ever could.
Sam really is a healer.
And now he’s healing me.