NINE
all in
sloane
Three weeks isn’t a long time to know someone. But that’s how long I had known Adam when he returned to post, two nights before he would leave on his next deployment. After that moment in the post office, it was like my entire life, and certainly our entire love, was on fast forward. I had Christmas Eve dinner with his family. He spent Christmas Day with mine. We spent every waking moment of my break from UGA together at my apartment, which was completely devoid of roommates, who had gone home.
This kind of behavior was completely out of character for me. But there was something about Adam and the way he looked at me that very first day. Even though I was in my crummy exam clothes, he made me feel like I was the most beautiful person he had ever seen. No boy I had ever been with had made me feel that way or could have tempered the sting of growing up in the shadows of two extraordinary sisters. Caroline was pretty and smart and so confident and self-assured that the world seemed to revolve around her, and Emerson, let’s face it, was essentially a gift from God, so unusually beautiful and talented. I always felt lost somewhere in the middle.
I should have been grateful, I suppose. I was smart enough, pretty enough, a good artist. I had good friends, and my parents did all they could to make sure I felt special and unique, like I was just as important as Caroline and Emerson. But, come on. How could I ever be? And now, here, with Adam, I was.
Maybe that’s why, very, very unlike me, I said “I love you” first. It was the night before Christmas. We were at his parents’ house, sitting by the crackling, real wood fireplace in the basement of their house on Lake Hartwell, outside Athens. It had a rustic, cabin-like feel to it. It was the kind of place where you just had to drink hot chocolate with extra marshmallows.
His parents were incredible. They were funny and warm and welcoming, and I felt so at home in his world, as though I had been there forever. In stark contrast to my mother, who would have risked life and limb to make sure we didn’t share a bedroom, they hadn’t even considered that we wouldn’t. I felt weird about it, especially since it portrayed the notion that we were having a type of relationship that we weren’t, a type I had never had with anyone, in fact.
That night, after the Christmas presents and carol singing, Adam and I were all alone in the basement by the fire. We had talked so much that I felt like I knew him better than I’d ever known anyone. But there was still one thing I needed to know. Looking up into his soulful hazel eyes, I said, “Adam, what made you decide to enlist? I mean, how could you just leave school and everything behind?”
He was leaning against the couch, his legs out in a V that I fit into perfectly. I leaned up against him, my back against his chest. His strong arms were wrapped around me and for the first time since 9/11, for the first time since my father was taken from me, I felt safe.
He kissed my ear and said, “You know, Sloane, I watched those planes crash into the towers, and it made me sad. But it also made me furious. All I could think about was the people in those towers, my people. They left for work that morning expecting to come home that night, kiss their husbands and wives, and tuck their children into bed. Even the survivors’ lives had changed forever.” He paused, and I let his words sink in because he was right. I was one of the survivors. And every minute of my life since that second tower fell had been just a little bit worse.
He pulled me closer to him, and I could tell he was thinking. So I looked up at him again. “What?”
He smiled at me. “I want to say something, but I’m afraid it will scare you away.”
“There is nothing,” I said, “that could possibly scare me away at this point, Adam. I’m pretty much all in.”
He nodded, and I knew he felt the same. “I’ve spent some time wondering why I felt so compelled to right this wrong. I mean, I didn’t have a loved one in the tower. I had no real stake in any of it.” He paused for a moment, his fingers trailing lazily up my arm. “And this is the crazy part. When I saw you in that post office, when we had lunch that day, when I knew your dad had been killed, it was like all the pieces of my life finally fit together, all the things that didn’t make sense suddenly did. I think, even though I didn’t know you yet, Sloane, I had been fighting for you all that time, like my heart knew that one day I would meet you and I had to be able to tell you I hadn’t watched this atrocity happen to you without trying to fix it.”
By this point I had scooted away from Adam. I was sitting on my knees looking at him, rapt with attention. My heart was beating wildly, the butterflies in my stomach having baby butterflies. When I didn’t say anything he said, “I’m sorry. I knew it was too much. I wish I hadn’t said anything.”
But I shook my head and moved closer to him until our faces were only inches apart. “Adam,” I said.
“Sloane,” he replied.
“I love you.”
He smiled and pulled me to him, kissing me. “I love you too,” he whispered. “I know it seems crazy, but I absolutely do with everything I am.”
I wrapped my legs around his waist and kissed him again. I began unbuttoning his shirt, pausing to pull my own over my head. My rational mind would have reasoned that his parents were right upstairs, but I was way past being rational.
“Sloane,” he whispered. “Are you sure about this?”
He knew I was a virgin, knew I had never had feelings like this for anyone.
“I have never been so sure of anything in my entire life.”
I knew I had only known Adam for two weeks and I might never see him again, but I didn’t care. If he left and, God forbid, something happened to him, I would always regret that I hadn’t shared this moment in time with him and him alone.
His poor mother probably didn’t have this in mind when she picked that soft sheepskin rug for in front of the fireplace. In that moment, our worlds collided, and I knew he was it for me. I was made to be with Adam.
The night before he left, through our tears and heartache, he got down on one knee in UGA’s Founders Memorial Garden and said, “Sloane Murphy, you are the love of my life. Will you marry me?”
It was a proposal exactly like Adam. Simple and direct, but passionate. And I knew I was the luckiest girl in the entire world when I said, “Yes.”
He slid a gorgeous ring on my finger. “My grandmother’s,” he said.
I smiled. “So, your parents?”
“My parents couldn’t love you more,” he said. “They said they knew from the moment they met you, just like I did, that we were perfect for each other.”
Six months later, my sisters, on the other hand, still thought I was crazy. And my mom was a wreck. They didn’t think we had known each other long enough to get married, didn’t think we understood what we were getting into. What they didn’t understand is that when you’re getting to know someone normally, there are so many distractions. You go to movies, parties, cookouts, baseball games. You share the inane details of your days at work, binge-watch trashy reality TV shows. But is any of that connection? Does it help you know what’s inside the other person’s heart? Not if you ask me. At least, that’s what I told my mother nine weeks before Adam came home, and, contrary to what my family believed would happen, our wedding was still on.
Every day for eight months, I had written my future husband a letter and received one in return. I had spent eight months asking those important questions, sharing things about myself that I had never shared with anyone, and sending them off to the US Postal Service’s care, hoping my words and, much more importantly, my love would reach him.
So, while my family begged me to change my mind and pleaded with me not to be so hasty, I believed with all my heart that I knew this man better than anyone. I knew his soul, the recesses of his mind.
I knew he wanted a small wedding, just like I did. Nothing like Caroline’s five-star Manhattan blowout, paid for by James, despite our mother’s protests that his picking up the tab was tacky. So we booked the church, picked out a dress, put deposits down on a band and a caterer, and ordered tents for the front yard. All the while, my mom put on a happy face. But when it came time to order the invitations, the veneer cracked. That’s when I realized that her happiness for me and her proclamation that nothing would make her happier than having Adam for a son-in-law was a farce.
“Sloane, honey,” she had said hesitantly, “you don’t have to do this, you know. You don’t have to go through with it.”
I was shocked and so hurt. “Mom, why would I not go through with it? He’s the love of my life. I’ve never been surer of anything.”
She had crossed her arms and leaned on the counter, looking around as if one of my sisters might jump out from the cabinets and save her. “But you don’t know him, Sloane. You knew him for three weeks. I know the whole soldier-off-at-war thing is romantic, and I can see how you could get swept up in a proposal, but let’s take a step back.”
Caroline had called me later that afternoon. “No one’s saying you shouldn’t get married,” she said. “Just let him come home. Date for a few months. Make sure he’s who you think he is.”
It ruffled me that my family would even say such things to me. But it didn’t change my mind. It didn’t change the fact that I knew Adam was the one for me. I knew what a commitment I was making.
The way I felt the day he came home that first time was a feeling unlike any other. Relief washed over me with a vengeance. I felt whole again, complete.
I must have stood in his arms in the airport for an hour, relishing the way he felt, the way he smelled. I knew I would never let him go again.
When I stood at the altar in the St. James’s chapel and pledged to love him forever, I knew I would. Maybe I hadn’t yet considered what that would look like. Maybe I didn’t truly understand what that would come to mean. But I would love him anyway. And it would be OK. I had pledged to be with that man for better or for worse.
And this? This was worse. This was worst—well, almost worst, which felt close enough. But despite how it had turned out, I knew one thing without a doubt: even knowing what I knew now, I would do it all again. Adam was a soldier, but, in a way, so was I. And I, like him, like his best men, would be loyal until the very end.