I couldn’t bring myself to go back to the cabin. Lindsey would be there, she’d be so fucking close I would be able to practically taste her on the air. No, my parents were going to have to wait a while before I came to visit again. So I took my mom’s journals back home after I called the promotional tour short two weeks ago and flew home. I rented a place in Maine where I could work by myself, where I could work on myself, but more importantly, where I could write.

I read my mom’s journals finally, too. It took me a few tries. The sad part is, I was only able to do it when I remembered hearing the first passage being read in Lindsey’s sweet voice. I imagined all of them in her voice, and somehow it helped me get through them. I got through my mom’s apology, which took the first few journals. Imagine that, she was apologizing to me, when I was the ungrateful shit who made a career out of pissing off her and the rest of my family.

Her big confession was that her and my dad had faked my rejection from Parsons. They thought they could force me into making the “right” decision since I would never have listened to them. It was a shitty thing to do, but it hurt to read how much my mom blamed herself for everything that happened after because of their one real sin against me. I wished I could go back and tell her it didn’t matter, that I would’ve found some way to imagine the world was against me, no matter what had happened or how few mistakes they had made.

What surprised me was the rest of the journals were her love story. She wrote how she met my father, how they fell in love, how they fought at times, and how they decided to have us. She talked about what it was like when we were just babies and we changed her life and all the hopes she had for us.

I read one passage in particular that stuck into me like a seed, burying itself deep where I know it’ll grow and grow no matter what I want. “I remember how I’d lay you on my lap and stroke your little head. You loved that. You’d fight so hard to keep your eyes open, but every time my fingertips ran across your forehead they’d slip closer and closer to closed. I loved those nights, just sitting with you in the rocking chair while you slept and dreamed in my lap. I still remember how comforting the weight of your little body was on me.

“I’d think about how I made you, how I had such an awesome responsibility to honor that. I had brought you into the world and it was my job to make sure I prepared you for it. It was so strange to think that you were growing into a little person, someone who’d have hopes and dreams one day, who’d make mistakes and suffer tragedies and live through amazing things.

“You were my little baby boy. My first baby. And I was still naive enough to think I could help you once you grew up and became your own person.

“This part is hard to write, Chris, but it hurts when I think about how I failed you. I think about your sweet little face and all the things that we could’ve done and shared together, but somewhere along the way I messed that up. I won’t lie and say I know what it was that drove us so far apart, but I’m not going to make excuses and blame you, either. I take the blame for how things turned out between us. I failed you. I failed my baby, and I’ve never forgiven myself for that.”

Reading that passage broke something in me, but it was something that needed to be broken. It was a wall I had built up over the years made out of anger and a bull-headed refusal to let anyone in or feel anything good. I let it break apart when I saw what my own stubbornness had done to my mom, how it had weighed on her, and how I had missed my chance to apologize and make things right before she died.

I said a prayer that night for the first time in my life. It was probably a prayer that would’ve made a priest cringe, but it was the best I could do. I told God he had better exist, and if he did he had better not dare do anything but let my parents move on to a place where they could know what happened to me wasn’t their fault.

And then I started to write.

The words poured out of me like I was writing a book I’d already read a thousand times from memory. It was a tragedy and a love story and a message all in one. It was nothing like my publisher was expecting, but I promised them a book, and they will get a book. I’ve only been here a few weeks in the cabin I’m renting out in the middle of nowhere, but I’m already almost done with my first draft.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still think about Lindsey. When I close my eyes too long or let my thoughts wander, she’s always there. I’ve made her out to be more perfect in my memory than she possibly could’ve been, which makes it all the more torturous. But I have to cling to the truth: she betrayed me. I’ve found a new part of myself out here, a better part, and there’s no room in the new life I want to build for the kind of women I used to get tangled up with. Despite my heart telling me Lindsey was different, I just keep remembering holding contract up to her passport and seeing the damning evidence of her signature.

Sometimes I worry about how I came in her without protection. It was so fucking reckless and stupid. I could’ve gotten her pregnant. What then? I wouldn’t be able to keep shutting her out of my life, for starters. Either way, it wouldn’t change things between us. Not really, at least.

She. Betrayed. Me.

The new me isn’t going to sit around and whine about it. I’m moving on. I’m writing the book. I’m going to do something meaningful with my life so the woman who used to fall asleep stroking my forehead, dreaming about what I could become won’t have wasted all that hope.