My mother held me tight that night. She held me like I was an infant again, and I let her. I let her cradle me, brush back my hair, make me too much tea and offer me too many biscuits. I let my father kiss me on the forehead and I let him sigh in relief as he hugged me. I let them do all the things they needed to do as doting parents, while I moved around trying to hide the uncertainties that were going around in my head.

I was at a crucial point in my life. Probably more so than when Lizzy passed away, or when I walked from Alex’s arms right into Marcus’. The pain of leaving behind one of my soul mates yet again was unbearable. I wondered what Marcus was doing that night and I hoped he wasn’t hurting alone. I hoped he’d learned from our conversation, the same way I had, that doing things alone wasn’t ever going to do us any good. So I sent him a few messages to check in, unable to switch off my feelings for him just like that, while also wanting him to know that I cared. After his reassurances, and after sending me a picture of his tea, a large pizza in a takeaway box with all the toppings I hated on it, I finally allowed myself to laugh, told him I loved him and relaxed a little.

Now all I had to figure out was how to keep moving forward and find out who I was and what I stood for.

“What do you want to watch?” Dad asked us in an unusual display of generosity when it came to what was on the television.

“You choose,” Mum cooed.

“I’m not bothered,” I mumbled, my head perched on my mum’s shoulder as I leaned on her and tucked my feet under my bum.

I could feel Dad’s eyes on me, and when I looked up and glanced his way, I saw the small scowl on his forehead before he quickly brightened and turned his attention back to the television. “Okay, but don’t say I didn’t offer.”

Ignoring the weird look on his face, I focused on the television, too, mainly seeing images but not hearing any of the words as my thoughts became too loud. Alex, Marcus, Sammy, the lives we’d built around our mistakes, and how it was all going to come shattering down around us. The guilt was there, even though, deep down, I knew we’d both made the right decision earlier. It wasn’t until I heard the excited whispers of my mum next to me that I squinted and really tried to focus on what she was saying.

“Doesn’t that look wonderful?” She sighed dreamily. “Greece is one of my favourite places.”

The camera panned out to show stunning white beaches and aqua seas that glistened in the glorious sunshine. A narrator with an almost spellbinding voice told us of the delights of the Greek islands, dipping and weaving into the history of a country I’d always loved and admired. Within minutes, I was lost in a trance of blue, yellow and green, dreaming of feeling the sun on my face, stomach and thighs while my feet embraced their hugs from the ocean.

“Isn’t that where your friend is?” Dad eventually muttered, his eyes remaining focused on the screen.

I waited for Mum to answer, thinking he was talking to her, but when I felt her nudge me to answer him, I turned his way and scowled. “My friend?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“Who?”

“Danni.”

“Yes, she is, but how do you know?”

Dad shrugged one shoulder, turning his mouth down at the corners as he tried to look nonchalant. “She called yesterday, tried to get hold of you before the wedding. We got chatting.” Sighing heavily, Dad gripped the arms of the chair he was sitting in and groaned as he pulled himself up to a stand. He never made eye contact with me as he began to walk out of the room while speaking over his shoulder. “She said you should go out and see her before the summer season ends. She sounds like a nice girl. She has good ideas. Something to think about, maybe.”

Before I could even protest, he’d disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me open mouthed while Mum reached to push my chin up with a single finger.

“Your father,” she said through a small giggle. “About as subtle as a needle in the arse, hey?”

“I’m getting slightly worried about all his scheming. Does he want rid of me?” I joked.

“No,” she cried all too quickly. “He wants you to live. Really live, Nat. Maybe a holiday isn’t such a bad idea.”

“I can’t just go to Greece.”

“Why not?”

I stuttered, turning to face her once again. “I-I have work. I have you guys, I have…”

“A lifetime to worry about work. You’ll never be twenty-two again, sweetheart. If ever there was a time to go and find yourself, now is that time.” With a soft kiss to my cheek, Mum got up to leave me, too, until all that surrounded me was a new life, waiting and tickling at my chin for me to go to it. It was making me promises of the ocean and the sand, lazy days with a clear mind and endless possibilities. A chance to figure out who I was while everything and everyone else took a back seat.

It was something I had to think about. It was something that had me reaching for my phone, scrolling for Alex’s number and pressing call in a ballsy move that even I didn’t know I had in me.

“Natalie?” he answered with surprise in his voice.

That voice. My voice. The voice that had always brought me to life, even when it felt like it was killing me.

“Hi.” I smiled, resting my thumb on my bottom lip before pushing down on it.

“Is everything okay?”

“Alex, I’m going to need a favour from you. No questions asked.”

“Anything.”

I sucked in a breath and held it high in my chest before I finally began to speak, “Meet me tomorrow.” I grinned bigger. “In the park. Our park. Lunchtime. I have something I need to tell you.”

Then I hung up. Just like that. The new me was taking control. I was saving myself for a change, even if I had to fall first.

The end of summer was approaching, but my favourite park, which had seen some of my best and worst moments, still looked incredibly beautiful. The sun was high in the sky that Monday afternoon. I was dressed in blue jeans and a white t-shirt with my thin, grey cardigan hanging open to allow the wind to creep up my top and caress my stomach.

I was nervous about what I was about to do, unsure if this was the right thing to happen for the second time, but I knew I had to make life about one thing then.

One person.

What good was I loving anyone else if I didn’t know how to even begin to love myself?

With my face pointing up at the sun and my eyes closed, I smiled anyway. The birds sang their songs, the people around me chattered in hushed voices and intimate whispers, probably referring to me looking a little bit like I’d just escaped the mental asylum, but I let them say what they had to say. There was only one voice I was interested in, and the moment my name fell from his lips, I only smiled brighter, showing all my teeth to the sky before I turned to face him.

Now that all the pretending was out of the way, I could allow myself to react to him as naturally as both my body and mind wanted to, and just his voice alone – his beautiful, raspy tones – had those butterflies doing their happy dance once more while my nipples tightened in my bra and my cheeks began to blush red.

He was as handsome and as perfect then as he had been seven years ago when we first met. Alex just wasn’t as certain anymore. His hand was already tugging at the ends of his overgrown, copper hair, and I envied it as I watched it dig its claws into him, because I wanted to do exactly the same thing with my fingers.

The stubble on his jaw only highlighted his perfect bone structure, and when I finally locked eyes on my favourite colour, I was smitten all over again.

“Why are you smiling?” Alex asked nervously. Letting his hand fall, he pushed both of them into his jean pockets, hunching his shoulders together until his black t-shirt hugged his muscles.

“Because you’re here.”

“I don’t understand. I thought this was…”

“Me telling you that Saturday night was a mistake? Me telling you to stay away from Marcus and me forever?”

“Isn’t it?” he asked calmly.

“No.” I smiled, taking a small step forward. The man I was in love with gulped, and if I hadn’t had something so important to say, I would have laughed at the way things were changing already. Instead, I looked all around us, taking in the scenery of the park and all those who were standing in it. “It was in this very park that I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life right beside you. Do you remember that conversation we had about the birds and how I thought you were an eagle?”

“I remember everything we ever said to each other,” he admitted quietly.

“Good,” I said, looking back at him. “Because it was also in this very park that you broke my heart the very first time I saw you standing side by side with Bronwyn.”

Alex stared at me blankly. There was no denial, no explanation to go over again. We’d already rehashed our history a hundred times in so few days. Now we had to concentrate on forward, not rewind.

“I’ve felt the good here, and I’ve felt the bad. Now I want a new memory in this park,” I told him.

“What kind of memory?”

A shaky sigh poured out of me, making my smile falter for just a second. “A new beginning kind. I want to see the look in your eyes when I tell you that Marcus and I have decided to part ways. I want the kind of memory where I tell you I’m single, available and very, very much still in love with you, just like I have been for the past seven years.” The lump in my throat was agonising as I pushed it down and rocked on my feet. Alex’s eyes were alive as he stared at me, whether in astonishment or more confusion, I wasn’t certain, but when he eventually spoke, for the first time since he’d waltzed back into my life, he looked happy.

“Y-you…”

“I’m in love with you,” I reassured him, my hands moving to the back of my jeans where I hooked my thumbs through the belt loops.

“Can you say that again?”

“I’m in love with you.”

“You're in love?”

“Yes.”

“With me?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Most definitely.” I smiled, trying hard not to laugh.

“And you're single?”

“Yes.”

“As in… no longer attached.”

“As in, free as a bird,” I said slowly.

“There’s nothing standing in our way?”

“Nothing.”

“And you want me?”

“I’ve never wanted you more.”

“Holy shit,” he whispered, his face almost childlike in its astonishment.

“But…”

“No.” He took a firm step forward, stopping himself as he gathered some control and shook his head. “Shh. Don't do that. No buts.”

I tilted my head to one side. I loved this man, even though there was so much we didn’t know about each other. All the years we’d spent apart, though, hadn’t diluted that connection I felt around him. It only seemed to make it stronger, more electrifying, more destined to be.

“Alex, I need you to listen to me.”

“I’m scared of what you’re about to say, Natalie. You just dangled the fucking carrot.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of. This isn’t about you. This is about me.”

“The it’s not you, it’s me speech?” He smirked, but there was no arrogance behind it. “Really?”

“It is me. My whole life, I’ve depended on somebody else the whole way through. Lizzy got me through my childhood, then you got me through Lizzy’s death, then Marcus got me through the pain of losing you. Now I’m finally able to walk away from something, from someone without the pain crippling me too much, and I feel it’s time for me to test the strength in my own legs. I love you. Fuck everything else, I love you. I’ve just turned my back on a man that could have given me the world… and I’ve done all that so I can finally have you. So I can finally be with you, because it’s you that I’m in love with.”

“Then let me touch you. Let me kiss you and take you somewhere,” he pleaded. “I’m not going to lose you. No matter how many excuses you come up with.”

“You can’t lose me. Don’t you see that now? You tried to shake me off, but you were always with me, always a part of me, even when neither of us knew it. You’re in here.” I tapped my chest with two fingers. “But you made me a promise in that hotel. You said you would always be waiting for me, no matter how long it took for me to find my way back to you.”

He frowned, blinking furiously as he studied my face and tried to figure out what I was about to say.

“Where are you going?” he finally asked.

“I need a holiday – maybe head to London for a few days before flying off to Greece. I need to travel a little bit, be away from everyone I know and love. I need to be alone to figure out what goes on in my mind when I’m not being influenced by someone else or something else.”

“You need to figure out who you are.”

“I do.”

Straightening up, Alex pulled his hands out of his pockets and let them fall by his sides. His eyes fell to the ground briefly, before he looked up through those heavenly lashes of his and smiled flatly. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“I’ve got all the time in the world, Natalie Vincent,” he whispered. “It sucks, but if that's what you need, I'll give you it. I'll give you whatever you want.”

“It’s not fair for me to ask you to wait for me,” I said, raising a single brow as a hint of amusement flashed over my face. “I wouldn’t blame you if you walked away.”

“I have no right to ask you to be fair. I’m not leaving ever again.”

“I don’t know how long I will be.”

“I’ll wait.”

“I don’t know if I’ll come back the same person, either.”

“There’s no side of you I couldn’t love.”

My smile grew bigger, the desire pooling in my stomach as my body cried for me to go to him. Every single inch of me wanted to curl up in Alex’s arms and lay there until I died, but my mind had turned stubborn in recent days, and all the heartache I’d ever suffered served as a constant reminder to myself of how much I needed to be fixed.

“I love you,” I told him softly, sounding exactly like the fifteen-year-old Natalie Vincent that wanted to tell the fifteen-year-old Alex Law how much he meant to her. “I really love you, Alex.”

“I love you, too. All the way, baby.”

“All the way.” I grinned.

“But... Natalie?”

“Yeah?”

“You should probably get ready for what I’m about to do. And I won't be sorry.”

I didn’t have time to inhale a breath before Alex had scooped me up in his arms, lowered me to the grass beneath our feet and begun to straddle me. I didn’t say a word as he pressed his chest to mine and ran both hands through my hair until it was all away from my face.

“I’m only sorry I didn’t do it sooner,” he breathed down on me, his smile breaking free.

“This is as perfect as it could ever have been,” I told him quietly. My hands cupped his face, both thumbs finding their way to his mouth and stroking gently. “I’ve missed kissing you.”

“Then let’s quit wasting time,” he whispered.

I didn’t listen to my mind’s screams of excitement when Alex’s lips fell softly against mine and I finally tasted him on my tongue. The only sounds in that moment were the birds again.

And my heart.

It was free, just like they were, so I let it sing while I lay beneath the eagle.

Happy, content and home. Finally home.