Chapter Fourteen #3
Graham nodded. “People want to hear from you. Want to know what you’re going through, how you feel about everything.
If you have concerns about the program, if you think something went wrong, that the crew was sent on a mission that was flawed to begin with, then you would be the perfect person to bring the issue to the American public. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. Let me have some time. It’s—it’s complicated. I need more time.”
Vivian didn’t know how to explain to him what this felt like, didn’t know how to explain it to herself.
She felt—suspended in limbo. She’d just come from a memorial service for her husband, and intellectually she knew what everyone was telling her, knew that he was gone, that he wasn’t coming back.
She just couldn’t quite make herself believe it.
“I understand,” Graham replied.
Did he?
Vivian bit back a response because it was a perfectly reasonable, perfectly polite thing for him to say, but she very much doubted that he did understand. Not to mention, she was going through it and she barely understood herself.
Wait for me.
She swore she heard it again, Joe’s voice in her ear, or maybe he was a figment of her imagination, and she belatedly wondered why, if he was a ghost haunting her, she couldn’t see him, even if he was a hazy, ephemeral presence.
She was greedy enough to want more than the small pieces of him she was receiving.
She’d never believed in ghosts before, never held much credence for the intangible, but now she questioned everything.
Maybe she was unraveling completely.
“Are you alright?” Graham asked, his brows knitted together, worry on his expression.
“I’m sorry. I’m just distracted.”
What was happening to her? How had she gotten to this place?
If Graham knew the direction her thoughts had taken, knew she was even contemplating the possibility that her husband was a ghost, he’d probably be very worried about her.
That was the thing about Graham—on paper, they’d made complete sense. They were both practical and grounded to a fault. When Graham took risks, they were entirely related to the stories he chased. Otherwise, he was an extremely cautious man, a quality they had both shared—until now.
Graham held her gaze. “Can I ask you something?”
Graham paused as though he was choosing his words with great care, and she knew before he spoke what he was going to ask her.
It was the same question she’d asked herself after she and Joe had a big fight over his career, when her anger made her question her life choices, the aggravation of military life and the space program getting the best of her.
And each time she had come to the same inescapable conclusion:
For reasons she never quite understood except to say that they were as constant as the stars, she loved Joe.
Vivian nodded, because she felt like she owed Graham this—owed him the closure of their relationship that he’d never received.
That night of Polly and Frank’s engagement party, when she called Graham to break up with him, she hadn’t mentioned anything about Joe, hadn’t focused on anything other than her feelings.
But he must have wondered when he heard they were together.
Perhaps because she now knew what it was like to exist in this strange limbo, her husband officially declared dead, but no body to bury, no sense of finality to his death, she had sympathy for the questions that likely lingered inside Graham.
“If you hadn’t met Joe, if things had been different, would we have had a chance? What we had—would it have been enough?”
Vivian knew the futility of such an exercise, of playing the “what if” game until you litigated your choices to death. In another life, if Joe had never existed, would she have been happy with Graham?
Perhaps. Probably. Yes.
They’d been good together. And she had been happy with him. It was also undeniable that in running toward him, she’d been running from the inevitability of Joe and the inevitability of this moment, of losing everything. Vivian wasn’t sure if telling him the truth was a kindness or not.
And in that moment, she knew without a shred of uncertainty that she would never move on from Joe.
That there would never be another man she loved.
After her father’s death, Vivian had watched her mother jump from relationship to relationship, searching for something she had presumably never found, and the idea of a never-ending string of failed relationships was too depressing to bear.
Better to be on her own, and to make peace with that, than to keep trying to make a relationship fit that never would.
“I’m sorry,” Vivian said instead, because at her core, she was sorry. She had hurt Graham, and he had deserved better than the way she had ended things. “You deserve someone who will love you the way you should be loved. I’m sorry that wasn’t me.”
“No, I’m sorry.” Graham shook his head. “I shouldn’t have asked. Shouldn’t have put you in this position. Not with everything you have going on. I still care about you. I’m here for you as a friend, for whatever you need.”
“Just find out whatever you can about what happened to the spacecraft. Please.”