CHAPTER 78
harley
Will I get my pixie dust back tomorrow?” Aria asked as she crawled into her bed, disappearing underneath a mound of purple blankets and stuffed animals. I held one end up for her, making sure she wouldn’t get lost and tangled amidst her comfy chaos while she got situated for bed.
“No,” I said. After finding out she’d thrown glitter in some man’s face at Sparrow & Sage, I’d taken her entire glitter supply and hid it.
“But why?” She drew out the why for a solid five seconds, her grumpiness fueled by tiredness. “I want my pixie dust back!”
“I know you do,” I replied, “but we’ve talked about what you can and cannot do with pixie dust. We can’t throw pixie dust at people without their permission. Someone could get hurt.”
“It’s magic!” she exclaimed.
“Aria,” I cut her off before she could go on another rant about magic. While I did my best not to limit her creativity and imagination, there were times when a line had to be drawn. “We can try again in a few days.”
“Fine!” She flopped back on her pillows, crossing her arms. The way that lower lip of hers protruded dramatically was almost enough to make me cave on the spot. Almost. I hated seeing her upset. “But I don’t like it.”
“And that’s okay. You’re allowed to not like it.
” As soon as the blankets were tucked in around her, I sat on the bed next to her.
I leaned against the headboard beside her and stretched my feet out in front of me.
Despite her frustration with me, the minute I raised my arm, she took the opportunity to snuggle into my side.
“Are you excited about your first day of school tomorrow?”
“Yeah!” Aria said. “I’m going to make so many friends!”
“Good.” I chuckled. I adored how social she was. It made it easier to send her into a situation like this. “We do need to talk about something, though, okay?”
“Okay.”
“This,” I began, shifting slightly to pull a bracelet from my pocket, “is your new allergy bracelet for the year.”
I held out the purple silicone bracelet for her to see. There were two large charm buttons on it—one for her peanut allergy and one to note that she carried an EpiPen. She took it from me and scrutinized it.
“It’s not very pretty,” Aria mumbled, making a face as she stared at the bracelet.
“I know,” I said. “And I’m sorry, but it’s not meant to be pretty. It’s meant to keep you safe.”
Every school year, I bought her a new bracelet.
Not because I had to, but because I used it as an opportunity to have this conversation with her all over again.
She had a severe allergy to peanuts, and, while I could control her immediate environment, the risk became greater when her environment expanded.
Her private school was elite and small, making it easy to build a safe environment.
Wilde Bay Elementary was a very different story.
“Fine.” She pulled it onto her wrist.
“The biggest issue is that I’m not nearly as close to your school as I used to be,” I continued.
Her old school had been a block away. I could run there if needed—and I had in the past. On a good day with no traffic, her school here was still twenty minutes away.
“Your class is bigger here, too, which means there’s a lot more going on for your teacher to keep track of. ”
I didn’t tell her how much that worried me.
She didn’t need to carry that into her first day.
Her last school had been a small private school.
There were only eight kids in her class.
There were thirty-one in her new class. It was easy for something like peanuts to slip through the cracks when it was just one teacher.
“What do we say if someone wants to trade food with you?” I asked
“No, thank you,” she quipped.
“And if they keep asking.”
“I tell them I don’t want to die because of peanuts.”
“And if they tell you that there are no peanuts in their food?”
“I tell them peanuts can end up in all sorts of things, and then I tell them no. Again,” Aria said. “And if they ask again, I punch them for being a jerk.”
“No, you don’t punch them,” I told her quickly. “You just keep saying no.”
“Fine.”
“And what do you do if someone offers you candy?” I asked.
“I tell them no, thank you, and then I ask you for candy when I get home because I missed out on candy because of my stupid allergy.”
“That’s fair.” I could give in to that compromise. “And do you touch other people’s food?”
“Nope.”
“Good.” Leaning down, I kissed the crown of her head. “I know it sucks—”
“It sucks so much!” She let out a dramatic sigh.
“I know, little love,” I said. “It’s not fun, but we have to go through it all to make sure you’re safe.”
We sat there for a while longer, going through our EpiPen plan—including where she’d store it, what to say to her classmates if they had questions, and how to handle random interactions with teachers.
I walked her through the phone conversations I’d had with the school nurse and her teacher, reassuring her that everyone was on board.
While I knew she hated the inconvenience, I also knew that having all the information made her feel a little safer, and that was all that mattered.
After Aria was asleep, I retired to my office.
It was the only room in the house that wasn’t done.
The bookshelves were up, but my books were still in their boxes on the ground.
Some of my art was hanging, and some were leaning against the wall.
My client binders were out and organized, and my desk was neatly put together.
It was progress. I just struggled to put the final pieces together. When it came to taking care of anything related to Aria, I was on top of it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t nearly as good at putting that same effort in for myself.
Healing was a messy thing. No one really told you that when you started your journey.
Everyone talked about growth, breakthroughs, and what it would mean to become a better version of yourself.
What they didn’t talk about was the in-between…
that part where you were painfully aware of every flaw and every scar, but you hadn’t quite figured out how to live with them yet.
Therapy helped, and so did my daily medication. Most days, I could feel the difference. The constant hum of anxiety was gone, leaving me calmer than I’d ever been in my life, and I caught myself before my old habits could get the better of me now.
But nothing could prepare me for how raising my daughter would bring me face to face with all the truly awful things about my childhood—the ones I’d softened in my head because I had to in order to survive.
Like how love was conditional. The list of conditions had twisted and changed depending on my mother’s needs or desires.
I carried that weight without realizing it and applied it to every relationship in my life.
I let it shape how I interacted with people, turning me into a people-pleaser, putting my personality on the line.
From the moment Aria was born, I knew I didn’t want that for her. I wanted my daughter to be loved for exactly who she was, but moreover, I wanted her to feel it. To give her that, I had to change. I had to be better.
I knew how to be better for her. I knew how to let her be herself, how to make her feel seen and heard, how to build her up, and how to help her feel safe. But I was still figuring out how to show up like that for myself.
It was messy, but I was trying.
Exhaling slowly, I opened my laptop and logged into my telehealth account.
My therapist, Olivia, was a godsend with how she worked with my schedule.
I was down to therapy every other week or as needed, but I hated doing my appointments when Aria was awake.
I wanted to give her as much of my attention as I could, which often meant after-hours appointments.
“Hello, Harley,” Olivia greeted when the link opened up the appointment we had scheduled.
“Hi,” I replied. “Thank you for pushing our appointment back a little bit on such short notice. We had a little bit… Aria wasn’t happy going through all her allergy information before bed, and we had an incident today that we had to talk through.”
“Do you want to talk about what happened?” she asked. She was no-nonsense about our appointments, and I appreciated that.
“It’s the pixie dust thing again,” I replied. “Same shit, different day, new town. It’s fine.”
“How did the move go?”
“She’s excited, which is good,” I told her. “She starts school tomorrow. I think she’s ready, so that’s good.”
“That’s good, but how are you feeling about the move today?
” Olivia redirected it right back to me, which was a thing we needed.
I wasn’t good at focusing on myself. “I know Wilde Bay has a lot of difficult memories for you. I know that we’ve been working through everything, and that you’ve felt confident about this move, but I’m wondering how you’re feeling now that you’re officially moved in. ”
“We walked down Main Street today,” I said quietly. “It was… weird. Not bad, just… weird. So much has changed, but it hasn’t, you know? It’s still Wilde Bay. It was nice.”
And it was. That part surprised me. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel once I got here. I knew this was the right place to raise Aria. I just hadn’t been one-hundred-percent on whether or not it was right for me.
“That’s good.” She smiled. “Now, the last time we talked about Wilde Bay, we were talking about Maverick.”
I nodded slowly. Maverick. . I did my best not to think about Maverick unless I was in a therapy session, trying to work through something related to all the complicated feelings I had about him and our history.
“Have you decided if you want to contact him? To apologize to him?”
“I decided not to,” I replied. While a part of me wanted closure and wanted to apologize for what I’d done to him, I knew it was the wrong choice.
“He said he didn’t want anything to do with me, and I have to respect that.
I do respect that. I know it’d bring me closure about what happened, but I don’t know what it’d do to him, and that’s not fair. ”
“That’s good progress, Harley. That’s a very mature conclusion to draw. I know you were struggling with that one,” she told me. “And how do you feel about that decision?”
“I’m okay with it. I know it’s the right thing to do.”
“Good. And what about your mother?”
That question made my heart stutter a little bit.
Elizabeth Lowell was the demon I carried with me everywhere.
She was everything I measured myself against, the compass I used to adjust my behavior.
I didn’t want to be like her, but I didn’t know how to let go of everything she’d put me through either.
I hadn’t seen my mother since I put her in Peaceful Pines.
I did everything I could to avoid her, and I’d cut off all personal contact with her.
The center coordinator still contacted me every few days with updates about her health, and I had the power of attorney over my mother’s care.
She wasn’t improving, but that was the nature of dementia.
The longer I did this thing called healing, the more I realized I needed to face her.
There was so much between us that needed to be talked about if I could sit down with her on a good day.
There was so much I had to say. But every time I thought about sitting down with her, my heart did wild and crazy things in my chest. The rush of anxiety threatened to flatten me right there.
The more I healed, the more visceral my response was.
“Where’d you go, Harley?” Olivia asked when I didn’t immediately reply. “What are you thinking about?”
“I was thinking about waiting until next year,” I admitted. “I don’t think it’s the right time right now. We have school and are getting settled in. And then the holidays will be here, and I don’t want to sit down with her during the holidays.”
She merely nodded. I was making excuses—giving stupid reasons why, instead of being honest with her. With myself.
“I can’t do it,” I whispered. “I’m not… I’m not ready to sit down with her yet.”
“There you go. It’s okay to say that out loud. It’s okay to give a voice to that feeling,” she said. “It’s okay to need time. You have done so much work over the last six years. You should be proud of yourself.”
“I’m trying to be.” And I was. It wasn’t easy.
Some days were so much harder than others, but like I said, it was messy.
Healing wasn’t a straight line forward. It was thousands of small steps, some forward and some back.
It was fueled by the deliberate decision to keep moving and keep trying, no matter how hard it got.