Chapter Twenty-Three Buffalo, New York Present Day #3
“I do, actually. It’s why you love me.” Scarlett folded her hands smugly on the table. “Is the part where we finally talk about what’s between us?”
Chrissie should have been prepared for this. From the second she’d discovered the truth about this trip, they’d been marching toward this exact conversation, this exact moment in time.
Still. Nothing could have prepared her for the way the chill started seeping through her veins.
“If you’re about to tell me that giving me Kat makes up for all the rest, I’m going to get up from this table, walk out the door, and book the first flight home,” she said in a voice as cold as her blood.
Scarlett’s smirk deepened. “I know she’s been a real pain in the ass lately, but she’ll come around eventually.
She’ll break up with a boyfriend or bang her knee in volleyball and go running to her mother to kiss it and make it all better.
You’ll forgive her, just like you always forgave me, and then go on to repeat the cycle until you two are the old ladies boarding a steam packet and traveling across all four oceans.
You guys can even take my trunk if you want. I’ll leave it to you in my will.”
Chrissie almost did it. She almost pushed back from the table and left her terminally ill friend to find her own way the last four hundred miles to her destination. But one of the ironclad tenets of their relationship was that Scarlett was the one who left.
Chrissie was the one who stayed behind and held things together with every ounce of strength she had.
“That’s the last joke I’ll stand by and listen to you make about dying, so be very careful how you proceed,” Chrissie said in the same tone of voice she used when Kat was being particularly difficult—a thing she often was, because she was very much her mother’s daughter, and because Chrissie loved them both so much that she never tried to quash the indomitable spirit that beat its wings inside them.
“I’m going to go with you to Vermont. I’m going to stand by and hold your hand while you do whatever it is you need to do to make peace with your decision.
I’ll love you and carry your remains home and inter them next to your grandmother’s—”
But here she had to stop to draw a deep, shuddering breath. Her hands gripped the edge of the table so tightly that she could no longer feel her fingers, but Scarlett sat in shocked silence until she was able to finish.
“I’ll lay you to rest next to that beautiful, kind woman who gave us both so much,” she managed through a throat thick with tears.
“And then I’m going to go home and take care of our daughter until she no longer needs me.
Maybe that’ll only be for a few more years, or maybe it’ll be for the next sixty, but I made a promise and I intend to keep it.
If you have a problem with any of that, that’s too damn bad.
My life will never be as big or as glamorous as you want it to be.
I won’t become a world-famous pianist. I might never get married.
There’s not some secret superpower lurking in my jacked-up, half-twin DNA waiting to be awakened from dormancy.
I’m a boring, basic nobody who’s learned to find joy in the simple things, and that’s exactly how I intend to stay. Do you understand all of that?”
“Chrissie, I—”
Chrissie leaned across the table, her fingers still clutching the table. “It’s a yes or no question, Scarlett, and those are the only responses I want to hear. Do. You. Understand?”
Chrissie could see the struggle taking place inside her friend. Scarlett ate one olive. Then another. She fidgeted and squirmed like a toddler trying to stave off naptime. When none of this failed to move Chrissie in the slightest, then and only then did she crash.
“Yes.”
All of the air seemed to escape Chrissie at once.
She leaned back against her chair, her adrenaline ebbing away only to leave an aching emptiness behind.
With shaking hands, she dug her phone out of her purse and pulled up the website she’d bookmarked the night before.
The time had come to start putting that list to good use.
Not for Scarlett to absolve herself of the guilt she was trying to unload before she died, and not because Chrissie was feeling particularly brave, but because it was time. It had been time for several years now.
Scarlett, never one to stay down for long, noticed what she was doing almost immediately.
“What are you doing? Is that an airline website?” Panic robbed Scarlett’s voice of its usual rich timbre. “You aren’t buying a ticket home, are you? You already said you’d stay with me. You promised!”
“And it’s a promise I intend to keep, just as I’ve kept all the others,” she said as she grabbed her credit card and started entering the information into the website. She didn’t tell Scarlett what she was doing. Her friend would learn for herself soon enough.
“But for once in your goddamned life, Scarlett—even now, at the very end—I need you to realize that not everything in the world is about you.”