21. Chapter Twenty-One #2
“Of course he did. He wasn’t an angel or a saint.
He was human.” Her eyes meet mine. “When the whole world tells a man he’s extraordinary every day, sooner or later he starts believing the rules were written for everyone else.
Loving Adrian cost me. Being loved by him cost me, too.
Then losing him took whatever was left. But I’d still choose him. ”
She turns her head away. “If someone offered me a life where I never met him, never buried him, and never had to crawl through all the shit that followed...” She shakes her head. “I wouldn’t take it.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know who I’d be in a life where he never happened to me.” She lifts her sunglasses, and for the first time, I see tears in her blue eyes. “And as fucked up as that sounds… I’ve never wanted to meet the woman I would’ve become without him.”
That one gets under my skin and stays there.
I think of Phoenix at thirteen, lying flat on his back beneath the tree in my parents’ yard, hands behind his head, telling me that one day we’d have songs on the radio.
Fourteen, stealing fries off my plate. Fifteen, showing up at my bedroom window after a fight with his mom.
Sixteen, asleep on our couch after we’d spent all night arguing over one stupid lyric.
Seventeen.
Eighteen.
Nineteen.
Twenty.
Every memory I have seems to have him standing in it, usually talking too much, eating something that was mine, or making me laugh when I was trying very hard not to.
He is so thoroughly woven through my life that imagining it without him feels like trying to remember a song after someone has stolen the melody.
“Phoenix is an asshole,” I say.
Goldie’s mouth curves. “The famous ones usually are.”
“He wasn’t always.” I shake my head. “Or maybe he was. Maybe those parts were always there and fame just gave them a microphone.”
Goldie huffs out a laugh.
I glance down at the notebook in my lap. “When we were kids, he was still cocky. Still impossible. Still convinced the world would fall in love with him.”
I smile, even as I miss who he was. But the smile fades just as quickly as it comes.
“But before the world got him...” My fingers trace the edge of the page. “...I knew where all the soft places were. I’m just not sure they’re still there.”
Goldie watches me without interrupting me.
“He transformed into someone who only knew how to take.” I stare down at my notebook as my fingers curl around the corner of the page. “Songs. Attention. Women.” A breath catches in my throat. “Me.”
The word falls between us.
“I kept giving because now and then he’d stare at me the way he used to, and I’d convince myself that version of him was still the real him.” I laugh but there is no humor in it. “Turns out hope is a hell of a drug, too.”
Goldie lowers her sunglasses back over her eyes.
“I kept thinking if he chose me enough little times...” My throat tightens. “...eventually it’d add up to one big time.”
The silence answers for her.
“How pathetic is that?”
“It isn’t.”
I glance at her.
“It isn’t pathetic to want the person you love to choose you.” Her voice is quiet. “It’s heartbreaking when they keep showing you they won’t.”
“Yeah, but I kept pretending crumbs were a meal.”
Goldie gives a slight nod. “Now that is the kind of lie that’ll starve a woman of affection.”
The wind drifts through the courtyard, lifting the corner of the page in my notebook. I smooth it flat.
“I don’t know how to stop loving him,” I admit.
“Then don’t.”
I look up and see her shrug.
“Love isn’t the problem, darling. You realize you love him. The problem is every excuse you stitched onto it to survive him. That doesn’t mean he gets to keep hurting you, Willow.”
My chest pulls tight. “I know.”
Goldie studies me for a long moment. “Do you?”
“I think so,” I say, the truth slipping out, quieter than I intend. “I can’t imagine a life where he never happened to me.”
Her gaze holds mine. “Then don’t. People are always desperate to make healing appear clean. They tell you to cut them out, forget them, burn the photos, and throw away the songs. But life doesn’t work like that.”
The wind stirs and I push back a strand of hair that has fallen across my face.
“Some people get threaded through you,” she says quietly.
“You can spend the rest of your life trying to pull them out, but all you end up doing is tearing yourself apart. Adrian is everywhere. He’s in my favorite city.
The way I take my coffee. He’s in half my bad habits.
He’s in every song I can’t listen to and every song I can’t stop. ”
Her thumb finds the little gold A again. “I used to think healing meant getting him out of me. Now I think healing is deciding which parts of him to hold onto and which to finally let go. But I am aware he loved me with everything he had.”
A staff member named Leah appears at the courtyard entrance.
“Willow?” she says.
I lift my head.
“You have phone time available now if you would like to make your first call.”
For two weeks, the outside world has been a locked door. I could hear breathing from the other side. Now someone has handed me the key.
“Remember, romance is a disease,” Goldie says, her mouth curving into a smile.
“Yes, I’m aware,” I say, pushing to my feet. “And mine has a lip ring.”
Goldie huffs out a laugh.
I tuck the notebook to my chest and take one step toward the door.
“Willow,” Goldie says.
I turn my head and peer over my shoulder at her.
“Don’t give him the easy version of yourself just because you miss him.”