Chapter 14
As I drove back to the Packers’ after the frustrating end to our date, I was annoyed that I hadn’t thought to suggest a hotel room.
Of course, he hadn’t suggested one, either.
Should I be worried about that? Then again, maybe he had thought of it and held back out of respect.
My fluttering insides wouldn’t have minded him being a little less of a gentleman just this once.
The first thing I did when I got home was pull up the online lease agreement.
Rebecca and William would be disappointed, but I hesitated for only an instant before scrawling my electronic signature.
It was time. I was both capable of, and entitled to, an independent life.
Once the Packers saw their relationship with Lucy wouldn’t suffer because we were living at another address, it would all be fine.
Up to this moment, whenever I’d thought about moving out, I’d envisioned simply boxing up all the Sam mementos that had kept us company over the past several years and then replicating their prominent display in the new apartment.
But that was before I’d met Max. Now I surveyed the packing job ahead.
It was going to be a bit more complicated. And I only had about ten days to do it.
There was no chance I’d be falling asleep anytime soon, so I figured I might as well dive in.
I poured a glass of wine and started with the bookshelves in the living room.
Before long, I realized every item triggered its own complex decision tree.
Was it something I could part with? Was it something Lucy deserved to have down the road?
Was it something I should offer to the Packers, or store for them in case they ever grew more comfortable with having more reminders of Sam in their midst?
Was it something that would be an obstacle to moving on with another man, whether or not that man was Max?
I began painstakingly sorting the mementos into piles.
I picked up the last trophy Sam ever won, the one he’d hoisted in the air, beaming with pride, on a humid February day in Acapulco.
Keep. Definitely keep. But certain other trophies, lucky racquets, and his favorite high-tops seemed to move back and forth between the piles—blurring, merging, and swapping places of their own accord—depending partly on whether, in that moment, I was mentally solving for preserving every last memory of Sam or having sex again sometime this century.
I took a break and checked my phone. I’d missed a text from William with a photo of Lucy at IMG.
There was my beautiful girl, wearing a teal Adidas tennis top, her hair pulled back in tight pigtails.
As I stared at the picture, I tried to imagine Max meeting Lucy.
All of a sudden, I knew with perfect clarity that I needed to come clean with him about everything that had transpired after my debut novel before this relationship went any further.
No matter where we were living, I couldn’t risk Lucy’s feelings until I told Max the full story of Sam’s death, why I wrote Love You to Mars and Back, and how utterly bizarre it was that he, an astronaut whose favorite sport was tennis, walked into my life when he did.
As much fun as I was having with Max in the here and now, I needed him to understand the complexities in my life.
If he couldn’t handle truth and ambiguity, so be it.
Lucy was, and always would be, the center of my solar system.