Chapter 30 #2
Margo glances over her shoulder. “You sure?”
“Yeah, I just want a few more minutes out here. It’s too pretty to rush.”
That part is true. It’s just not the reason.
They disappear into the house, and once I’m alone, I walk to the end of the dock and sit, letting my feet dangle over the water. The lake laps softly against the wood.
This place has a way of holding the echoes of my past. My grief sneaks in sideways, in the shape of a sausage or the tone of someone’s voice. It is the tug in my chest I didn’t expect, the one that says I’m not done missing him. I know I never will be.
I tilt my face toward the setting sun and close my eyes, letting the warmth soak in.
I pretend Josh is beside me. For a moment, I let the thought take shape.
The way his arm would rest lazily across the back of the dock, how his leg would bounce without him noticing, the way his smile could hold an entire conversation.
I sit with it. With him. Let myself miss him for once.
This place is sewn through with him. Every board, every chipped bit of paint, every summer storm that sent us running for cover while laughing too hard to breathe.
It is impossible to be here without feeling the ghost of him everywhere.
After Josh died, no one ever really looked too closely at my grief.
I didn’t invite it in, and I didn’t push it away.
People liked me better when I smiled, when I stayed busy, when I didn’t make them sit with the sharp edges of my loss.
People needed me to hold it together. Margo, my parents, Rhett.
So I did. I played the part. And sometimes, I was grateful for that.
It let me tuck the ache away, to pretend the world hadn’t lost something irreplaceable.
Even when I knew it had.
A few minutes pass before I hear footsteps behind me on the dock.
Rhett lowers himself beside me. I know he can tell something is off, but he doesn’t press me on it.
It’s one of the things I’ve always respected about him.
Most people see grief and rush to smother it.
Patch it. Distract it away with soft lies and well-meant reassurances.
But Rhett doesn’t do that. He lets it breathe. He lets me breathe.
The sun dips lower, scattering gold across the water in that way that makes everything ache just a little more. The kind of light Josh used to call magic hour. He believed the world was more honest in the minutes between day and dusk.
“Hell of a view,” Rhett says after a long stretch of quiet.
“Yeah.” My voice comes out small, carried off by the breeze. “Josh always loved the lake at this time of day.”
“He was a sucker for the sun.”
I smile, something fragile pulling at the corner of my mouth. “He used to drag me out here in the mornings, even when I begged him to let me sleep in. Said sunrises and sunsets at the lake were the whole damn point.” The memory pulls a cracked laugh out of me.
“He pretended he was a philosopher instead of just annoyingly chipper before eight a.m.”
“He really was the worst morning person,” I say, rubbing at my cheek. “Always with a plan. Always up before everyone else.”
“He made everything feel bigger,” Rhett murmurs. “Life had more texture when he was around.”
His eyes stay fixed on the lake, jaw tight in that familiar way he gets when emotion climbs too high, and he’s determined not to let it show. I know that tension. I want to smooth it away.
“This place…” I swallow. “It makes me miss him so much.” My voice barely holds. “I know you miss him, too. He was your best friend.”
Rhett looks at me then. His eyes are bright, wet, unguarded in a way that knocks the breath from my lungs. I see the hollow Josh left behind. The shape of the absence we both carry.
For once, I’m not alone in it. For once, the grief doesn’t feel so isolating.
“I miss him every damn day.” He plants his elbows on his knees, hands clasped tight. “Some days I still wait for his name to light up my phone. Or I swear I’m going to head to his house to hang out with him. But then I remember he isn’t here anymore. He won’t ever be here again.”
Tears sting hot at the back of my eyes. I blink up at the sky, as if that will keep them from falling.
“He would be so proud of you,” I say, fighting past the swell in my throat.
Rhett’s inhale snags. His Adam’s apple lifts and drops, a hard swallow.
“He would be proud of you, too,” he says, cutting a glance toward me. “So many memories I have of him, you’re in,” he says. “You and Josh. Always together. And being here, this place…” His gaze sweeps the shoreline. “…it sharpens everything. Makes it hurt more. But it also makes it feel more real.”
I know what he means. Some days, for me, the missing is quiet, a ghost passing through a familiar room. Other days it roars. But I guess the ache is the price we pay for having had something worth missing.
I can’t help but let the doubt seep in. It gnaws at the base of my throat.
I’ve spent too long swallowing questions just to keep the peace, just to survive the ache of everything I lost. But something in me has shifted here at this place.
I can feel pieces of the old me stirring.
The girl who laughed easily. Who wanted things without apologizing for it.
Who believed she deserved more than being someone’s soft place to land.
If I want a real shot with Rhett, if I want anything honest, I can’t pretend this fear doesn’t exist. I don’t want to be a trauma response.
I don’t want to be the familiar shape his grief reaches for in the dark.
I’ve been reduced to that before. A stand-in.
A reminder. Something safe because it’s already broken in the same places. And I won’t do it again.
I owe it to myself to know. I deserve to be wanted for who I am now, not because I’m what’s left standing when someone else is gone.
“What if…” The words snag. I try again. “Do you think you have feelings for me because I’m what’s left of Josh?”
Rhett’s head lifts slightly, puzzled.
“I mean…” I hate how small I sound. “I’m the closest thing to him you have. The last piece of him still here. What if that’s why you—”
His soft chuckle cuts through my spiraling. It startles me. My brows pull together.
“What’s so funny?” I ask, my heart catching in my throat.
He stops laughing, but there is still a smile on his face. “You truly don’t know,” he says quietly, “how long I’ve wanted you.”
I blink, caught somewhere between confusion and the reckless ache to believe him. Before I can find my footing, he adds, almost offhandedly, “Can I show you something?”
I nod my head. He shifts, pulling his right leg up onto the dock beside him. My eyes catch the first tattoo immediately. It is a date. One I recognize immediately. Josh’s birthday. I trace the numbers with a finger, as if touching them could summon him back, could somehow make him tangible again.
And then I notice another one next to it. It is smaller and faded. A tiny little outline of the sun.
“You wanted to show me that you have Josh’s birthday tattooed on your thigh?”
“No, but yeah. I got it after he died.” His hand brushes his leg absently.
“It felt right putting his memory there.” He chuckles again.
“I already had my favorite person tattooed on my thigh, so adding my best friend felt right. ” My throat tightens at the phrasing. Favorite person. I don’t understand.
He shifts again, angling his leg slightly. “But that’s not the one I wanted to show you.” His finger hovers, then taps lightly beside the date. “This one.”
My eyes follow the motion, settling back on the sun. My heartbeat starts doing something erratic.
“This one,” he continues, voice quieter now, “I got two weeks after I met you. September third, to be exact.”
“Why would you get a sun tattooed on you?”
He exhales. “Josh and I made a stupid bet one night after drinking. The loser had to get a tattoo.” A faint, almost fond smile ghosts his mouth.
“When I lost, I didn’t want something I’d regret in five years.
” He shifts closer on the dock, knee knocking gently against mine.
“I knew it was going to be permanent. So I wanted something I knew would still mean everything to me, no matter who I became as time passed.”
I frown, my fingers hovering over the ink, tracing the shape without quite touching it. “I don’t understand.”
His mouth curves. He tips his leg closer, closing the distance himself.
“Sun—ny.”
My heart stumbles into a rhythm I seem to only feel when I’m with him. My eyes lift to his, and I see it there. The unflinching devotion I’ve spent a decade imagining, now illuminated in the curve of ink, etched into his skin.
“I have been in love with you,” he murmurs, voice low, unwavering, “for over a damn decade.”
The words hit me full force. Twelve years. Before funerals. Before hospital rooms. Before the world split open and left us sifting through the aftermath.
“I loved you when everything was easy,” he goes on. “When Josh was still alive. When our world was loud and reckless and full. I loved you when you thought no one noticed you. I loved you when I had no reason to believe love was something that lasted.” His eyes soften.
“I loved you when he was taken from us,” he admits, jaw tightening. “I loved you when I watched you fall in love with someone else. I loved you when you hated me.”
My chest aches, sharp and sweet all at once. I’ve spent so long questioning whether I’m worthy of being chosen. Whether what I feel is just survival dressed up as hope. And here he is, dismantling every fear with devastating care.
“This—” he gestures between us, then toward the lake, toward the past, toward everything we lost, “—this didn’t create what I feel. It just stripped away my excuses. Grief didn’t make me love you, Rach. It just made it impossible to keep pretending I don’t.”
I want to speak. I want to tell him how this lands in me, seeing him stripped of defenses makes my chest ache in the most exquisite way. It finally feels like something ancient inside me has finally been named.
But the words refuse to line up.
So instead, I lean closer. My forehead finds his shoulder, and I let the quiet hold what my voice can’t.
Because in this soft, glowing stillness, I understand something with startling clarity.
Love like this doesn’t demand proof. It doesn’t rush toward confession.
It simply exists. A pulse. A breath. A lifetime written in ink.
And I am utterly, irrevocably swept into it.
“I’m glad you’re here with me, Rhett,” I say finally.
His arm tightens slightly around me. “I’m not going anywhere, Sunny,” he says, and this time his voice is softer. “Not this time.”
I turn my face and press a kiss to his cheek. “Can I have a few minutes alone?” I whisper. “I just want to sit here and look at the water. I promise I’m okay.”
“Of course, Sunny.”
He stands, quiet as he came, and walks back toward the house. I stay where I am, feet dangling above the lake, the sun low and gold and fading on the horizon.
I was so certain I had lost her. That girl I used to be.
The one who trusted her own momentum, who believed the world would bend because it always had before.
I told myself she vanished somewhere between grief and growing up, between the day everything shattered and the years I spent carefully assembling a smaller life from the pieces that remained.
After Josh died, I learned how to make myself manageable.
I learned when to soften, when to disappear, when to be agreeable instead of alive.
I mistook restraint for strength and survival for wisdom.
And when I looked in the mirror, I told myself that caution was maturity, that dulling my edges was the price of staying intact.
But sitting here now, with the lake breathing beneath the sun and the dock warm under my palms, I understand how wrong I was.
She was never gone.
She was waiting for permission to exist again.
The girl Josh believed in. The one who trusted her own fire. She didn’t die with him. She endured.
And now, finally, I am choosing her.
I am taking back what was always mine.