Chapter 19
The portal no longer shocks me.
My angel is here, waiting, serene, with her red mermaid hair and knowing smile, palms clasped with eternal patience.
One more balloon lived and gone.
Officially down to seven.
Will it take that many to accomplish what needs to be done?
How am I doing? I wonder. The time in Nicaragua made me appreciate my old life—but sparked new curiosities, too.
Other countries, other people, other entire versions of Sutton.
I want to see more, for her, for me. To keep going, wherever this leads.
“Welcome back,” the angel sings.
“Thank you,” I say, my tone thoughtful. “That was amazing. I really loved it there.”
“What did you love about it?”
“For starters,” I say, “I don’t think I picked up my phone more than a handful of times. It was glorious.” The house bell gonged as our alarm clock. We had Wi-Fi, but no pressing need for it. The simplicity, the presence, the love. The food, the children, Charlie. “It felt pure,” I finish.
Like heaven.
It reminded me that you don’t need much to feel like you have the world.
To feel God.
“I also learned a lot,” I continue, more somberly. “Things I won’t forget.”
She smiles. “Like what?”
I squint, mentally holding up my reflections against the struggles of my thirty-nine-year-old life.
I’m humbled by the contrast—embarrassed, almost—that my own personal crises felt so acute, insurmountable.
The struggles were real, no doubt: the chill in my marriage, the chasm between me and Max, the weight of growing older.
But being in Nicaragua gave me perspective.
Maybe aging is living. Maybe I have far more blessings than I’ve been counting.
Maybe love is enough—and worth fighting for.
Maybe I’d choose my given hard, any day of the week.
Sorrow twists with sweetness inside my chest. “I’m really blessed,” I admit.
“You are blessed,” the angel agrees. “And your recognition of this is significant.”
I nod, feeling not just new awareness, but hope. I don’t want to give up on making a difference, living with meaning, appreciating each day.
At twenty-five in my real life, I’d already worked my way up at a small but exploding interior design firm, solidifying myself as Amber Allister’s right-hand girl.
Indispensable. My little clone, Amber said.
I’ve always needed another me! Her protégée.
Sixty-hour work weeks and stomach ulcers included, but worth it.
By thirty, I’d launch out on my own, with a burgeoning social media following, Amber’s full blessing, and even a roster of clients, one hundred percent free and clear. I adored the work. Most of the time, minus the stress of launching a company and time away from my babies.
On weekends in our mid- to late twenties, Reid and I went to weddings.
Lots and lots of weddings, from the stripped-down to the sensational.
Twenty-six in one year, each a vivid celebration of vows.
Then, I remember when we entered our thirties and the baby shower Evites eclipsed the elaborate wedding invitations delivered by snail mail.
Eventually, the showers and sprinkles were replaced with little-kid birthday parties, each one more Pinterest worthy and extravagant than the last. And now occasionally came divorce news. Once or twice now, second weddings. Sometimes, tragically, funerals.
I hated it.
I want to reclaim the optimism, wonder, and passion of those years in our twenties—the belief that the world can be changed.
That great love exists, even if it also evolves.
Somehow my brief time in Nicaragua offered me a fresh taste of all this—adventure and faith, but also reality.
So much life pulsed and popped outside my bubble.
Speaking of bubble—I peruse the balloons, wondering what else awaits me.
Infinite possibilities.
Or seven, to be exact.
I sip a breath of air. The only balloon I am unequivocally not popping is twenty-eight. If Los Angeles was bad and a broken heart wasn’t even the advertisement, what on earth would that hold?
No, thanks.
For the third time now, the thought of jumping two neat years ahead is sucking me in like a Dyson.
Twenty-seven.
A Ferris wheel.
Intriguing.
This could mean so many things.
The angel watches me eyeing it.
“You haven’t gone backward yet,” she observes.
Huh.
She’s right. I can’t explain why. Maybe I just feel pressed to keep moving this forward.
“It hasn’t felt right yet, I guess.”
Without me needing to ask, she pulls the gold spear from the podium, slips me the handle.
I’m still eyeing the Ferris wheel. Twenty-seven, where I will not be celebrating five years of marriage in San Diego along with our one-year-old son. Mourning the end of nursing Max, despite how much I always struggled to love it like I thought I should. Or like every other mom seemed to.
Oh, how I loved my son, though, that boy.
No matter how he felt about me.
Of course, even now I miss what I once found so hard, impossible—nursing itself, everything about those early days that felt so physically daunting but emotionally natural.
Our primal, skin-to-skin closeness, before every single thing I did was an affront to his coolness, another piece of proof I was crushing his life.
I twirl the needle.
Twenty-seven.
Okay.
Let’s try you again.