I turned away from her.

“Sometimes you leave because it’s better to deal with your problems on your own.”

“Did you?”

I came back to her. “Yeah. I did. And I’m really sorry if my leaving hurt you. The last thing I wanted was for you to feel abandoned. I know what that’s like.”

“I didn’t feel abandoned,” she said, looking me in the eye. “’Cause I knew if I ever called you, you’d come.”

She said it so matter-of-factly. And it was funny, because the second she said it, I realized she was right. I would have.

Anytime over the last six months, I would have been there if she’d reached out.

I wasn’t like Amber.

Even small, I was better than she was.

And then she did call and I did come.

I’d passed a test I didn’t even know I’d been taking.

“When we get home, you should come inside,” she said. “I bet he’d want to see you.”

I had to muscle the lump down in my throat.

“Okay,” I whispered. “I’ll do that.”

I just hoped she was right.

CHAPTER 46 JUSTIN

I missed her. It was an ache in my chest that never went away. After six months, I’d accepted that it never would.

The first few weeks after she left were the worst. I was depressed. There was no skirting around it, it was depression.

The kids kept getting sick from going back to school. It felt like I had someone home with a cold every day for two solid weeks. Then I got sick and had to take care of everyone else on top of it.

The house was always messy. Cleaning it was like shoveling in a snowstorm. Everyone needed me, all the time. Chelsea’s separation anxiety from Mom and Emma hit a crescendo and she hung off me like a monkey when she was home and cried every time I dropped her off at school. I was touched out and overwhelmed and missing Emma so badly it was hard to breathe.

I lived my days going through the motions like a zombie. My life felt like a series of mundane tasks I had to tick off until I die—meals, homework, laundry, doctor’s visits, grocery runs. Rinse and repeat.

I hated everything. I was moody and tired all the time. I tried to fake that I was okay during our visits with Mom, but she saw through me. She kept pressing me for what happened and I couldn’t talk about it and I’d leave feeling shitty because I could tell she was worried about me.

The guys tried their best to help. They tapped in. Took the kids to stuff. Sat with Alex at his games, Jane drove Sarah to dance for me a few times. They tried to get me out of the house, take me to lunch. But a light had gone out inside of me and nothing was going to turn that back on.

All of this was because of Emma. And I didn’t blame her for one ounce of it.

If you can choose anger or empathy, always choose empathy. And I did.

A year ago I would have been mad at her for leaving. It was black and white back then. To me, love meant you stayed. But now I understood that love sometimes means you let someone go.

I appreciated the strength it required for her to come tell me she had to in person, even though it was hard.

I respected that she was self-aware enough to know what she was and wasn’t capable of.

I saw the sacrifice it took to decide she wasn’t going to repeat the same cycle with these kids that made her who she was.

And I didn’t want to repeat the cycle either. So I let her go too. And the worst thing about that was it meant I could never let her come back, because I couldn’t ever believe she’d stay.

I know she told me not to, but for a long time I was waiting for her. A very real part of me wanted to hope that she could change. Hold out for some miracle. But with distance I came to realize that wasn’t reality. That the same thing that took her from me would be the thing that would keep her away—or make her leave again if she ever came home. And I couldn’t put the kids through that. Not again.

I couldn’t imagine what Emma could ever say to me to make me feel safe in that relationship after this. And this was the hardest part of all to deal with. The finality of it.

It was really over.

I let myself wallow for a few hard, miserable weeks. And then I looked around at my life and I realized that I was a guardian now and that me unraveling was no better than when Mom did it. I had kids to raise, an example to set. I didn’t have the luxury of the meltdown I currently deserved. So I got my shit together. I did what I was good at. I pulled myself up by the bootstraps and I put systems in place.

I mapped out my day and took a good long look and I made changes.

I stopped making breakfast during the week. I liked doing it because Mom always did, but it was too much.

I took everyone to the store and let them pick out their favorite cereal and oatmeal. Alex’s new job in the morning was to pour Cheerios in a bowl for Chelsea, who was already up by the time he was, and turn on her movie before he left for the bus. This took him two minutes and bought me another hour of sleep.

Once I started sleeping more, my energy and mood got better. I got a treadmill for under my desk so I could get my steps in while I worked. Got some weights and set up a little home gym to use after dropping Chelsea off at preschool.

Sarah liked to cook. I started asking her if she wanted to help me make dinners. She did. We bought that Sloan Monroe Crockpot cookbook and Sarah and I would meal prep and Alex cleaned up and suddenly dinner was fun again. A team-building activity I started to look forward to.

For Halloween Alex wanted to make the front lawn into a graveyard so we went to the Halloween store and bought a bunch of animatronic zombies. I spent way too much money, but it was the first project we all did together. We carved pumpkins and got Brad a dog costume. On Halloween night Sarah and I made a lasagna and hot chocolate and took Chelsea trick-or-treating. And I realized, when the kids were back at the house, sitting on the living room floor going through their candy, that I’d had a good day. It would have been better if she was here. But it was still good.

After that, the days kept getting better, a little at a time. Thanksgiving was hard without Mom, but we went to Leigh’s and came home with lots of leftovers. A few days later we went to cut down a Christmas tree. We took pictures and the smiles were real. We spent a Saturday baking Mom’s cookies and they came out perfect.

When the clock struck midnight on the TV on New Year’s Eve, I missed Emma so much I had to leave the room. But by then I’d accepted this pain as part of my everyday life, and while it never got easier that she wasn’t here, it did start to feel normal.

In January Alex turned sixteen and got his driver’s license. I gave him the van. Now I had another driver in the house, which helped.

Little by little, we were figuring it out.

And there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t feel her absence like a void in my soul. I missed her like I missed the sun in the winter.

I’d realized something after being with her. A valuable lesson that I think all the best and most enduring romances have figured out.

The love stories sold us the wrong thing.

The best kind of love doesn’t happen on moonlit walks and romantic vacations. It happens in between the folds of everyday life. It’s not grand gestures that show how you feel, it’s all the little secret things you do to make her life better that you never tell her about. Taking the end piece of the bread at breakfast so she can have the last middle piece for her sandwich when you pack her lunch. Making sure her car always has gas so she never has to stop at the pump. Telling her you’re not cold and to take your jacket when you are in fact, very, very cold. It’s watching TV on a rainy Sunday while you’re doing laundry and turning her light off when she’s fallen asleep reading. Sharing pizza crusts and laughing about something the kids did and taking care of each other when you’re sick. It isn’t glamorous, it isn’t all butterflies and stars in your eyes. It’s real. This is the kind of love that forever is made of. Because if it’s this good when life is draining and mundane and hard, think of how wonderful it will be when the love songs are playing and the moon is out.

I was grateful that the life I’d been forced into taught me this lesson. I just wish I hadn’t learned it with Emma. Because nothing and nobody else would ever compare. With anyone else, it’s just folding socks on a sofa.