The sudden mention of him mentioning me made my heart flip.
I’d missed so much. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, his birthday, the kids’ birthdays. They had to hate me. How could they not?
“We miss you, you know,” she said.
The words caught me by surprise and I looked over at her.
“You do?”
She talked to the burger in her lap. “Everybody was like, really sad when you left.”
I swallowed. “They were?”
“Yeah. Like, I know you’re not, but it kind of felt like you were my big sister or something. You were our family.” She looked at me.
I studied her. “I felt like that too. I didn’t want to have to leave,” I said.
“Then why did you?” she asked.
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.
