Chapter 119 How to make it right

Chapter 119 How to make it right
Nora’s POV 

I looked at her for a long moment. The proposal sat in the air between us. I let it sit there without touching it. Let it be what it was, an offer wrapped around a need wrapped around five years of something I hadn’t known was there until twenty minutes ago.

Natalie was still watching me. Still with that rare exposure on her face that she was already beginning to pull back, already beginning to reassemble the composure over the top of, the way she always reassembled it because Natalie without composure was a person she did not know how to be for long.

I looked at her and I thought about what she had said.

All of it.

The younger sister feeling that turned to love. The gradual shift, and standing in the trees, watching and keeping it because there was a mission and the mission came first. The plan to tell me when it was over.

The plan that didn’t survive contact with what I chose.

I understood all of it. But understanding it didn’t change anything, and I understood it, and I was going to carry that understanding with the same honesty I had been trying to carry everything else since I walked out of that station.

“No,” I said.

She looked at me.

“I’m not coming with you,” I said. “That’s not…” I stopped. Found the right words rather than the first ones. “That’s not the answer Natalie. For either of us.”

Her jaw tightened.

“You haven’t thought about it,” she said.

“I don’t need to think about it.”

“The case against you…”

“Is my problem,” I said. “I told you that already. Whatever the state decides to do with what they have against me, I will deal with it. I am done running.” I looked at her directly. “I have been running in one direction or another for five years. I ran towards the plan, towards my anger, towards the mission, and all of it was just tiring, and I am done.”

“This isn’t running,” she said. “This is surviving.”

“For you maybe,” I said. “Not for me.”

She looked at me with the wet eyes she still wasn’t acknowledging and something moved through her expression that I recognized from the years of sitting across from her. The particular look she got when she had heard something she didn’t want to hear and was processing it. She was good at processing. She had always been good at processing.

What she wasn’t good at was accepting outcomes she hadn’t designed.

“Natalie.” My voice came out gentler than I intended. Or maybe exactly as gentle as the moment required. “Leave. Please. Not because I’m angry… though I am angry, I am genuinely furious about what you did today and we are not going to pretend that’s a small thing.” I held her eyes. “But because this hospital is not the place for the rest of this conversation and because Alexa is somewhere in this building and I need to be present for her. I cannot do that while you are standing in front of me.”

She was very still.

“Please,” I said.

The stillness held for a long moment.

Then she picked up her jacket she had apparently set somewhere I hadn’t noticed when she came in, put it on with the same deliberate movements, taking back the composure piece by piece.

She looked at me one more time.

“Think about it,” she said. “I mean ... Just …” A pause. The smallest fracture in the voice. “Think about it.”

And then she walked out.

The curtain swung behind her and settled as I heard her footsteps go down the corridor and become nothing. And then the sounds of the hospital came back in. I sat on the narrow bed and I put my face in my hands.

The tears came from somewhere I hadn’t known was still full.

I had thought, after the last times I shed tears, in Alexa’s arms in the hotel room, in the apartment, and tonight in the waiting area chair — I had thought that I had emptied most of what was available. That the reserves had been significantly depleted. But I was wrong.

This was a different kind of crying from any of the others. Not frightened or relieved, and not the long overdue release of something compressed for too long. This was the tears of someone who had been shown something true about their own life and didn’t know what to do with it. Natalie’s voice in my head.

She is a curse to you.

I pressed my hands harder against my face.

She wasn’t. I knew she wasn’t. I had meant every word I said.  Alexa had been nothing but a blessing, had come into my life this second time with open hands and an open heart, and had given and given and given without asking for anything in return.

But.

The but was there and I had to be honest about it even in the privacy of my own hands pressed against my own face in a hospital curtained room.

The cost.

Not the cost to me. My cost had been paid years ago when Jessica did what she did and the courts decided what they decided, that walked me into a place that took five years from me. That was what being with Alexa cost me.

But Alexa’s cost. I lifted my face from my hands and looked at the curtain.

She left her marriage. Her home, her child, her perfect life. She had lost all of it, because…

Because of me.

Because of what was between us and what had always been between us . 

Yes I lost five years of my freedom, but she lost everything!

Alexa had lost her family for me.

And now she was in a hospital bed struggling to survive, still because of me.

Not because of anything she had done wrong. Or because of any choice she had made that was selfish or unkind. She had made choices that were entirely about trying to do right by someone she had wronged and those choices had put her on the edge of life and death. And that person was me.

Because of the gravitational field of my life which had been pulling things in and breaking them for going on six years now.

Natalie’s words again.

Everything she touches becomes complicated and painful.

She was wrong about the curse. Alexa wasn’t the curse. But maybe… maybe the union was. Maybe there were two people in the world who genuinely, honestly, completely loved each other and were still not supposed to be together. Not because the love wasn’t real. Or because either of them was bad or wrong or broken beyond use.

But because the cost of the being together was too high.

Not for them. For the people around them.

Aria’s face.

That was the thought I kept arriving at and leaving and coming back to. I wiped my face and sat up more straight on the narrow bed.

I thought about what I was going to say to Alexa when she woke up.

The thought came slowly and then all at once.

This is the arrival of an understanding that had been working its way up from somewhere underneath everything for longer than tonight.

When Alexa woke up…

I will tell her to go home.

I will sit beside her bed, hold her hand and tell her she needed to go back. To Leon and Aria. To her martimonial house.  She was going to argue.

I already knew that, because Alexa argued about things that mattered to her with the energy of someone who had decided and did not undecide easily. She was going to say she had made her choice, and was going to say things had changed. She was going to say Nora.

And I was going to say… I know. I know all of that. And I love you. I love you in the full complicated real way that has always been true, that I shut the door on for years and have found its way back. I love you and that is why I’m telling you to go home.

Because that is what love looked like when it was bigger than what you wanted.

Sometimes, the biggest love you can show someone is to let them go.

The love that said, you have lost enough. Your daughter has lost enough. Go back to the life that is still yours while it is still yours to go back to.

I had cost her five years indirectly.

The five years she had spent moving on and building something while I was in that place, those years were somehow part of her cost. She had paid them without knowing she was paying them. I was not going to cost her Aria. I will not be the reason that child will grow up with a mother who chose someone else over her. I was not going to let the love between Alexa and me become the thing that stood between a little girl and her mother. No matter how real and genuine the love was.

That wouldn’t be a love story. It would be a tragedy.

And I had lived enough tragedy, as for me.

I sat with that part too.

What came after.

Our apartment will still be there. The restaurant will also still be there. Rosa had said same time Thursday and I will be there on Thursday and the Thursdays after that. The new city and the new life will be the beginning of something that was mine, built by my hands, owned by nobody else.

It don’t need Alexa to still be there.

It don’t need Natalie either.

It just required me. Nora Martinez. Who had been broken, rebuilt and broken again, and was apparently still here, still capable of sitting upright on a narrow hospital bed even after donating blood and crying from somewhere real.

Still here.

Still capable of choosing.

That was what love gave when it finished being selfish.

That was what I had.

I wiped my face one more time.

Breathed in and out.

And I sat in the quiet of the small curtained room and I let the decision settle into me until it stopped feeling like a decision and started feeling like the only thing.

The only true thing.

The one I had probably known for longer than tonight.