Chapter 126 Acceptance

Chapter 126 Acceptance
Alexa’s POV 

The crying didn’t stop all at once. It tapered the way it always did, the peaks coming down, the breathing finding its way back to something functional, the room reassembling itself around us as we came back to it. Nora’s arms were still around me from behind and mine were still over hers and the morning light had continued its patient journey across the floor without waiting for us to finish. I breathed In and out.

The kind you did when you were pulling yourself back from somewhere.

I thought about what she had said.

All of it. The baby, Jessica, Leon, Aria, Nora’s five years, and me almost losing my life…all of it laid out with the honesty of someone who had been alone with it long enough to stop softening the edges.

She was right.

I had known she was right from the moment she started talking. That was the thing about true things…you recognized them before you were ready to, before you had any idea what to do with them, before the recognition was anything other than painful.

She was right. 

I walked out last night because being right in front of the truth was more than I could manage in that moment, so I went into the corridor and stood in the cool air of it, letting myself be angry instead because anger was easier to stand inside than the alternative.

Than sitting with her arms around me with the full weight of what needed to happen pressing down with the quiet inevitability of something that had always been going to happen and had just been waiting for someone to say it out loud.

“I miss her,” I said.

Nora was very still behind me.

“Every day,” I said. “I have missed her every day since I left. Not as a thing I was managing and containing.” I looked at the floor. “Right in the front. Every single day.” Nora didn’t say anything, she let me pour my heart out. 

“I miss the way she smells,” I said. “I miss the yellow blanket, the drawings and the terrible jokes.” I stopped. Breathed. “I miss being the person she runs to. I miss being the one she holds her arms up for.” My voice had gone rough, I let it be. “I left a child who holds her arms up…I have been living with that every day…telling myself it was the right thing, but…”

I stopped to catch my breath.

“Deep down I know It wasn’t the right thing,” I said quietly. “Leaving her. Whatever was happening with me and Leon and all of it… leaving Aria was never the right thing and I have known that from the moment I lifted those suitcase wheels off the floor so she wouldn’t hear me going.”

Nora’s arms tightened slightly.

“And Leon.” The way I said his name had its own weight that was different from everything else. “Leon has been loving, patient, caring and genuine” I shook my head. “He did nothing wrong. He loved me in every way he knew how, but I…” I stopped. 

“I left him for a love I couldn’t even be honest about when he asked me directly.”

The room held that.

“I feel terrible,” Finally saying it out loud, the plain fact of it. “For all of it. For the way I handled everything. For what I did to him and what I did to Ari, and what my choices kept doing to you.” I looked at the morning light. “I feel genuinely terrible.”

Nora moved. She shifted around so she could see my face, one arm still around my back, looking at me from the side now rather than from behind.

“But,” I said.

She waited.

“I couldn’t just leave you,” I said. “And I need you to understand that. It wasn’t selfishness… or it wasn’t only selfishness. I looked at your life and I saw what my silence had cost it. I couldn’t just walk away from that and call it moving forward.” I looked at her. “I needed to do something. To give something back. Even if it was imperfect, messy and cost things it shouldn’t have cost.”

She was looking at me with those eyes.

“But you’re okay now,” I said slowly. Working it out as I said it. “You have the apartment. Rosa, and the city that doesn’t have bad memories in it.” I looked at her. “You’ve found your footing. Without me. You found it yourself, and it’s real, and it’s going to hold.”

She nodded. 

“So I’m not leaving you in a place that needs holding together,” I said. “You can hold it. You are holding it.” I paused. “Which means I can go.”

The words sat in the room.

They sat differently from the last time those words had been in this apartment. Last night they were Nora’s words…offered to me like something she had decided to give. Now they were mine. Chosen. Coming from the same place that the decision to leave Leon’s house had come from…that same still clear certainty, but pointing in the opposite direction. Home.

“I hope they’ll forgive me,” I said.

“They will,” Nora said. Without hesitation.

I looked at her.

“Everyone loves you Alexa,” she said. It wasn’t flattery. She said it with a plain conviction, like someone stating something they considered obvious. “Leon loves you. Aria…” She stopped. “Aria is six years old and has her mother’s capacity for feeling things completely. She will forgive you before you finish apologizing.”

Something in my chest moved.

“You should go tomorrow,” she said.

I looked at her.

“A daughter needs her mother,” she said. “Not next week.”

“Are you sending me away?” I asked her.

She blinked.

“What? No! That’s not…” She stopped. “That is not what this is.”

“It feels like it.”

“I know how it feels,” she said. “But it isn’t.” She looked at me steadily. “I’m not sending you anywhere. I’m telling you where you already know you need to go.” She paused. “There is a difference.”

I looked at her face.

“If I go,” I said. “What do you do?”

She was quiet for a moment.

Not the silence of someone who didn’t know. The silence of someone deciding how honest to be and landing on completely.

“I stay,” she said.

“Here?”

“Here.” She looked at the apartment. 

“I like this city. It doesn’t have the shape of anything that happened before in it. It’s just…new.” She looked back at me. “I’ll stay and find something more sustainable than the restaurant. I’ll not leave the restaurant, Rosa would not accept that, but I’ll find something additional. Build something.” She paused. “Take care of myself. Which I have not done in a very long time and which I think I am overdue for.”

I looked at her.

“You’ll be okay,” I said.

“I will be okay,” she said. Not a performance, or reassurance produced for my benefit. Just a fact she had arrived at and was stating.

“I believe you,” I said.

She nodded.

We looked at each other across the small distance of the sofa.

Everything that was going to be said had been said. The honest things and the hard things, the things that cost something to say and the things that cost something to hear. All of it acknowledged and resolved, as things like this could be resolved which was imperfectly but genuinely.

I reached out while she came forward at the same time.

We held on together, and she was crying again.

I was also crying again.

Two people who loved each other letting go of the version of that love that kept costing the world around them, and holding onto whatever was left…which was real, warm and present even without the rest of it, even with the letting go, even here.

We stayed. For as long as the staying was what the moment needed.

Which was a long time.

Which was not long enough.

Which was both of those things at once.