Page 32 of Came the Closest
“Cheyenne, that’s depressing.”
He says it with such conviction that I can’t help it—I start laughing. I’m still crying, though, so really, I’m craughing. Tears roll down my cheeks, my shoulders shake, and my stomach hurts from the unexpected laughter. I have no doubt I look like a complete and total mess.
Mostly, though, I realize that I’m feeling again.
“Sorry I…” I look at his tear-stained shirt in dismay and peer up at him. “Sorry I used your shirt as a snot rag.”
Colton mock salutes. “Happy to be of snot rag service, ma’am.”
“I haven’t cried like that since the accident,” I say quietly, fisting and unfisting my fingers so I won’t curl them in Colton’s shirt again. “I haven’t cried at all.”
Colton holds my gaze. “Then make sure you choose sad once in a while, too.”
“Colton,” I deadpan, borrowing his droll tone from moments earlier, “that’s depressing.”
He shakes his head. “No, I don’t mean it that way. Don’t choose it to become depressed. Choosing sad doesn’t mean closing yourself off, it just means letting yourself feel the hard emotions. Because then, when you choose happy afterwards, it’ll be the purest form of happy you can find.”
For a long moment, I just let his words sink in. Turn them over in my head, trying to wring the truth out of them, trying to make them make sense.
Colton chuckles softly, and I frown. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Colton,” I say deliberately, “what is nothing?”
“It’s just…” He pauses and runs his teeth over his lip, letting them sink into the skin there. “At least we know the blue mind theory is true.”
My brows crease. “Blue mind theory?”
“Yeah,” he says, nodding. “They say that, when near a body of water, it increases your neurotransmitters, such as oxytocin.” Pink flushes his cheeks, and he smiles sheepishly at me. “Also known as the cuddle hormone.”
“What you’re saying,” I begin slowly, feeling my own face warm, “is that my outburst just now was a byproduct of the blue mind theory?”
Colton looks at me intently and shakes his head. “No. I’m saying that, because of the blue mind theory, two fake fiancés will have an excuse, if they so choose, to cuddle this summer.”
If choosing happy seems hard, choosing sad feels disturbingly easy.
Colton and I walked through the rest of the house together, and after that, I picked up lunch to take to Hazel’s flower shop, where I officially resigned. I think she knew it was coming because she’s intuitive, but still. The least I could do was thank her for taking me under her wing the last couple months, and there’s rarely a better way to someone’s heart than through food.
Now, I’m choosing sad before I start packing up my apartment later. I’m going to see my dad. My stomach turns at the thought of stepping through those sliding glass doors. Since that seemingly ordinary day, the one where I lost my baby, I have mostly avoided hospitals. If I don’t, I’ll remember the emptiness that hollowed me out and the stinging realization that I would never feel that baby’s kick against my belly.
Today, though, I will face it just as bravely as I faced the lake house. Dad is in a long-term care facility on the northern edge of Balsam Falls, and I pull into a parking stall beside a shiny white Porsche and hitch my tote over my shoulder. Walking inside, I’m hit with the contrasts of the hospital to the world outside.
Sticky June humidity becomes rattling air conditioning turned too cold. A cloudless blue sky is blocked out by sterilized white walls and tile floors. Fresh, slightly briny lake air gives way to the caustic smell of antiseptic.
I’ve only visited Dad once. It was with Justin, and I didn’t let myself get close enough to touch Dad like my brother did. Justin, being Justin, didn’t comment on my distance. He just quietly accepted it, talked to Dad like they were sitting on the porch together, and then blared Pitbull on the drive to lunch at The Pier.
I approach the nurse’s station before I can talk myself out of it. “Hi. I’m here to see Tripp Kolter. I’m, uh, his daughter.”
The nurse—Mindi, according to the nametag clipped on her teddy bear print scrubs—looks up from her computer screen with a welcoming smile. “Sure, hon. Do you know your way, or do you want me to walk you up there?”
“I know the way but thank you.” Instinctually, I touch my wave necklace, the curve of the sterling silver familiar beneath my fingertip. “Do you, uh…” I wet my lips. “Do you know if there’s been any improvement?”
It’s a pointless question. We’d know if anything had changed, good or bad. But I’m stalling.
Mindi’s face softens. “Not that I’ve heard today. Having you here will be the best form of healing for him, though.”
I don’t know about that. Mom’s been here every day for the last four and a half months. Surely, his wife’s presence would revive him if he were to be revived. But I nod like I agree and cross to the shiny silver elevators. It can’t be more than a couple hundred steps from the nurse’s station to Dad’s room. It feels like twenty miles, uphill, in sheets of slanting rain. When I reach Room 1203, I pause and stare hard at the silver doorknob.