Page 130 of Modern Romance January 2025 5-8

But when he came downstairs, maneuvering slowly on his own, she felt it burst inside of her like a firework. That certainty.

She wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. It was now a clearer goal than anything else ever had been. It didn’t erase the other things that she wanted. It didn’t mean she no longer cared about her business, she did. It didn’t mean she no longer carried baggage from her childhood, or felt a strange amount of anxiety regarding any proximity to her childhood. She did.

But there was room for this. Room for him.

To want something more than success, to want something more than distance from her past. To want something more than to simply succeed on her own. That was what she had been chasing all this time, a sense that she would be okay on her own because the crushing feeling of being left to her own devices seemed inevitable. She had always known that her mother would die young. Ever since she could understand the implications of the kind of cancer she had, Auggie had understood that.

That isolation. She had seen that the potential for that existed. They had had an accident. He was mortal. He had been injured. There were complications from that injury and they might continue.

But that reality didn’t seem bigger than the hope that they could have something together.

She loved him.

She couldn’t say anything right now. She had to sit with it. Because Auggie was the sort of girl that needed a plan.

“I was thinking,” she said. “That since we have to go into the hospital to see the neurologist, it is probably time for you to put out a statement about your sister.”

He paused. “I thought you said it was better to not engage in PR.”

“What I think is better is maybe you saying something real about it. I don’t think you should go through your publicist. I think you should just tell the truth. No spin.”

“No spin?”

“Yes. What if you told the world the story of your sister. The way you told me. And maybe it’s messy and you’re not universally loved in the end.”

“I never cared about being universally loved.”

“Didn’t you?”

She wondered if maybe he had, in a way. If part of him had craved that because he had never gotten it anywhere else.

“I suppose it was better than being a disappointment. But that was never the goal.”

“No. It was to show your father that he was wrong in every way. But... Maybe the truth does that more effectively. You loved Seraphina. Flaws and all. You loved her even though it was difficult. You’re a better man than your father. It’s evident just in that.”

He tented his fingers beneath his chin. “I don’t know how to talk about my feelings.”

“We’ve been doing a lot of it since we’ve been here.”

“But this doesn’t count.” He waved his hand in a sweeping gesture, and she felt like he had taken all her chess pieces off the table in one fell swoop. Because he had just dismissed this entire experience. This experience that had been so profound to her.

He doesn’t mean it that way.

She bit her bottom lip. “Well, maybe it’ll count for something.”

“Once we leave here, Auggie, you’re not obligated to me. You never were.”

“Yes. I could’ve just left you blind and stumbling around.”

“You could have.”

She could have. It was a strange thing, actually, to really sit with that reality. There hadn’t been anything stopping her. She could have done that. She could have.

She could have.

That was actually true of her caring for her mother too. She felt like she had had no other choice. But she had.

But when things had gotten hard, that was how she had chosen to love her mother.