Page 53 of Waves of Time
“You know what I mean.” Hilary crossed her arms over her chest.
Marc did, in fact, know what she meant. He was no dummy. He gazed out into the inky darkness for a long time, as though he weighed up exactly what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it, then said, “I tried to talk myself out of it. But every day, I sat over in San Francisco in my beautiful apartment, all by myself, and thought about you. About our past.” He swallowed. “I thought about that story we just told Aria about the night you told me you were pregnant. And I just couldn’t stop crying.”
Hilary’s throat was tight. She couldn’t speak. Marc’s eyes glistened with tears.
“I have had such a nice life,” Marc said. “Don’t get me wrong. I made goals, and I reached them, and I’m proud of that. But… I have regrets, too. If I had had half the insights on life and what it means when I was twenty-one, I never would have left Nantucket. You couldn’t have dragged me away.”
Marc’s tone darkened, proof he meant it. Hilary had never seen him so serious.
Hilary touched his arm. “Everything happened the way it was supposed to,” she tried to tell him. It was what she’d told herself over and over.
But Marc shook his head. “Everything happened because I was too selfish to understand the joy I had right in front of me. I missed so much, Hilary. You were the greatest thing that ever happened to me, and you gave me a daughter. And I just took off.” He snapped his fingers.
“We weren’t getting along,” Hilary reminded him. “We fought all the time.”
“I caused those fights because I wanted to find a way to blame you for us breaking up,” Marc insisted. “It was cruel and childish. And I recognize it now.”
Hilary was quiet. Her eyes had begun to hurt terribly, and she closed them as the world spun around her. Before she could say another word, Marc’s strong arms were around her, and she burrowed her face against his chest, inhaling his familiar musk. It had never really changed over the years. Some things never did.
“Why didn’t you ever remarry?” Marc asked quietly.
Hilary stifled a laugh. “I never met anyone I could really fall in love with. Not after the love we’d shared.”
Marc sighed. “I felt the same way.”
Hilary raised her chin to look into his eyes. “I figured you were dating every twenty-something in San Francisco.”
Marc bristled. “What? That’s what you thought of me?”
“You’re a rich and powerful man!”
“Not all rich and powerful men are dirtbags,” Marc said.
Hilary’s heart lifted. For a moment, they studied one another, eyes glinting. And then, his lips were upon hers, and Hilary felt her soul tumble around her body, then lift to the ceiling and into the sky. Marc’s kisses had been the kisses that had made her fall in love for the very first and the very last time. And remarkably, they felt just the same as they always had, as though, somehow, they’d found a way to travel through time, all the way back to the first days of their love.
When their kiss broke, Marc’s eyes were filled with tears. “I don’t want to let you go again,” he breathed. “I think it would kill me.”
ChapterTwenty
Hilary’s surgery was set for ten the next morning. Feeling like a child along for the ride, Aria sat in the back seat of her father’s rental vehicle, staring at the hands of her parents, clasped between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s. She’d never seen them hold hands before. It thrilled her.
At the hospital, Marc dropped Aria and Hilary off and then drove away to park the car. Aria and Hilary walked slowly through the double-wide doors, both quiet. Aria searched her mind for something to say, a joke, or anything to take their minds off the surgery. Instead, she said, “Dad looks like a teenager in love.”
Hilary chortled, her cheeks red.
“What is going on with you guys?”
Hilary shook her head. “Maybe it’s all an act to get my spirits up before the surgery.”
“There’s no way he would do that,” Aria said, her heart ballooning. Clearly, her parents had had some kind of conversation about the nature of their relationship, perhaps about their past regrets. Maybe they wanted to try again.
Hilary and Aria sat in the waiting room. Marc arrived a few minutes later, slightly breathless, unzipping his autumn jacket as he sat beside Hilary. He touched her knee just as a nurse arrived and said, “Hilary Coleman? We’re ready for you.”
Aria hugged her mother, her eyes closed, trying her best to instill a sense of love, of hope. But as Hilary walked away with the nurse, her arms and hands shook so violently that they were blurry. Just last night, Aria had made the mistake of reading about all the things that could go wrong with glaucoma surgery, and she hadn’t slept a wink. Lucky for her, Thaddeus wasn’t a good sleeper, either, and they’d spent most of their hours on video chat, staring into one another’s eyes and telling stories about their past. It was funny, Aria knew, to think she had such a dramatic past, even at the age of twenty-one. But her decision to leave college had felt monstrous, and she’d only just now begun to make sense of it.
“I guess you figured out something a lot of people take years to learn,” Thaddeus had said. “That you don’t have to stay in a bad situation. That sometimes, things don’t get better.”
With Hilary in the operating room, Hilary and Marc stood up and walked the hallways of the hospital, feeling jittery. The internet had said the surgery would take between forty-five minutes and an hour for each eye, giving them plenty of time to freak out. Afterward, Hilary needed to stay at the hospital for an additional hour before they could drive her home.