Hold on to My Heart (Maine Sullivans)

“I get it, Ash. Life doesn’t always make sense.” Even if Nash felt like nothing in his life had ever made as much sense as it did whenever he was with her. “Before Vienna, I believed I was meant to spend my entire life on the road, never letting myself settle anywhere for too long or connect with anyone too deeply. But after Vienna?” He looked deep into her eyes. “Suddenly, I’m wondering if everything I thought I knew was wrong. And if maybe there’s a different way to live my life.”

“Both of our lives are already really great,” she said softly. “Hopefully, they’ll just keep getting better from here.”

He barely kept from reaching for her hand. “Mine is already better, simply because I met you.”

For a moment, he thought she might kiss him. Instead, she took a step away and said, “I’m starved. Should we eat?”

Swallowing his disappointment at not getting to kiss her, he helped her lay out the blanket and the Irish-inspired comfort food from the picnic basket. Corned beef and cabbage sliders. Mini shepherd’s pies. Bacon-wrapped cabbage. Guinness cheese pretzel bites.

Everything looked delicious, and when he told her so, she said, “My mom is a wonder in the kitchen. She’s a wonder, period. I mean, you’d have to be to raise seven kids, wouldn’t you?”

“Seven of you, wow. That must have been quite a crowd to grow up with.”

“I’m the baby of the group. On the one hand, it was like having six big best friends to play with. On the other, it meant there were six people always ready to tattle on me when they thought I was doing something wrong.”

“Do your siblings all live nearby?”

“Everybody except Hudson, who’s in Boston with his wife, Larissa. And although Brandon has a house in town, he’s usually off in some exotic locale, launching another hotel.”

“Are there any other kids in your family apart from Kevin?”

“My sister Cassie is getting married this weekend, and her fiancé has a little girl named Ruby, whom Cassie has adopted. Ruby is almost two and the cutest kid on the planet. Apart from when Kevin was her age, of course,” Ashley added with a grin. “Hudson and Larissa have been married a while, but don’t have any kids. I don’t know if Rory and Zara and Lola and Duncan are thinking about kids yet. One day, though, I hope there’s lots of little Sullivans running around Bar Harbor the way we did when we were kids.” She reached for an apple slice. “What about you? I know your mom passed away, but do you have any aunts or uncles or cousins or nieces or nephews?”

“Not that I know of. It was always just me and my mom.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, how did she pass away?”

Again, he was struck by how nice it was that Ashley didn’t already know everything about his life. But even though he’d told parts of this story before in interviews, he could feel the emotions building inside of him as he prepared to tell Ashley. “The year after I left home, there was a fire in the apartment building she lived in. The official cause was a wiring issue. She was still living where I grew up in a pretty poor part of Raleigh, North Carolina, and the building was old and not very well maintained.”

He was barely done speaking when she moved closer to put her arms around him and hold him tight.

“Nash, I’m so sorry.”

It had happened a long time ago, and he’d sworn he was over it. But he still found himself holding on to Ashley. Breathing her in. Letting himself be comforted.

She was still hugging him when she asked, “How do you feel about your mom now?”

His arms instinctively tightened around her, and he felt something that was suspiciously like a sob moving through his chest. And then the words were spilling out of his mouth.

“I never got a chance to go back to see her again. Never got a chance to have a relationship with her as anything but a kid. I might have been able to look at her life through different, more mature eyes. I never got the chance to say I understood, or that I forgave her, if either of those things are even true. And I never got to say good-bye.”

So many nevers. That’s how life with his mom had always been. Never hearing I love you. Never laughing together. And never getting to forgive or say farewell.

“The last time we saw each other was the night I left town. She screamed at me, told me I was worthless, that I was just like my waste-of-space father and would never amount to anything. She told me she didn’t care if I ended up dead on a street corner somewhere.”