The Last Thing He Told Me

“I’m asking you what you left out. About you.”

“While you can still get off the plane? We haven’t started taxiing yet. There’s probably still time…”

He squeezed my hand, trying to make light of it. But I was still jumpy. I was suddenly too jumpy.

“What do you want to know?” he said.

“Tell me about Olivia,” I said.

“I’ve told you a lot about Olivia,” he said.

“Not really. I feel like I know only the basics. College sweetheart, teacher. Georgia born and bred.”

I didn’t add the rest… that he lost her in a car accident. That he hadn’t been involved, seriously, with anyone since.

“Now that I’m going to be in Bailey’s life, in a serious way, I want to know more about her mother.”

He tilted his head, like he was considering where to start.

“When Bailey was a baby? We all took a trip to Los Angeles. It was the weekend that a tiger escaped from the Los Angeles Zoo. A young tiger, who had been at the zoo for only a year or so. He didn’t just escape his cage, but the entire premises. And he ended up in a family’s backyard in Los Feliz. When he got there, he didn’t hurt anyone. He curled up under a tree and took a nap. Olivia was consumed with this story, which is probably how she found out the other part.”

I smiled. “What’s that?”

“The family whose backyard the tiger had curled up in had gone to the zoo only a few weeks before and one of their two young boys had been obsessed with the tiger. The boy had cried when he had to leave the tiger, not understanding why he couldn’t take the tiger home with him. How do you explain that the tiger ended up at this boy’s home? A coincidence? That was what the zoologists decided. The family lived pretty close to the zoo. But Olivia thought it served as proof. That sometimes you find your way to the place that wants you most.”

“I love that story.”

“You would have loved her,” he said. Then he smiled, looked out the airplane window. “There

was no way… not to love her.”

I squeezed his shoulder. “Thank you.”

He turned back toward me. “Do you feel better?”

“Not really,” I said.

He laughed. “What else do you want to know?”

I tried to think of what I was asking for—it wasn’t about Olivia. It wasn’t even about Bailey. Not exactly, at least.

“I think… I think I need you to say it out loud,” I said.

“Say what?”

“That we’re doing the right thing.”

That was the closest I could get to it—the closest way to express what I was actually worried about. I wasn’t used to being a part of a family, not since I lost my grandfather. And that didn’t exactly feel like a family. That felt like a twosome, plowing our way through the world, just me and him. His funeral was the last time I even saw my mother. Her calls on my birthday (or somewhere around my birthday) were our only form of communication at this point.

This was going to be something different. It would be the first time I was a part of an actual family. I felt completely unsure of how to do it properly, how to count on Owen, how to show Bailey she could count on me.

“We’re doing the right thing,” Owen said. “We’re doing the only thing. I swear to you, on everything that matters to me, that’s how I feel.”

I nodded, calmed. Because I believed him. And because I wasn’t really nervous, at least not about him. I knew how much I wanted him—how much I wanted to be with him. Even if I didn’t know everything about him yet, I knew that he was good. I was nervous about everything else.

He leaned in and put his lips against my forehead. “I’m not going to be that asshole who says you kinda have to trust someone at some point.”

“You’re going to be the asshole who says it without saying it?”