For Us (The Girl I Loved Duet 2)

“That’s the thing though, Mom. It doesn’t feel like he betrayed my trust. It feels like the person who I was closest to in the world took everything I had worked for, threw it in the dirt and danced on it. And he never tried to—” I stop, trying to find the words. “He never tried to reach out. Never tried to talk. He said he was sorry, but I thought that if he was sorry he would have contacted me by now.”

“In a way,” she says, “he did. He didn’t have to send those packages but he did. He doesn’t know that you’re sick or that you put off college for a year. For all he knows you’re at one of those schools having the time of your life. I know you feel that you got the short end of the stick here, and in a lot of ways you did. But I don’t think that this has been easy for him either.”

I take a minute to think about that, and how I left him in that hallway. He never reached out to me, but I never did to him either. I blocked him on every avenue I could find because I didn’t want to hear from him. Even if he had tried to reach out, I don’t think I would have gotten the message. Those packages he sent to the schools were probably the only way he could think of to show me what he was thinking. And he never had any idea that I never knew. Not until now.

“I still think it’s too late,” I say.

“Maybe it is,” Mom says. “Maybe it isn’t. If you need any kind of closure, I say it’s worth trying to talk to him. If you don’t, and you don’t want to talk to him that’s fine too. But you need to let the hurt go. It’s not going to help you anymore.”

“Yeah…” I say.

“I won’t say anything more,” she says, looping her arm through mine.

She doesn’t have to. The seed is already in my brain, and whether or not I think about it, it’s going to be there in my subconscious, working its way through. “Yeah.” I say again.

“So what do you want to do now? Chelsea Market is close to the end.”

“What’s that?”

She grins. “I have no idea but it sounds cool from everything I’ve seen online.”

“Sounds good to me.” I try to push what she’s said out of my head, but it’s going to stick. All the way through the amazing market where there are flowers and weird chocolates and honey milkshakes and more food than I could ever possibly eat. It’s delicious and filled with people and I have a hard time envisioning a place that’s more New York. But I’m sure I’ll find one.

We make our way to Washington Square Park and I take a selfie with the arch, and we see another show that evening. By the time we make it back to the hotel we’re both exhausted and ready to sleep, but I’m still thinking about Peter. My mom is right, I do need some kind of closure. Even if we don’t talk in any other way, I need him to know that I forgive him. Because I do. Fully and completely.

I curl up in my bed and turn away from my mother so that she doesn’t see, and I pull up Peter’s number. I never deleted it from my phone, and when I pull it up, all of our previous texts are still there. I start scrolling through, and fight the tears that come with it. I didn’t realize how much of the grief of losing him remained. Maybe now that I’m experiencing the grief, I will finally be able to let it go.

The last thing he ever texted to me was ‘I love you.’

Is he going to see that when I text him? Does he have all of our old texts saved or did he purge me from his life the way I tried to do to him?

I go into his contact and unblock the number. What do I say?

There’s so much to say and yet all of it feels inadequate. Too small. I start to type of bunch of things, and delete them. Again and again. Finally, I settle on something simple.

Peter,

I’m sorry for the things I said, and I wanted you to know that I forgive you. If you want to talk, I’m here.

I stare at it for a long time before I press send, and I watch as the little bar moves across the top of the screen, trying to send. It seems to be having a hard time, and the Wi-Fi in the hotel is crappy so I have to move my phone around a bit for it to finally go through. It still seems to be having a hard time. I feel a sliver of dread when the text bubble turns from blue to green, because that always means there’s a problem with the connection.