I hardly notice anyone else, anyway. I’m just too wrapped up in Oliver, in feeling like I’ve catapulted back in time fifteen years to when I first fell in love with him and it—and I—are fresh and new again.
We’re the last ones in.
And I feel like this could be my forever, as I fall asleep curled up with him in a flower-painted bus under the stars.
* * *
We’re on the road again the next day.
And it’s our last stop in Alberta before the cozy cottage waiting for us and our new lives.
And also our last goodbyes.
It still floors me. Not just that these people are willing to help at all, but that they actually look sad when it’s time for me to go. Half of them should want me torn limb from limb for what I did in my darker years, for the ways I could’ve done more, even after I’d seen the light and sworn to dismember Galentron.
What comes next is a total surprise.
I don’t expect the hugs.
I don’t expect the well-wishes or Clarissa thrusting a box of her custom-made hot-pink candy into my hands like I didn’t used to creep that poor child out when she was just a baby herself.
Frankly, I’m surprised I didn’t turn her off candy for life, every time I used to ask her if she’d want a piece during those long, strange meetings at her father’s house. I singled her out because I had a soft spot for her, even if I’ll never admit it to her face.
Maybe a small part of me saw young Clarissa Bell as the girl who could’ve been my own lost daughter.
I also get sticky kisses galore from little baby mouths, and claps on the shoulder from big hands, and just…
More than I know how to deal with.
It’s almost a comical relief to settle in alone with Oliver and work on recentering myself.
But it’s also strange as we realize we’re right back in a place that’s not too different from our little sojourn in his Alberta cabin.
Only, this is forever.
This is us now.
The start of our new lives, and that ring heavy proof on my finger.
We look at each other wide-eyed and starry for a tense moment as the bus pulls away. It leaves just us and the snow and the little grey-roofed house with the pretty scalloped edges on the eaves.
He starts to say something.
So do I.
Then we both stop, bursting into laughter.
And suddenly, it’s easy again.
I give him a grin. He gives me a sillier one back, and I marvel at just how easy it is being free.
It stays easy, too, as we settle into the routine of our first few days. We finally get a chance to figure out what it means to live together, be together, find quiet ways to fill the time with books and gardening and just talking to each other as if we’ll never tire of each other, no matter what we say, no matter how long the brilliant Alaskan nights stretch on.
We wonder if it ever stops snowing in Alaska, but it does. A few months in, the harsh winter chill gives way to a mellow spring and a summer that’s brief, but glorious.
He starts a new collection of fine wine in our underground cellar.
Yes, there’s even a couple bottles of Delaney which he only breaks out on special date nights when he wants to torture me.
I don’t hang up my designer clothes, but I develop an obsession with kitschy costume jewelry from a little secondhand shop in town, and start trying to make it me.
Roughing it out in small-town Alaska isn’t the kind of life I’d ever have imagined for myself.
But it’s the perfect life I wouldn’t trade for anything.
…except for one nagging thing.
A silent question, always waiting. An unfinished chapter. An unmade call.
Until the day when the phone finally rings, sitting on the charger in its little study nook off the kitchen.
It takes me a heavy, slow-motion second to realize what I’m hearing.
Then I lift my head sharply from stirring my coffee, forgetting how to breathe as that old tension knifes through me. An instinctive response to the adrenaline rush, awakening those killer instincts that hone in on that phone like it’s a gun held to my face.
Only, I think I’m more scared of that phone than I’ve ever been of any weapon.
I’m scared to answer it, scared she’ll say never contact me again.
The terror makes me selfish enough to let it keep ringing and ringing until it’s almost too late.
No!
Fuck that.
I’m Fuchsia Delaney. Since when do I fear anything?
I told you before, I’m no hero.
But one way or another…
I won.
This is my story, and it’s still being written.
And for the first time in my life?
I’m the one who gets to tell it.
And I hope I can help my daughter tell her own story, too.