Husband by Choice

And then there’d been the incident outside Carly’s bedroom window. She’d been so certain it was Steve outside that window that she’d risked her life to prevent him from hurting anyone else.

And at the house...Steve hadn’t been outside the shed, hunting her down. Max and Chantel had been there. Hugging....

“You can’t expect to be aware of every possibility in the world,” Lila said in that reassuring tone of hers. “Anyone, all of us, can only make determinations based on our own perceptions and perspectives. Just because you were wrong about something doesn’t mean you can’t trust your instincts.”

Yes. Right.

“What if your instincts are wrong?”

There was no movement from Lila’s chair and Jenna lifted her head and glanced over. The woman was staring right at her.

“You don’t always know,” Lila said. “That’s part of the challenge of being human,” she said. “You have to remain fully alive, every minute of every day, always aware that what you see in front of you might not be there at all.”

“And what you don’t see could be sitting right in front of you.”

“Exactly.”

“So the key is to not get set in your ways.”

“Maybe. And maybe there is no key. Maybe each day is meant to be lived for what it is.”

“So how do you stay safe?”

“Ah, so that’s the real question, is it?”

She wasn’t sure. “What’s the answer?”

“I don’t have it.”

It wasn’t the response she’d been expecting.

“I was so sure that if I kept my mind on what I knew to be true, stayed in control, mentally, I’d be fine.

“But when you try to stay in control mentally, when you stay focused only on what you know, you close the door to knowing differently.”

“Yes, you do.”

It all felt so hopeless. She felt so helpless.

“I think I blame myself for the fact that my family was killed in a car accident and I wasn’t. I was thrown from the car and I lived.”

Hearing her own words, Jenna cringed. Obviously she’d lived. She was sitting right there.

“I really believe that I was saved because I have more to do here on earth. I certainly didn’t save myself. And I know there was no way I could have saved any of them. I was a kid. I wasn’t to blame for the accident. I was too young to drive and had nothing to do with any of it. But...I don’t know, could I still, deep inside, be blaming myself?”

“I think the fact that you’re asking the question says that you are, on some level, taking some sort of responsibility for what happened. Tell me about the accident.”

She was so messed up, so desperate for clarity, that for the second time that night she spoke of something that she normally kept buried in the deepest recesses of her psyche.

And as she talked, she remembered little things th

at she hadn’t known were buried there. Like the chocolate bars.

“Anytime we took a trip, my mother would buy us each our favorite candy bar,” she said, remembering her favorite. And those of her mom and dad and brother, too.

And there was the cheeseburger Chad had ordered when they stopped for lunch. He’d taken so long to finish it their folks had let him bring it in the car. She’d sat there watching him eat it, one little bite at a time, and wished that she had one, too.

“I remember my father looking in the rearview mirror, watching to make certain that we both buckled our seat belts when we got back in the car,” she said slowly, back in that car, seeing her father’s raised brow. “I pretended to put mine on. I made it click, but didn’t fasten it. I hated the way it dug into my hip bone.”