Page 91 of Happy After All

Ben is her best friend. If she takes a risk and it goes badly, she’ll lose her support system. It’s easy for me to say that he’ll be there for her no matter what. I think that he will be.

But I can also understand why that’s not so easy or clear cut for her.

“I’m really sorry that I was being pushy about Ben,” I say.

“Oh, it’s okay,” she says. “It’s probably fair. Somebody probably should be pushy with me. I’m ... I’m tired of myself. I have two best friends. You and him. I can’t tell him ...”

“You know that he feels the same way.”

“I do,” she says. “That’s the scary part. Because if I jump in, I’m going to be jumping in all the way.”

I can understand why that’s scary.

I haven’t given over any control to another person for a very long time. I haven’t even been trusting enough to tell the people around me my entire story.

“This whole being a person thing really sucks,” I say.

“You write romance,” Elise says. “Doesn’t that make you uniquely qualified to comment on this stuff?”

“Yes. If I were writing your romance, it would be a friends to lovers, and you would have a happy ending, complete with a wedding epilogue.”

“I like the way you think, but I’m concerned life doesn’t work that way.”

“That’s why I don’t feel uniquely qualified to comment, even with my romance pedigree. Those who can’t do ... write, or something?”

She taps the counter with her bejeweled nail. “So, you have a terrible ex who’s a movie star.”

I hold my hand up. “He isn’t a movie star. He is a fixture of midbudget TV movies.”

“Okay, but still. Doesn’t that make you ... not believe in happy endings?”

I think about that for a moment. “No. Though I do think that sometimes in books, happy endings take a different shape than they do in real life. In books, they’re kind of a fixed state. But I think in real life ... we continue to have conversations. We continue to change. We continue to live in the happy ending, even as life happens around us. I think in books, the characters deal with all their issues, and that’s when they can be together. I think in real life it’s not that simple.”

“Great. So you just have to do everything while dealing with all of your immeasurable issues and trying to love somebody.”

My heart squeezes. “That’s what I think. But, at least you have somebody that you love.”

She nods. “Yeah. Somebody that you might lose.”

I think about her daughter. Her beautiful, perfect daughter.

Emma.

You can lose anyone you love. I am so painfully aware of that. My thoughts get tangled up, and it takes me a long time to talk again.

“I think that’s life too,” I say, slowly. “We can always lose something. Hell, we can always lose everything. I think the truly miraculous thing about life is that we keep loving anyway.”

Not necessarily romantic love. Not even necessarily the love a mother has for her child. My own mother’s love certainly wasn’t enduring, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever get the chance to have a child that I get to keep with me.

I’m grateful for my family at the Pink Flamingo. I love Elise. I love my life.

Even though I don’t want to examine the full implications of it right now, everything in me is telling me to reach out to Nathan. To grab hold of him. To keep on connecting to him.

Even knowing how everything could end.

“You’re so funny,” Elise says, looking at me. Her words make me startle.

“What?”

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