Page 31 of Reclaiming Love

Chapter 17

Asilent sadness spread all around the miserable place and even the floral shots of color that peppered the bleak landscape, like Monet teardrops on a dull canvas, were powerless to lift the gloom.

A sea of tranquility descended over him, covering the turbulent sadness that lingered deep inside.

Of course he’d come empty-handed. What was the point of buying flowers? It wasn’t as if she’d admire them, or tell him how much she loved the color, or the smell of them. It wasn’t as though she could run her fingers over the petals.

Not now that she lay under here.

Noah crouched down and his gaze dropped to the mottled dark gray tombstone. Cold and hard, it protruded like a shimmering iceberg from the chilled, rock-solid earth.

She was one of the first people he had loved, and now she was gone. At first he started to count the hours since he’d last seen her. The days, and then the months and ….now it was a year. Through it all he still wondered: could I have saved her?

The last time he’d seen her had been two weeks before she died. They had separated by then; it had been her way of pushing him away, the way she always engineered everything. She’d fought for control—control of her body, control of her urges, of the constant eating and purging.

Bit by bit he was piecing it together. The patterns and the excuses. Always the excuses: why she couldn’t meet up, the last minute cancelling of plans. He would later discover that it was during these sudden, last-minute unexplained absences that she would binge, then vomit, then swear she’d never do it again. Then she would go and work out for hours at the gym. It was a constant battle, between excess and repentance, a cycle she could never break.

Her parents had offered to accompany him to the cemetery today, but he knew they each needed their time alone to grieve. As much as he had loved her, even Noah knew that in time, while he might not completely forget, he would move on. That someone else would come along and replace the memories, the touches, the hopes.

But for her parents, there would be no such respite, no such replacement. Nor for her sister. He knew, despite his own pain—as sharp and as deep as it was—the pain of her parents went deeper, was sharper, would be ever present.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. Yet at the same time he never thought of her as being here, even as he read the inscription on the tombstone.

The Bree he’d fallen in love with was not here. Even when he recalled their times together, in his memories she was never the frail ghost of her former self. He chose to remember only the beautiful, healthy girl from high school.

The sorrow came not just from losing the beautiful girl who had gone but also for the lost chances and missed moments that might have saved her life.

It didn’t matter how many times his parents or her parents told him he couldn’t have done anything. He still believed he could have.

Crouched over the unforgiving earth, Noah’s eyes focused on the tombstone, and he sat, a solitary figured hunched over, until the angry sky turned even darker.

He had to be here, to mark the passing of a year.

But Christmas Eve would be forever tainted.

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