Page 7 of Born in the Spring

I sigh.That nightandthat day. “I’m tired,” I dismiss, the half-truth calling up the exhaustion that’s settled into my bones. My mind, however, remains restless.

“I figured as much.” Helena drones her disappointment before giving a lift to the praise. “But at least we’ve gotten somewhere.”

“I don’t need to talk about that night,” I tell her, half sure I’m reminding her. I don’t have regrets about that choice—the one I made up until Shepherd walked away. And I don’t want to have regrets about any more.

“I think you do,” she counters.

“I thought knowing what I need hasn’t been a problem forme,” I counter back, but with another amused twitch.

“It hasn’t,” she hedges, with a hint of her own amusement. “But I’m making sure you’re still movingforward—”

“The only way for me to move forward is to go back,” I say, some hedging of my own in the words.

Shyla Mountain was the home I never wanted to leave. I didn’t have a choice in leaving then, and I don’t have a choice in going back now. Plenty of choices have been made for me, but I’m not breaking down over this one, the one I can still fix.

My heart failed me with Shepherd. It failed us. I sometimes hesitate to say it wasmewho failed us, because maybe he did too. But that night failed us both. And what’s left of me, and us, is still on that mountain.

Memories meet me in my sleep, when I can get it, and they’re a skip in my pulse throughout every day, but it’s the moment I left that keeps my wounds open. I can still hear my tires crunching the snow. The small screech of my brakes before I pulled off the road. Sounds so vivid, that send for me the most.

I’ve taken my space, and it’s only gotten bigger. Six months away. Six months after. And I’ve still not recovered. I may never recover fully, but I’m not going to get better in this stagnant little apartment of nothing.

“You want to go back, so you’re waiting for someone to tell you you can,” Helena deduces, and it’s funny she puts it that way, because Amie did too. She asks me all the time when I’m coming back, and I always respond with,when I can. She understands my meaning, and the last time I gave her that response, she gave her permission.I say you can.

“Are you truly ready for that?” Helena asks next.

I drop my head against the back of the couch, the tie holdingback my hair pressing less uncomfortably against my head than her probing to keep me reflective. “What do you think?” I ask back, my voice a genuine reach for her opinion. If she’s suddenly discouraging, I might second guess myself.

“You have to tell me, Elara,” she says, with a small stress onyouandme. I can’t work off the words in her mouth, and she can’t put the words into mine. But when I only blink at the spinning ceiling fan, she uses my silence as an opening to question more. “Are you ready to see him?”

Jasper’s eyes, the conflict I saw in them, his brokenness, the last time they looked into mine, come back to warn me ofwhatI could be going back to.

But I knowwhois waiting for me. And I have to trust that. And myself.

My swallow is loud in this too quiet room, aching my throat, and I sit back up. “I miss him. So, of course,” I say, then add with my own stresses, “I miss everyone. I’m ready to see all of them.” Amie. Vanessa. The kids I worked with and their parents. . .

I need the physical presence of everyone who knew Shepherd like I did. Over the phone only gives so much, and it’s not the same.

“I’m just trying to get inside your head, Elara,” Helena says, a jab at the job she still has to do, and I snort a laugh.

I already know that not showing my emotions doesn’t mean I’m not feeling them. But it was also her professional reminder that, in the midst of grief, it’s stillperfectly okayto also laugh, to smile, and to be happy and live. It doesn’t mean that I’m not sad or that I don’t care. I needed to hear that one, because, sometimes, I think Shepherd would disagree. I feel like he’s staring down at me, frowning in my betrayal, seeing me tryingto be happy and live, while he can’t.

“And you rang me,” Helena adds, with a smile in the lighthearted plaint.

“Thanks for taking my late night calls,” I tell her to that, as I’ve told her before. She claims I’m never waking her, but the alertness in her voice is night and day, so I know this is the friend side of her picking up the phone at this time.

“I gave you my private number for a reason. I’m gunning for your happiness.” In her pause, I make a finger-gun behind the pillow that she’d smile over if she could see me. “And I agree with you. You should go back.”

On the heels of Helena’s encouragement, I declare to myself that I’m going back, my sigh of relief relaxing me more into the couch as my heart aches with its lightest beats.

“How’s your sleeping been?” she checks in now, segueing into the first of her winding down questions. This is one she knows the answer to—us being on this call at now close to three in the morning an answer in itself—but she has to ask anyway.

“Still not the greatest,” I say my repeat. She’s given me some techniques to combat the insomnia—to use her word—but my struggle with sleep hasn’t changed, my schedule still not the same. I’m surprised I haven’t been fired from the small receptionist job I found here, producing tired work. I have tomorrow off, and I’m now sure of what I’m using the free hours for.

“And how’s the guilt today?”

“Still better,” I say my next repeat, as Jasper, again, crosses my mind, and the hope that his has eased too.

Helena tried to recondition those thoughts, without specifics, by taking me through the harsh process of seeingmine and Shepherd’s choices that night as separate. I didn’t tell him to get drunk and take his board out on the slope.

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