Page 16 of Could Have Been Us
His hands move up and down my back as I inhale his clean soap and spice scent. God, he smells so damn good, feels so damn perfect, and I want to stay hereforever.
The word whispers around my heart, but I push it down.
Jack isn’t my forever.
He was my once.
“How? When?” he asks.
“The other day, but Samuel called me about it a few hours ago.”
Jack releases me, taking the warmth of his body with him and leaving me colder than before.
He moves toward the window, running his fingers through his thick brown hair. When he turns to me, his eyes are filled with questions and hesitancy. “Are you okay?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. Are you?”
The sound of a half laugh and half sigh comes from his lips. “No. I don’t know what to think.”
“I’m going.”
“Going where?” he asks.
“To Georgia. I need to pay my respects.”
Jack’s breathing grows labored as he stares at me. “What about her?”
After all this time, he still struggles to say her name. When we gave her away, he had to release everything about Kinsley. He has never mentioned her to me since. Part of me has hated him for it.
I’ve wanted him to live in the grief of giving her away the same as I have. Each year, her birthday passes, and each year, I spend it alone, crying and thinking of who she is. I’ve looked at her beautiful face in photos, always there, just on the cusp of my life but never a part of it.
Another part of me has envied him. How he’s been able to just go on with life, pretending as if we never held her, loved her for those brief moments, and then clung to each other as we dealt with the pain of losing her. We both agreed to never speak of it. Not because we worried not only about my father’s threats, but because it would change nothing.
All it would do is hurt people in our lives for lying and us for the fact we don’t have her.
“I won’t see her. I’ve already spoken to Samuel, and I’m going there now.”
He shakes his head. “This is wrong, Stella.”
“What?”
“You going there. It’s a risk. What if she sees you?”
“Misty was my friend, Jack. I . . .”
“You’re going for you.”
I snap back at his words as though he’s slapped me. “What?”
He closes his eyes, looking away as shame creeps in. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just that it feels like everything we’ve done is crumbling. We’ve spent years convincing ourselves that giving her away was the right thing, and now you’re going to where she lives?”
“Screw you, Jack. If that were the case, I could’ve asked Misty if I could meet her anytime over the last twelve years. I’ve stayed away because it was the right thing, but going and paying my respects to the woman who has raisedourdaughter, well, that’s the right thing too.”
If there’s nothing else I know in this world, at least I know that. Had we kept Kinsley in the lives we were living twelve years ago, nothing would be this way. I wouldn’t have been able to give her anything. My father made it clear that, if I kept her, I wouldn’t have any support. He would ensure my family cut me off and I would know exactly what it was like to be a single teenage mother. I would’ve been working in the factory, barely making ends meet. Jack would never have gotten the job he did out of college or risen up the corporate ladder as fast as he had.
Kinsley would’ve learned poverty and hunger, and I would’ve hated myself.
“I know.”
