Page 46 of Slow Burn
“I need to go now, Princess. I will always be your mama in my heart. I will always think of you, wonder where you are, how you’re growing, what you might be doing. I will love you to the end, Princess.” I am a mess but I fight through it.
I rock her a few more moments, until I hear the front door close. I hold her close, my arms tight, my nose smoothing over her soft hair, breathing her deep. After pressing a kiss to her face, her nose, I settle her back into her crib. I crank the mobile and Amelia giggles, reaching for the dangling owls.
Takes everything in me to turn away from that baby and walk out.
My bags are in the hall by the door, and Levi is there waiting. I don’t know what else to say, so I don’t say anything. I don’t deserve a second chance, a hail Mary, and we both know it. I can’t look at him as I hook my bag over my shoulder and start to head down the hall.
“Brynn…” I shake my head when he says my name right as I reach the door.
“I can’t take back what I did. What I didn’t do. And, I don’t want to. It got me here. It got me you and Amelia for a while. I knew it was a fairytale, knew it would not have the happily ever after I kept promising. Because, how can someone like me deserve something like that? Everything I felt was real, everything I told you, it was real. I wish I had made the right choices from the beginning, Levi.” My shoulders bounce once because I know I can’t take that back, either.
“I wish…I wish you had taken fifty-five seconds. Just like I should have last summer. It might be so different if we had.” I nod and open the door, refusing to look back.
“We were worth fifty-five seconds. I knew that then, and I know that now. I am so sorry, Levi. Goodbye.” I close the door with a soft click and race down the stairs.
A cab is waiting at the curb and that guts me. There was no chance this was ending any other way. I knew that. I knew that last night as I told him the truth. Knew that this morning when I woke up on the floor alone. When I realized he couldn’t even be in the same room as me, in the same house even, as I said goodbyes.
Seeing that cab waiting makes it real. This is over.
