Page 24 of Born to Run Back
Theo returned his attention to the stones before he spoke. “I did the same thing.” His voice carried the particular exhaustion of someone who’d been excavating their own buried truths for months. “I’ve been in therapy. Turns out I was using all this to avoid dealing with my mother’s death four years ago. Every stone I placed here was like laying flowers on her grave.”
We continued to work, watching months of devotion disappear into bags and boxes. Soon, only the essential pieces remained—the driftwood carved with the kids’ initials, a handful of the smoothest stones we’d each brought on different nights, the small glass vial that had once held rainwater from that terrible October storm.
“I keep thinking about that first night,” I said, sitting back on my heels, my hands stilling for a moment. “Not the night we had sex, but before. The night of the accident. The way it felt to help someone. To matter to another human being in a life-or-death way.”
“I know,” Theo said, his voice thick with recognition, with this particular ache of understanding. “I felt it, too. Like I was finally necessary to somebody. Finally important enough because I could be the one to save someone. Fucking pathetic, right?”
I shook my head. “Of course it’s not pathetic, Theo. It’s human. You’re human.”
He looked at me. “You’re the first person who saw me in years.”
My eyes watered. “Y-You are, too. I was invisible before you.”
Without conscious thought, we moved toward each other across the diminished memorial. When his arms wrapped around me this time, everything was different. No desperation. No hunger. No frantic need to disappear in each other’s pain. Simply two people who’d shared something terrible and were finally ready to carry it properly, together but not dependent. Still connected, yet not consumed.
I cried on Theo’s shoulder—not the wild, shattered sobs of that first October night, but the quieter tears of genuine grief finally allowed to flow in the right direction. For Beck, who’d never become the pediatric surgeon he’d dreamed of being. For Delaney, trapped in the long, uncertain journey of healing. For the two broken strangers we’d been, so hungry for connection we’d mistaken a crisis for compatibility, and the intensity of it for intimacy.
His hand moved through my hair with infinite tenderness, and I felt his own tears fall warm against my temple. We held each other in this sacred place one last time, letting ourselves feel everything we’d been afraid to feel when we’d been too busy using each other as shields against the dark.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered into the wool of his jacket, breathing in that familiar scent of spicy aftershave and autumn nights. “For all of it. For using you to avoid my own broken pieces.”
“Me too.” His voice emerged muffled against my hair, rough with months of accumulated regret. “You deserved better than becoming someone’s escape from reality.”
We stayed rooted there until the tears gentled into something like tranquility, until the night air began to bite at our exposed faces and remind us we were still alive, still breathing, still capable of choosing what inevitably must come next.
When we finally pulled apart, Theo reached up and touched my cheek with his warm, calloused hand, his thumb tracing the salt tracks there like he was memorizing them.
“Could we…” he started, then stopped, his expression uncertain. “I mean, would you want to…”
“Start over?” I finished for him, understanding flooding through me like warm water. “Actually get to know each other this time?”
“Yeah. But slowly. Really slowly. Like people do when they’re not running from something.”
Hope bloomed in my chest, different from everything that had come before; this was quieter, more sustainable, rooted in possibility rather than pure desperation.
”I’d like that very much,” I said, smiling.
He leaned forward and kissed me then, soft and careful and completely different from that frenzied night against my Honda. This kissasked permission. This kiss had nothing to do with drowning and everything to do with learning to break the surface, tosurvive.It tasted like tears and moonlight and the tentative promise of building something real from the ashes of our shared madness.
When we broke apart, we were both smiling tenderly at each other.
“Let’s do this right,” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Let’s.”
We finished dismantling what was left of the memorial together in comfortable quiet. Everything disappeared except for the carved driftwood marker and two stones—one smooth river rock each, small enough to carry in a pocket, worn enough to fit perfectly in the palm of even my hand. A reminder of where we’d been, but not a shrine to live inside forever.
When we walked back to our cars, Theo pulled out his phone, its screen glowing blue-white in the darkness as he opened his calendar app.
“So...” he said, and his smile was shy, hopeful, entirely without that painful edge that had characterized everything between us before. “Coffee? I mean, proper coffee this time. Somewhere we actually talk about ourselves instead of sitting there like weirdos on a bad blind date.”
I giggled. “I’d like that. But maybe somewhere with better lighting this time. And definitely somewhere that serves more than just coffee and awkward silence.”
“Deal.”
Driving away from mile marker eighteen for what I knew would be the last time as a ritual, I felt lighter than I had in years. Not because the grief was gone—that would always be a part of me, woven in the fabric of the woman I’d become that terrible October night—but because it no longer owned me, no longer defined every choice I made in every step I took with every breath I drew.
In my rearview mirror, I watched Theo’s headlights follow mine down the canyon road, and for the first time since that fateful night, I wasn’t afraid of where we were going.
