Page 102 of The Moment of Letting Go

I sit quietly, looking right at her, and she finally returns the gesture.

“I think he just feels really guilty,” she goes on. “But what do I know?”

I smile back at her, but it’s totally forced.

“Though I have to say,” she adds, “Luke may not be feelin’ it anymore, but ever since you came around, he seems a lot”—she shrugs, contemplating—“I dunno, happier, I guess. Landon’s death really messed him up. But it’s been almost a year, and instead of getting better, he just seemed to be getting worse up until recently.” She smiles in what I perceive as a thankful manner. “Maybe you’re just what he needed.”

Somehow her comment doesn’t make me feel like I desperately want it to: happy and warm inside. I’m not sure what it is I feel exactly, but it’s strange and dark and I don’t like it and I wish it’d just go away.

“Are you two gonna see each other after you leave Hawaii?” she asks.

“I hope so.”

“Yeah, well, I hope so, too,” she says, shaking her head and gazing back out at the sky. “I hate to see Luke falling back into that dark place once you’re gone.” She beams over at me. “Besides, I like yah; his past girlfriends, not so much.”

The only thing I hear is: I hate to see Luke falling back into that dark place once you’re gone.

That strange, dark feeling that doesn’t have a name—just go away!

Is Luke latching on to me for the right reasons?

Or have I become something he needs for all the wrong reasons?

The devastating answers—if they’re the answers I don’t want them to be—are sitting heavily in the bottom of my heart.

Luke

The roar of the wind makes it hard to hear one another and I’ve yelled so much my throat is sore. The plane moves through the air at about twelve thousand feet.

“I TOLD YOU!” Seth shouts at me over the roaring wind and the plane’s engine. “SHE SEEMS TO BE HANDLING IT JUST FINE!”

I nod happily while a guy does one last check of my parachute and then my harness.

Seth steps to the door of the plane, a red helmet much like mine stuck to the top of his shaved head.

“THREE MONTHS TOPS!” he says. “SHE’LL BE UP HERE JUMPING WITH YOU!”

“I DOUBT IT!” I shout back at him, adjusting my helmet. “BUT I’M OK WITH THAT!”

He grins at me, displaying his teeth, and then jumps out of the plane—it looks like the wind just snatched him into the sky.

Kendra, wearing a hot pink helmet and with a little black skull-and-bones sticker stuck to the left eye of her goggles, steps to the door next. Her blond hair, braided behind her, whips about her back as the wind hits it.

“SEE YAH AT THE DROP ZONE, SKYWALKER!” she says to me and jumps out.

I laugh out loud and shake my head.

I hate it when she calls me that, but I guess I deserve it since I was the one who started up the Ken-doll nickname she hates so much.

When it’s my turn, I waste no time and jump right out of the plane, free-falling, looking down at the ocean and the earth, so vast and endless, yet so small beneath me. I succumb to the moment and think of my brother.

It feels like I’m flying forever. It’s so breathtaking. Every bad experience I’ve ever had, every bad memory, every failure, every regret, it all just leaves me, and I’m filled with something I never imagined a person could feel before I started doing this: absolute freedom from every kind of darkness.

Nothing can touch me up here.

Nothing.

Except Sienna …

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