Beyond the Point(107)

“You should be what you are,” said Dani. “Sure. Your husband didn’t just get killed. But your friend did. And all of this other stuff? The letter? That matters too. You don’t have to be so strong all the time.”

They sat in silence, letting their coffees go cold.

“You said every guy you’ve ever dated screwed you over,” Dani said, disturbing the quiet. She let the statement linger in the air, without turning it into a question. But the subtext was clear.

Avery chewed on her cheeks. It was so complicated. Ever since she was a little girl, she’d learned that the only way to survive life was to suck it up. Hold it together. Get the grades. Earn the stripes. Go faster than anyone else, and never let them see you cry. She’d trained herself to be harder than she really was and couldn’t fathom opening the box in which she’d carefully packed away her grief. Her weakness. If she opened it, she was pretty sure it would swallow her whole.

“He’s engaged.”

“You’re joking.”

“You and Hannah, last Thanksgiving . . . you tried to tell me. And I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t want to see what was right in front of me.”

“We thought he was aloof,” said Dani. “We didn’t think he was engaged.”

“He never took me to his place. Never introduced me to any of his friends. I was so blind.” Avery shook her head and wiped her eyes with the sides of her forefingers. “And you know the worst part about it? That girl is going to marry him. I’m sure he’s just groveling at her feet, telling her it was all some huge mistake. As if I was some seductress that pulled him into my web. But we were together for a year. He talked about buying us a house, Dani.”

“He met your family!”

“He met my family!” Avery repeated, groaning at the thought of having to tell her mother.

“How did you find out?” asked Dani.

“I called him and his fiancée answered his phone,” said Avery. “I think she found a way to unlock his phone. She said she’d read all of our texts. I haven’t heard from him since.” She laid her head in Dani’s lap and let her friend stroke her hair. On the television, all the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons floated above brownstones, ready for their march down Sixth Avenue.

“You know, you’re not the only one that’s made mistakes,” Dani said after some time had passed. “I was so afraid of losing Locke as a friend, I never took the risk to tell him how I really felt, until it was too late.”

“The wedding,” Avery said, feeling herself cringe. She sat up and put her face in her hands. “Oh, Dani, I didn’t even ask how it went.”

“It’s okay. It was hard, you know? Seeing him with her. And she’s so nice,” Dani said with a roll of her eyes. “Her dad works at the Citadel, so it was this whole big Southern wedding, which was just weird, seeing him marry someone so white, and all the things that come with that. I read scripture at the ceremony.”

“No you didn’t.”

“I did,” said Dani. “In a gorgeous gown, of course. I looked great. But I felt terrible. I just wished I could go back and do it all over again.”

“What would you do differently?”

“I wouldn’t be so afraid.” Dani paused. “As a woman, you don’t want to be the one that makes the first move. But now I realize if I had, I could have gotten it over with a long time ago. I could have saved myself a lot of pain.”

“Is that the point?” Avery said. “Saving ourselves from pain?”

“I guess not.”

“You did the best you could. Maybe deep down, you knew he wasn’t the right one. And so you just let it play out. You can’t fault yourself for that.”

“And you can’t fault yourself for believing Noah.”

“Yes I can,” Avery said. “I mean, thanks. But I’m realizing now, I can’t keep blaming everyone else, like I’m some kind of victim. With Noah, I knew there were red flags; I just pretended they weren’t there. I wanted to believe him. That was my choice. And I have to own that, or else I’m going to keep doing the same thing over and over again. I deserve better than to dupe myself into a relationship simply because I don’t want to be alone.”

Dani raised her eyebrows and nodded slowly, as if she was impressed.

“Dang, Avery,” she said. “Did you just have a breakthough?”

“Yeah. Maybe I did.”

“You know we can’t talk about this stuff with Hannah,” Dani added. “When she gets home.”

“Oh my God, of course not,” said Avery.

“We have to just put all this aside and focus on caring for her. She’s going to be inundated with people. But you and me, we can be her buffer.”

Avery sighed, picking up her coffee mug and feeling the cold porcelain in her hand. She needed a refill.

“I just can’t believe she’s still not home.”





30


November 27, 2006 // Fayetteville Regional Airport

Twelve days after learning that Tim had been killed, Hannah felt the lurch of the airplane as its wheels touched down in Fayetteville. After begging him for mercy, LTC Williams had finally put her on a flight from Kuwait to Germany. Then she’d taken three commercial flights—Germany to New York, New York to Atlanta, Atlanta to Fayetteville.