Park Avenue Player(103)

When I arrived at my door that night, I paused before opening it. I knew Elodie had received a letter, too. I assumed she was in a similar predicament of confused emotions.

When I finally entered, I saw her sitting alone on the couch.

She got up fast and ran to me, taking me into her arms. The tension in my body dissipated as I allowed myself to be held by her without retreating. I’d resisted her far too much in the past several days. At the very least, we needed this right now.

We held each other for a long time before she finally let me go and said, “I can’t believe it.”

I let out a deep breath and nodded. “But it’s the first time anything has ever made sense to me when it came to her. Even when I saw her lying there in the hospital, it never occurred to me that she could’ve known about her illness before she ended things with me all those years ago.”

Elodie stared off. “I’ve been thinking back to some of the conversations she and I had when I was dating you. I don’t understand how she could’ve endured listening to me go on and on. That took a lot of strength.”

“Everything she did took strength. Handling the stuff about us was a drop in the bucket compared to surviving every day on this Earth knowing she was going to die young.”

I closed my eyes. That got to me the most: the courage it took to live like that.

Elodie seemed more concerned about me than herself as she placed her hands around my face. “Are you going to be okay, Hollis?”

She didn’t realize that even though this news was hard to grasp, it brought me comfort to know my lingering emotions over Anna all these years hadn’t been in vain.

“Reading her letter was jarring, but it’s brought me a strange sense of peace,” I said. “I’d been so conflicted about whether she would’ve wanted me at her funeral, conflicted about why I was so devastated to lose someone who had apparently betrayed me. It’s going to take a while for this to sink in, but I’m more okay today than I was yesterday, if that makes sense. I thought we’d never get answers, that we’d have to live with uncertainty forever. Now we know everything.”

“Yeah.” She sniffled. “We do.”

We moved over to the couch, and Elodie rested her head on my chest. I wrapped my arm around her as we sat in silence. I didn’t want her to leave tonight. I wanted to sleep next to her and bury myself inside her to forget about the pain of this day.

But I wanted those things to comfort myself.

I still didn’t feel right about jumping back into things with Elodie until I was ready to give her everything she deserved. Just when I’d started to think I might be able to try again to pick up my life where it had left off, this new bomb had dropped. Even though it had brought me some peace, it also brought new emotions that had to be dealt with, namely grappling with the realization that Anna never stopped loving me. She’d died knowing I loved someone else. Despite the fact that she’d orchestrated that, I knew it had to be painful for her.

Hailey walked out into the living room. “Are you two okay?”

“Yeah, we’re fine,” I told her.

Her face said she knew that was bullshit.

“No more secrets, guys, remember?”

Elodie looked up at me and mouthed, “Can we tell her?”

I nodded.

“Sit down, Hailey,” Elodie said.

She took a seat on the chair across from us.

Elodie sat up. “Today we both received letters from our friend Brianna.”

“She wrote you from heaven?”

Elodie shook her head. “No. She wrote us before she died.”

“Oh. What did she say?”

“She admitted something neither of us ever knew.”

“What?”

I spoke before Elodie had to explain it. “Apparently, she found out about her illness just before she ended things with me all those years ago. And so the reason I believed we’d broken up all these years wasn’t true.”

“She lied?”

“It’s complicated, but she didn’t want me to have to suffer knowing she was sick and watching her die, the way I’d had to with my mother. So she pretended to choose to leave so I…wouldn’t love her anymore.”

Hailey looked down at the floor. “That’s so sad.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s a prime example of selflessness.”

“What did she write to you, Elodie?”

“Well, she actually told us both something that’s really pretty unbelievable. She was the one who set me up to apply for this job. She somehow knew it was your uncle’s listing and planned the whole thing so I would meet him. She hoped we would fall for each other.”

Hailey’s eyes moved back and forth as she processed that information. “I always thought God sent you. But it was Anna? She’s better than God.”

Elodie smiled. “She’s basically an angel, both while she was here and beyond.”

“So if she wants you guys together, why are you so sad?” Hailey asked.

Elodie looked at me. That answer wasn’t a simple one.

“I guess we’re still trying to accept how hard it must’ve been for her,” I said.

Hailey got up from her seat and gave me a hug, which was rare. “Thank you for telling me.” Then she hugged Elodie, too.