Reminders of Him(89)

I feel like the words I’m about to say are the most important words that will ever come from me. I wish I were more prepared. Kenna deserves better than to have me and my plea be the only hope left between her and Diem.

I blow out an unsteady breath. “Every decision I make is for Diem. I ended my engagement with a woman I loved because I wasn’t sure she would be good enough for that little girl. That should tell you that I would never put my own happiness before Diem’s. I know you both know that, and I also know you’re just trying to protect yourselves from the pain Kenna’s actions caused. But you’re taking the worst moment of Kenna’s life and you’re making that moment who she is. That isn’t fair. It isn’t fair to Kenna. It isn’t fair to Diem. I’m starting to wonder if it’s even fair to Scotty.”

I hold up the pages in my hand.

“She writes letters to him. To Scotty. She’s been doing it for five years. This is the only one I’ve read, but it was enough to change my entire opinion of her.” I pause, and then backtrack on my words. “Actually, that’s not true. I forgave Kenna before I even knew the contents of the letter. But the second she read this out loud to me, I realized she’s been hurting just as much as all of us have. And we’re slowly killing her by continuing to drag out her pain.” I squeeze my forehead and put even more emphasis on the words I’m about to speak. “We are keeping a mother from her child. That’s not okay. Scotty would be so mad at us.”

It grows quiet when I stop speaking. Too quiet. It’s like they aren’t even breathing. I hand Grace the letter. “It’ll be hard to read. But I’m not asking you to read it because I’m in love with Kenna. I’m asking you to read it because your son was in love with her.”

Grace starts to cry. Patrick still won’t look me in the eye, but he reaches for his wife and pulls her to him.

“I’ve given the last five years of my life to you guys. All I’m asking for in return is twenty minutes. It probably won’t even take you that long to read the letter. After you read it, and take time to process it, we’ll talk. And I’ll respect whatever decisions the two of you make. I swear I will. But please, please give me the next twenty minutes. You owe Diem the opportunity to have another person in her life who will love her as much as Scotty would have loved her.”

I don’t give them an opening to argue or hand the letter back to me. I immediately turn and walk to my house and disappear inside it. I don’t even look out the window to see if they’ve gone inside, or if they’re reading the letter.

I’m so nervous I’m shaking.

I look for my parents and find them in the backyard. My father has items from the RV spread out across the grass, and he’s using the water hose to clean them. My mother is sitting in the patio love seat reading a book.

I take a seat next to her. She looks up from her book and smiles, but when she sees the look on my face, she closes the paperback.

I drop my head in my hands and I start to cry. I can’t help it. I feel like the lives of everyone I love are hanging on this moment, and it’s fucking overwhelming.

“Ledger,” my mother says. “Oh, honey.” She wraps her arm around me and hugs me.





CHAPTER FORTY


KENNA

I woke up with a migraine due to how much I cried last night.

I expected Ledger to text me or call me, but he never did. Not that I want him to. A clean break is better than a messy one.

I hate that my choices from that one night years ago have somehow created another casualty all these years later. How long will the aftershocks from that night continue? Will I feel the ramifications forever?

Sometimes I wonder if we’re all born with equal amounts of good and evil. What if no one person is more or less malevolent than another, and that we all just release our bad at different times, in different ways?

Maybe some of us expel most of our bad behavior as toddlers, while some of us are absolute horrors during the teenage years. And then maybe there are those who expend very little malice until they’re adults, and even then, it just seeps out slowly. A little bit every day until we die.

But then that would mean there are people like me. Those who release their bad all at once—in one horrific night.

When you get all your evil out at once, the impact is much bigger than when it seeps out slowly. The destruction you leave behind covers a much bigger circumference on the map and takes up a much larger space in people’s memories.

I don’t want to believe that there are good people and bad people, and no in-between people. I don’t want to believe I’m worse than anyone else, as if there’s a bucket full of evil somewhere within me that continues to refill every time it runs empty. I don’t want to believe I’m capable of repeating behavior I’ve displayed in the past, but even after all these years, people are still suffering because of me.

Despite the devastation I’ve left in my wake, I am not a bad person. I am not a bad person.

It took five years of weekly therapy sessions to help me realize this. I only recently learned how to say it out loud. “I am not a bad person.”

I’ve been listening to the playlist Ledger made me all morning. It really is just a bunch of songs that have nothing to do with anything sad. I don’t know how he managed to find this many songs. It had to take him forever.