The Girl in the Love Song (Lost Boys #1)(122)

We’ll have a new life.

Miller unlatched the case and retrieved his guitar. “We’ve been here before. Seven years ago. That was the day you saved my life. Feels like a lifetime.”

“I think you saved mine that day too,” I said. “That’s when I knew I was in love with you. A pretty big revelation for a thirteen-year-old. I didn’t know what to do with it all.”

Miller turned to sit with his back against the mattress, raised all the way up.

“Come here.” He made room for me as I climbed onto the bed, my back to his chest. He set the guitar in my lap, his arms reaching around me. “I don’t know what to do with it all, either. Or mess it up with words. I want you to feel it, Vi.”

I leaned back against him to give him room, his cheek brushing mine. I could feel his heart thump against me, a steady beat that kept time. The first notes of our song reverberated through me, joined by Miller’s singing, low and rough, as he strummed the guitar gently.

“You know, you know I love you so…”

Miller’s playing stopped abruptly, and he pushed the guitar away. He wrapped me up in him and pressed his face to my neck.

“I’m here.” I held him, trying to be the anchor he’d so often been for me, when my world felt like it was coming apart. “Are you…scared?”

“Only of leaving you.”

I closed my eyes. “You won’t. I won’t let you.”

His chest rose and fell against my back in a heavy sigh. “I want to marry you, Vi. I want to grow old with you. I want to celebrate wedding anniversaries with you that make people stand up and applaud when they hear the number. I want to tell people that you’re the love of my life and that I knew that was true because I met you when I was thirteen years old. And that was it. There was never going to be anyone else.”

I turned in the circle of his arms, a tremulous smile on my lips. What are you asking?

He read my thoughts as he so often did. “I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, so I’m just putting it out there to who or whatever’s listening that if I get the chance, I’m not going to screw it up again.”

“Neither will I,” I said. “I’ll just put that out there too. To who or whatever might be listening.”

Happiness shone behind Miller’s eyes. Elusive. He never trusted it to stay, and I vowed to do everything in my power to give it to him, every day.

He kissed me, and despite the fear, a lightness swelled in my chest. Hope. I fed it instead of the fear and smiled into our kiss. A pact that sealed the proposals and vows permeating that hospital room but waited for another day to be made real.

I knew that day would come. Miller and I ebbed and flowed, but we always came back. Inevitable as the tide and beautiful in the end.





Epilogue





Three years later…



I see her the minute I take the stage. Even among a thousand faces in the festival crowd and wearing a floppy hat to protect her fair skin, I recognize Violet immediately. She’s standing with Sam. He’s getting taller, filling out more from the skinny boy we fostered six months ago. He has a camera up to his eye, snapping photos of the crowd, the festival tents, and me and my band on stage.

My family.

We didn’t plan for this to happen so soon. Violet still has her residency to complete, but Brenda from Helping Hands International called me and said it was an emergency. The foster family that Sam had been staying with was moving and they weren’t taking him with them.

I could only imagine how that felt. Like a family pet left behind, too inconvenient to take with. It wasn’t the foster family’s fault, necessarily. That’s how the system works; people coming and going in Sam’s life so that he knows not to get too attached. But Jesus, he’s eleven years old. He shouldn’t have to protect himself like that.

That’s a parent’s job.

It was supposed to be temporary, until the agency could find a permanent placement for Sam. But it became pretty obvious, pretty quick that Violet wasn’t going to let him go.

I can’t either, but God, I love how she loves him. We’re young and she’s busy as hell, working her ass off at UC San Francisco, but she made room for Sam in our home and in her heart immediately.

She’s still on track to be an endocrinologist, even though the transplant I received from my dad essentially turned me into a former diabetic. But Vi didn’t change her course solely for me, anyway. She just found her passion. I like to joke that she started med school when she was thirteen, taking care of me. I know she’s going to be an incredible doctor, and I have been doing everything in my power to make sure that her runway is as free of obstacles as possible.

After the Seattle concert three years ago and my hospitalization, I took a lot of time off. The plan was to stay in Texas while Violet finished her studies at Baylor, but she missed Santa Cruz too much. Reluctantly, she allowed me to take over her tuition so that she could go to UCSC just like she’d always dreamed. She finished her undergrad and then began medical school in San Francisco. We got a place in the Marina district with views of the Bay and Alcatraz, and I wrote an album. If you can call lyrics scratched into a notebook an album. But that’s how I started too. Thirteen years old, putting Violet in my music.

I quit touring to recuperate from surgery and my dad kept his promise. Once the surgery was over, he went back to Oregon to be with his wife. We email now and then; he likes to joke that he’s checking in to see how his internal organs are doing and scold them if they’re giving me a hard time. For the most part, they’re not. I have to take immunosuppressant drugs, but he was a near perfect match. Thanks to him, my life has become vastly easier. A tremendous gift and a bridge toward the two of us maybe someday having a relationship outside of an email or two.