Coming Home(182)

After a few seconds of silence, Holly sighed in exasperation. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what?”

She gave Leah a patronizing look. “You had a plan. You thought you were prepared. But when it was go-time, you panicked. You got scared, and you bailed.”

Leah blinked at her. “Okay?”

“Jesus, Leah! You still don’t see it?”

“See what?”

“That Danny’s just panicking!” she shouted. “He thought he was prepared, and he wasn’t, and it scared the shit out of him, so he backed out! It’s the same damn scenario!”

Leah stared at her friend, trying to swallow the lump in her throat. After a stunned second, she shook her head. “I don’t think—”

“He loves you,” Holly interrupted, her voice softening significantly. “You know he does, Leah. I can see it in your face, even now. He’s just scared. That’s all this is.”

Leah swiped at a fresh round of tears with shaking hands.

“He just needs someone to shove him. Hard.”

Leah laughed through a sob as she wiped her nose with her napkin, and Holly smiled as she picked her fork back up.

“So,” she said, looking pointedly at Leah. “Are you gonna shove him?”

Leah inhaled deeply as she picked apart her napkin. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “I don’t know if I can. If he even wants me to. I don’t know anything anymore.”

“Alright then, here’s the deal, chica,” Holly said, her expression turning serious. “I’m going to give you as much time as you need. I’m going to let you miss him. I’m going to let you cry rivers upon rivers if you feel like you need to, and you can talk about him as much as you want, until his name sounds like nails on a chalkboard if it makes you feel better. But I will not let you keep doing what you’ve been doing these past few weeks. If this is gonna get fixed, then one of you has to keep it together. And I don’t think it’s fair to expect it to be him.”

Leah swallowed before she nodded slowly.

“Okay then,” Holly said with a nod. “Now let’s finish these salads so we can go get some shoes.”

They spent the next hour at the mall, looking for shoes to go with their new dresses, and the entire time, Leah kept replaying Holly’s words over in her mind.

They swam through her, collecting the little splinters in her chest so that each subsequent breath seemed a little easier to take.

If this is gonna get fixed, then one of you has to keep it together.

She wanted to fix it—more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life—but she felt the same way Holly looked the day she tried to put together Evan’s entertainment center: the instructions were in front of her, all the tools right there at her disposal, and yet she didn’t know where to begin.

When Holly dropped Leah off a little while later, she gave her a hug and told her she would call her the next day, and Leah walked up the path and through the front door to the utter paradox that was her apartment. It was the only place she felt at peace, yet at the same time, it was an endless source of torture.

The fact that Danny had spent every night and practically every day at her apartment for a month before he left made his absence that much more jarring.

His memory was all around her, in every single room.

Leah walked back to her closet and hung up the bag that held her dress before she kicked off her shoes and climbed into her bed, pulling the comforter up to her chin.

And then she closed her eyes, drifting off to sleep as Holly’s words continued to course through her, gradually collecting little pieces of her fragmented heart.