One True Loves(45)

“But you haven’t yet.”

“So?” I say.

It’s so easy to talk to him. It was always easy to talk to him. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve always been good at it.

“I’m saying that I have spent the last three and a half years of my life hoping with everything I have in me to see you again. And if you think that you being engaged to someone else is going to stop me from putting our life back together, you’ve lost your goddamn mind.”

I look at him, and at first the smile is still spread wide across my face, but soon, reality starts to set in and the smile fades. I put my head in my hands.

I am going to hurt everyone.

The car becomes so quiet all I can hear is the roll of the cars whizzing past us on the road.

“It’s more complicated than you realize,” I say finally.

“Emma, look, I get it. You had to move on. I know everybody did. I know that you thought I was . . .”

“Dead. I thought you were dead.”

“I know!” he says, moving toward me, grabbing my hands. “I can’t imagine how hard that must have been for you. I don’t want to imagine it. All these years, I knew you were alive, I knew I had you to go back to. And I know you didn’t have that. I’m so sorry, Emma.”

I look up at him and I can see there are tears in his eyes to match the ones forming in mine.

“I’m so sorry. You have no idea how sorry. I should never have done it. I should never have left you. Nothing on this earth, no experience I could ever have, would be worth losing you or hurting you the way that I did. I used to lay awake at night and worry about you. I would spend hours and hours, days, really, worried about how much you must be hurting. Worried about how you and my mother and my whole family must be aching. And it nearly killed me. To know that the people I loved, that you, you, Emma, were grieving for me. I am so sorry that I put you through that.

“But I’m home now. And what drove me to get home, what kept me going, was you. Was coming home to you. Was coming back to the life that we had planned. I want that life back. And I’m not going to let the decisions that you made when you thought I was gone affect how I feel about you now. I love you, Emma. I’ve always loved you. I never stopped loving you. I’m incapable of it. I’m incapable of loving anyone but you. So I absolve you of anything that happened while I was gone and it’s now our time. Our time to put everything back together the way it was.”

It’s now so hot in the car that I feel like I have a fever. I turn down the heat and I try to wrestle out of my jacket. It’s hard, in the small space of the driver’s seat, to wiggle left and right just enough to get my arms out. Jesse, wordlessly, takes hold of one of the sleeves and pulls for me, helping me finally free myself.

I look at him, and if I push away the shock and the confusion and the bittersweetness, what I’m left with is extreme comfort. Opening my eyes and seeing his face staring back is more like home than anything I can remember. Right here in this car is the best part of my teenage years, the best part of my twenties. The best part of me. The whole beginning of my life is this man.

The years he’s been gone have done nothing to erase the warmth and comfort we have from the years we spent in each other’s lives.

“You were the love of my life,” I say.

“I am the love of your life,” Jesse says. “Nothing’s changed.”

“Everything has changed!”

“Not between us, it hasn’t,” he says. “You’re still the girl with the freckles under her eye. And I’m still the guy that kissed you in the police station.”

“What about Sam?”

It is the first time I see sadness and anger flash over Jesse’s face. “Don’t say his name,” he says, moving away from me. The sharpness of his tone disarms me. “Let’s talk about something else. For now.”

“What else could we possibly talk about?”

Jesse looks out the window for a moment. I can see his jaw tense, his eyes fixate on a point. And then he relaxes and turns back to me. He smiles. “Seen any good movies?”

Despite myself, I’m laughing and soon he is, too. That’s how it’s always been with us. I smile because he’s smiling. He laughs because I am laughing.

“This is really hard,” I say when I catch my breath. “Everything about this is so . . .”

“It doesn’t have to be,” he says. “I love you. And you love me. You’re my wife.”

“I don’t even think that’s true. When you were declared dead, it . . . I mean, I don’t even know if we’re still married.”

“I don’t care about a piece of paper,” he says. “You’re the woman I’ve spent my entire life loving. I know that you had to move on. I don’t blame you. But I’m home now. I’m here now. Everything can be the way it’s supposed to be. The way it should be.”

I shake my head and wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “I don’t know,” I say to Jesse. “I don’t know.”

“I know.”

Jesse leans forward and wipes away the tears that have fallen down my neck.

“You’re Emma,” he says as if that’s the key to all of this, as if the problem is that I don’t know who I am. “And I’m Jesse.”