“Jodi,” I say. “That’s not…”
“You’re overthinking it. You’re so busy worrying about what might go wrong that you’re not giving it the opportunity to go right.”
“No, I’m just…” I shake my head. “I think that I’ve lost my chance with him.”
“Aimee, love is a choice, not a chance.”
It takes me a minute to place my own words, the ones that I said to her after she met Kyle, when I was explaining why I didn’t believe in insta-love.
“Oh.” What else can I say?
She takes a sip of her coffee and touches my arm. “Now you get it.”
***
“Hmmm… Have you thought very much about trust, Aimee?”
Have I thought about trust? Even for a therapist, I think it’s an odd question.
I stare at Dr. Bernstein, sitting across from me in a chair covered in an ugly off-white fabric. She looks like a therapist. Glasses, hair pulled back from her face, the whole bit. And she makes a lot of hmmm sounds from deep in her chest. It’s very doctor-ish and soothing.
“Trust,” she says again, encouraging me with her eyes. Beyond her, the room falls away to a bright picture window that’s full of sky.
“What do you mean?”
She uncrosses her legs and leans forward so that she’s angled over the armrest. “When your parents came to the session last week, do you remember how we talked about trust? About it being a two-way street?”
Yes. Among a lot of things, she’d said that they needed to practice trusting me and that I needed to do the same for them.
I nod my head, trying to keep my thoughts straight.
“There’s a certain level of trust between friends, isn’t there?”
Friends? All of a sudden, I’m nervous. Something is seriously wrong here.
“And,” she goes on. “I wonder if you’ve ever given any thought to the trust that Jillian broke the night of the accident?”
Jillian… I think my brain is snapping in two. Breaking. “What do you mean?” I can barely hear my own voice. I’m shivering, shaking. I draw an image out of my mind: Jillian and me standing against the railing of a bridge, our fingers entwined, the wind whirling our hair up around our faces. I think we were fifteen.
I will if you will…
“She didn’t tell you that she’d been using pills.” Her eyes are heavy and every word out of her mouth is a prick against my sensitive skin. “She told you that she was fine to drive, but that wasn’t true, was it?”
Do you hear that sound? It’s the sound of the world ripping apart.
“That’s not… that’s—she wasn’t…”
“Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not telling you what to feel, Aimee. I’m just giving you the tools to help you work through this and I think this is something that you should at least consider.”
I can’t think of how to respond to that. I have so many words inside of me and no idea how to say them so I keep my mouth clamped in a straight line and I rub my hands over my trembling arms. God, it’s cold in here.
“One… Two… Three…”
After an eternity, Dr. Bernstein nods at the clock and closes the notebook on her lap. “Forgiveness isn’t simple,” she says like I don’t already know that. “There’s always a possibility that you aren’t the only one who needs it.”
Cole
It happens the way it began—with her bumping into me on a sunny day.
Later I’ll be able to wonder about all the ways that we might have missed each other. I’ll think about how the guy in the car in front of me could have made that light a mile back, or what would have happened if I’d decided to skip the Starbucks run before I stopped for gas.
But, in this moment, I’m not thinking about stars aligning or fate. Nope. I’m annoyed because the pay-at-the-pump machine isn’t reading the magnetic strip on my debit card. Again.
“Fuck,” I grumble, wiping the debit card against my leg and running it through the machine a third time. Card Error.
I start across the lot of the gas station, tucking the debit card in the fold of my wallet and the wallet in my back pocket. As I reach the swinging glass door, I see the girl coming. Her dark hair is pulled into a messy bun. She’s got a lopsided walk, her back is to the outside world, and she’s pushing against the glass with her bony hip. I just don’t realize who the girl is until after she’s caught her foot on the grated metal threshold and her bottle of orange juice is dripping down the front of my shirt.
“Agh!”
“Oh my God!”