“That sounds like fun.”
He shrugged. “What about you?”
She looked away, her mind flashing unbidden to her last days with her dad.
“I think I’m going to audition at Juilliard,” she said slowly. “We’ll see if they’ll still have me.”
For the first time, he smiled, and she caught a glimpse of the spontaneous joy he had shown so often during those warm summer months. How she had missed his joy, his warmth, during the long march of the fall and winter. “Yeah? Good for you. And I’m sure you’ll do great.”
She hated the way they were talking around the edges of things. It felt so… wrong, given everything they’d shared over the summer and all they’d been through together. She drew a long breath, trying to keep her emotions in check. But it was just so hard right now, and she was so tired. The next words came out almost automatically.
“I want to apologize for the things I said to you. I didn’t mean them. There was just so much going on. I shouldn’t have taken it all out on you…”
He took a step toward her and reached for her arm. “It’s okay,” he said. “I understand.”
At his touch, she felt all the pent-up emotion of the day burst to the surface, overwhelming her fragile composure, and she squeezed her eyes closed, trying to stop the tears. “But if you’d done what I demanded, then Scott…”
He shook his head. “Scott’s okay. Believe it or not, he even got his scholarship. And Marcus is in jail—”
“But I shouldn’t have said those awful things to you!” she interrupted. “The summer shouldn’t have ended like that. We shouldn’t have ended like that, and I’m the one who caused it. You don’t know how much it hurts to think that I drove you away…”
“You didn’t drive me away,” he said gently. “I was leaving. You knew that.”
“But we haven’t talked, we haven’t written, and it was just so hard to watch what was happening to my dad… I wanted so much to talk to you, but I knew you were mad at me—”
As she began to cry, he pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her. His embrace somehow made everything better and worse at the same time.
“Shhh,” he murmured, “it’s okay. I was never as mad as you thought I was.”
She squeezed him harder, trying to cling to what they’d shared. “But you only called twice.”
“Because I knew your dad needed you,” he said, “and I wanted you to concentrate on him, not me. I remember how it was when Mikey died, and I remember wishing that I’d had more time with him. I couldn’t do that to you.”
She buried her face in his shoulder as he held her. All that she could think was that she needed him. She needed his arms around her, needed him to hold her and whisper that they’d find a way to be together.
She felt him lean into her and heard him murmur her name. When she pulled back, she saw him smiling down at her.
“You’re wearing the bracelet,” he whispered, touching her wrist.
“In my thoughts forever.” She gave a shaky smile.
He tilted her chin so he could stare closely into her eyes. “I’m going to call you, okay? After I get back from Europe.”
She nodded, knowing it was all they had, yet knowing it wasn’t enough. Their lives were on separate tracks, now and forever. The summer was over, and they were each moving on.
She closed her eyes, hating the truth.
“Okay,” she whispered.
Epilogue
Ronnie
In the weeks since her dad’s funeral, Ronnie continued to experience some emotional upheaval, but she supposed that was to be expected. There were days when she woke with a feeling of dread, and she would spend hours reliving those last few months with her dad, too paralyzed with grief and regret to cry. After such an intense period together, it was hard for her to accept that he was suddenly gone, unreachable to her no matter how much she needed him. She felt his absence with a knife-edged sharpness she couldn’t contain, and it sometimes left her in a bitter mood.
But those mornings weren’t as common as they’d been during the first week she was home, and she sensed that they’d become less frequent over time. Staying with and caring for her dad had changed her, and she knew that she would survive. That’s what her dad would have wanted, and she could almost hear him reminding her that she was stronger than she realized. He wouldn’t want her to mourn for months; he would want her to live her life much the way he had in the final year of his own life. More than anything, he wanted her to embrace life and flourish.