Page 97 of What He Always Knew

Charlie pulled back, her eyes finding mine. We were both a mess, tears staining our faces, eyes red and puffy.

“You could never know,” she whispered. “In this lifetime or any other, everything happens for a reason, Reese. Your heart will heal, and you’ll find home again,” she promised me, as if she could possibly know for sure. “It may not seem possible right now, but you will. And something tells me the home you find will be more than you ever imagined. More than you’ve ever had before.”

She smiled then, a small, timid smile, and I returned it with as much energy as I could muster. Then, I pulled her into me again, allowing myself just a few moments more to hold her, to be with her, to pretend she was mine.

There’s nothing okay about losing the person you love.

Nothing would help ease the pain — I knew that even in the very first stage of it. There would be nothing to make it go away, nothing to numb it at all. So, in that moment, with her still in my arms — I welcomed it. I lived in it like I had after my family passed, only this time, it was a little easier.

Because I knew in the end, she was happy.

I had been wrong about Cameron. That much I knew when he fought back, when he didn’t let her go so easily. But then he’d shown me even more of who he was when he’d come to my house, when he’d told me he would bow out should she choose me. He wanted her happiness more than his own, and it was then that I realized he was a better man than I was — even if I hated admitting it.

He was fucked up, just like all of us, but he loved Charlie fiercely.

I knew he would treat her right, that he would mend what was broken, and that they would find happiness again together.

Perhaps that was what hurt the most.

Charlie was in no rush that night. She let me hold her as long as I needed to, and only when I stretched my arms and let her loose did she look at me, her eyes dry now, a soft smile on her lips.

“I will always love you,” she whispered.

I mentally traced the gold flecks in her eyes, knowing I would forever see them in my dreams.

“As will I always love you.”

I sealed that promise with one final kiss, one soft and sweet pressed to her lips.

And then, I let her go.

It was only in the exact moment that I let her walk out my door that I realized I truly did love her. Not in the selfish way I had since I was a kid, not in the empty way I had when I returned to Mount Lebanon looking for something to fill me again. I loved her in the true, genuine way.

Because I loved her enough to set her free.

In that moment, as much as my soul split open as she walked away, I put her happiness above my own. It was what Cameron had done from the start, what I wasn’t sure I could ever do, and yet here I was.

And I was thankful for that love.

If it was all I had, that one chance to love someone that much, that wholly, to care for them more than I care for myself — then I was glad to have it.

Even if it didn’t last.

It felt like an addict letting go of an addiction of sorts as Charlie pulled away, and I found myself already thinking of making amends. I owed a lot of people a lot of things after the way I’d been behaving — Blake an apology, Cameron one, too. I owed Charlie the respect and space to love her only from a distance, to never cross that line she’d redrawn between us. I owed it to my family to truly live again, to let them go, to somehow find a way to release the guilt I felt over their death.

And more than anything, I owed it to myself to build a new home — one that started with me — instead of trying to find it in someone else.

I knew the pain was far from over. I knew the race had just begun. I would spend months drowning in the bottle, in the memories, and a part of me knew I’d never fully let Charlie go.

But still, as her taillights disappeared from view, I found myself smiling.

My heart was broken, but it was still beating.

I could work with that.

The End