“So you’re breaking up with me? You just want to end it?” As she asked, I could hear the crack in her voice, could see the tears beginning to form in her eyes.
“It was never meant to be,” I said, hating myself and hating the truth and feeling as though I was letting the best part of me die. “Your life is going to change, but mine can’t. And that’s inevitably going to change things between us—even though I do love you, even though I know I’ll never forget the week we had together.”
For the first time since I’d known her, Morgan seemed at a loss.
“You’re wrong,” she finally bit out, swiping angrily at a tear that had spilled onto her cheek. “And you don’t even want to try.”
But I could tell that she was thinking about my aunt and Paige and the farm and understood what I’d said. She crossed her arms and stared out over the water, unseeing. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the piece of paper I’d scribbled on that morning.
“I know I have no right to ask anything of you,” I said. “But please take our song and make it famous, okay?”
She reluctantly took the paper and glanced at it, while blinking back the tears that kept threatening to overflow.
There’s a place that I know
Where only you and I can go
Far from the darkness of the past
Where love can bloom at last
Hold on to Dreamland
Forever, not just today
Someday Dreamland will be ours
Hold fast, don’t fall away
In my mind we’re living there
In that place we’re meant to share
No more talk of what we owe
Just what our hearts already know
In Dreamland, down in Dreamland
Hold fast, don’t fall away…
She didn’t finish but slipped the page into her purse, and for a long moment we simply stood together in the small town I knew I’d never escape, a place too small for Morgan’s future. I put my arm around her, watching as an osprey took flight over the lapping waves. Its simple grace reminded me of Morgan paddling through waterways in a place that already seemed far, far away.
After a while, we made our way back to the truck and drove to the Greenville airport. A handful of cars idled in front of the small terminal, unloading passengers, their hazard lights flashing. I pulled the truck in behind them and reached for her bag. Morgan slipped the tote over her shoulder as I rolled her luggage to the entrance.
My stomach was in knots as I buried my face in her hair. I reminded myself that I had spoken the truth. No matter what plans we made or how hard we both wanted things to work between us, Morgan would leave me behind someday. She was destined for great things, and she’d eventually find someone with a life more in sync with hers, something I knew I could never offer her.
Still, I understood that I’d hurt her deeply. I could feel it in the way she clung to me, in the finality with which she pressed her body against my own. I knew that I would never love another woman in the same way I loved her. But love, I realized, wasn’t always enough.
When we separated, Morgan met my eyes.
“I’m still going to call you,” she said with a catch in her voice. “Even though I’m furious at you.”
“All right,” I said, my voice hoarse.
She reached for her bag and adjusted the tote strap on her shoulder, then forced a brave smile before heading into the terminal. I watched the electronic doors open and shut as she passed through them and, shoving my hands into my pockets, I started back toward the truck, aching for her, and for me. As I slid behind the wheel, I recalled what Paige had once said about love and pain being two sides of the same coin and finally understood exactly what she meant.
Turning in to traffic, I tried to picture Paige and my aunt as I’d last seen them, feeling a heaviness settle in my chest. As much as I loved them, I knew that somehow they’d also become my prison.
Though Morgan and I stayed in touch, the calls and texts diminished over time. In the end, it had more to do with her than with me. In the weeks following Morgan’s move to Nashville, I’d struggled to manage the farm while overseeing Paige’s and Aunt Angie’s recovery. By late autumn our life had settled a bit, but by contrast, events overtook Morgan’s life like a boulder gathering speed and power as it rolled downhill. The changes that followed the igniting of her music career left me stunned; it reached the point that when I left a voicemail, she sometimes couldn’t return my call for two or three days. It was fine, I told myself—as I’d told her, I didn’t think we should try to make the long-distance thing work, since it would inevitably come to an end. Instead, when we finally connected—often while she was in airports or between meetings, or during recording breaks—I would listen with interest and pride as she relayed the latest developments in her meteoric professional rise.