“So you did come to Oregon for me, you liar,” she said lightly.
I laughed under my breath. “If I admitted it right up front, what would you have done?”
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “I think … I think it was easier for me to look at that weekend as scratching an itch. Indulging in something that I’d always wondered about. And I thought you were looking at it that way too…” Her voice trailed off. “I think I would’ve been scared if I’d known how serious you were. I put you so far out of my mind when I started dating Nick. I couldn’t leave you in the back of my heart, couldn’t think about those moments because I was in a relationship with someone else.”
It was torture to ask more. When she wasn’t in front of me to act on any of what we were feeling.
Yet I asked all the same. “What moment would you have thought of?”
She went quiet, but not for long. “It wasn’t even between you and me. Sometimes, I think it’s when I knew I could fall in love with you. It wasn’t just attraction. It wasn’t a harmless crush even though I felt both of those things.”
My brow furrowed. “Tell me.”
“We were at the beach house on the Fourth of July before you went back for your senior year. After dinner, you and Lia and Molly were cleaning up the dinner dishes. I was on the couch with Luna and Asher, and Molly started crying, but she didn’t want anyone to see.”
“Her miscarriage,” I said quietly.
“Yeah. Do you remember what happened next?”
I hadn’t thought about that night for so long. “I asked Lia to turn some music on. And then I took Molly’s hands and danced with her in the kitchen.”
“It was the first time I’d seen her smile in a week,” Adaline said. “You sang to her and twirled her around, and when the song was done, you wrapped her up in this great big hug, and I remember thinking that you must give the best hugs in the world. You were holding her so tight.”
“And did my hugs live up to the hype?” I asked.
She sighed. “You did. I’d go for one of those hugs right now.”
If I hadn’t made the choices I’d made, I could’ve given her a million hugs by now. Two million kisses. Could’ve memorized all the ways she liked to be touched. Instead, I still had all those things to learn.
And I would. I’d learn them all. I’d know all the best ways how to love Adaline Wilder, because it was what I was meant to do.
“We’ve missed a lot of time,” I said. My voice was rough, my chest heavy again. Somehow, after all this, it still felt like we were just as far away from each other as we had been at the beginning.
I hated it.
I wanted to tell her how much I hated it.
How that frustration and missing of her clawed at the insides of me when I least expected it.
But it would only make things harder for her if I did. So I wrestled those words down and kept them locked tight.
We stayed on the phone for another hour. She talked about Tim, how the whole family cried when they gathered for an update after his tests. How excited the whole family was for Lydia’s baby to be born any day. It was the first grandchild in their family, and she secretly loved that Lydia and Erik didn’t find out the sex. She cried when she told me how angry Parker was that Tim decided not to get treatment. I talked about practices and my interaction with Ned. I didn’t tell her about my call to Allie because I still wasn’t sure what—if anything—could come from it.
I was still stuck. And she knew it.
My eyes started to get heavy, and she could hear it in my voice.