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Beanie half-laughed. “It’s just that I love you both so much, and it’s not simple. So I hate it.”
“I didn’t say anything about how we feel now.”
But hadn’t she?
She and Beanie were too much alike, really. Beanie noticed everything and filed things away, thought about them, fit them together, and kept them neatly organized in her head until she finally had a chance to deploy them, sometimes years later. Wil hadn’t ever really wanted to know what her momknewabout her. But she did now. What if letting the world really see her showed Wil what she needed to know to live her life? She wasn’t going to like everything the world thought about her, obviously, but was that what she had been scared of and avoiding all this time? What the world thought? What her dadwould havethought?
What did Wil think? About her own life? About what she wanted?
Beanie looked at her with her serious eyebrows. “It says a lot about how you feel now if you’ve both shared how you felt then, and you’re sneaking off together in the Bronco like you’re eighteen instead of thirty, and Katie’s calling me to ask about Mike’s attorneys’ meeting. I’m not trying to tell you how you feel.”
“I know you’re not. But you’re right. It’s not simple.”
“If it were simple, howdoyou feel? About Katie?”
It wasn’t a fair question. It had only been two days.
But she’d been around long enough to understand that “fair” wasn’t a very useful gauge. She’d kissed enough strangers to havelearned that some thingsweresimple. And Wil was figuring out that sometimes, itwasn’tthat she didn’t know something about herself, or that she wasn’t sure what she wanted. It was that she wasn’t ready to act on that knowledge.
Wil was terribly, painfully attracted to Katie. She loved to look at her. She loved her expressive face and her funny enthusiasm and how surprising she could be. She loved how she was with her cats, how much she thought about them and their cat preferences and habits. She loved the way Katie challenged her and met her right where she was at and made room for Wil to think.
None of that was going to change. All of that was just a baseline, as far as how Wil felt about Katie Price.
“I could fall in love with her.”
That was true. Wil knew as soon as she said it.
Shewasfalling in love with her, probably, even if it shouldn’t be possible. But she wasn’t going to say this yet. And she knew the biggest thing holding her back was her fear that Katie didn’t, or couldn’t ever, feel the same way.
“Wil.” Beanie smiled. “Oh, honey.”
“Not simple,” Wil said. “At all. In any way.”
“No,” her mom agreed. “As much as Diana has shared with me over the years, talked things through with me, I still find it difficult to imagine Katie’s life. Even when she’s here, the security on Diana’s house, how they have to manage people, and phone calls, and being out in the public? How they’ve been betrayed by friends and family members, all the private financial settlements to get some family members to go away quietly?”
“Yeah.” Wil had to resist a sudden urge to get up from the rocking chair and leave. It was late. She’d had a big week, and the prospect of hashing her way through everything Beanie had just said was too daunting.
“And it seems like no matter how careful they are,” Beaniewent on, “the media finds her here and breaks apart the one retreat from it all that Katie has left. Our Katie has navigated and negotiated and sacrificed things that are beyond our ken.”
Wil took a deep breath, accepting Beanie’s kind dose of reality. “I hear you.”
“Look at me, though.”
Wil looked up at Beanie, her throat tight. “Yeah?”
“Your path hasn’t been simple, either. Don’t count yourself out. Don’t do that. Don’t do this thing where you defeat fear by circumventing it with a reasonable alternative. This is it.” Beanie opened her arms wide, indicating the room and the whole world around them. “This is life,” she said. “It’s all we’ve got. My Jasper, your dad, he got fifty-two fucking years, Wil. That’s all. And he didn’t dick around with any of those years, and I loved that so much about him, and youarehim, inside. You have him in there. He would hate it,hateit, if fear about what he went through was some root cause of your not living this life. And honey, my love, you have such a chance.”
Wil made herself breathe. It was all she could do, just breathe as her mother choked on a sob, because she hadn’t known that Beanie was going to say any of that or that it would land in Wil’s body with such a surge of cracked-open, raw grief.
“You got the news he wanted and couldn’t have,” Beanie said forcefully. “Please don’t waste it. Please. Be a lawyer. Be Katie’s. Be something you really, really are, but don’t be afraid you’ll lose it all if you try. You’ll at least have had it, even if it was only for a little while.”
Wil got up to curl next to her mom on the sofa, and Beanie put her arms around her. “Okay?” Beanie asked. “Okay?”
But she didn’t expect Wil to answer. Not yet.
They both knew this conversation was only the first one they’d needed to have, and that there would be more to say. They had more to share with each other. More grief. More gifts.
Beanie had been so patient.