I drew my eyes away from his, leaning my head back against the wall of the bridge. I couldn’t accept his words completely, but I sat with them for a minute and felt them out in my heart.
“How did you get so smart with all of this?” I asked eventually.
“Two years of forced therapy. My parents made me go after the accident. I didn’t want to, but they wouldn’t accept that. It was only supposed to be for a year, but I ended up going for two. For the longest time, I couldn’t get over the fact that I had taken Kelly out of school to go skiing. Nobody knew where we were. Her parents kept denying that it was their daughter on the ski hill, because they thought she was in school. And it was my idea. My fault. If I hadn’t asked her, she’d still be here.”
My heart dropped a tiny bit at that. I wondered if there was a part of Miles still in love with her. My selfish heart was now jealous of a woman who had been dead for years. I forced myself to push past the emotion.
“Any other day,” I began, “everything would have been just fine. You wouldn’t have second-guessed anything. But in that one moment, somebody else was in control. You couldn’t have stopped it because, for whatever reason, it was her time to go. You were never in control of her life. Or her decisions.”
Miles leaned his back against the bridge. I followed suit, our shoulders pressed against each other.
“Maybe you’re in the wrong profession, Oliviana. You sound just like my therapist.”
“Why is it always easier to fix other people's problems than it is my own?”
We sat that way for a while. The roar of the wind outside of the bridge provided a relaxing white noise as we both got lost in our thoughts.
“Do you think…do you think you’d be married to her right now if she’d survived?” I didn’t really want to know the answer, but I couldn’t look away from the train wreck of my thoughts.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. My brain wants to immortalize her as being perfect because I’ve blocked out everything else. But looking back, our relationship was pretty immature, which makes sense. We were eighteen, and I hadn’t dated much before. I was halfway terrified of her. So…probably not.”
The pieces of Miles’s puzzle were slowly beginning to come together.
“I remember you telling me a while ago that you didn’t start doing all the extreme sports until a few years ago. Was it related to her? To Kelly?”
He smiled and absently rubbed at a spot on his pants. “For a while, the accident made me scared to get close to anybody again. It took me some time to get past the trauma and stop feeling guilty. So, I decided to try to live my life like I thought Kelly would. My own way to justify her death instead of mine. She wasn’t afraid of anything except being still. She climbed every mountain chain in the Northeastern United States. When she turned sixteen, she begged her dad to take her white-water rafting in the Grand Canyon because she heard they had some of the best rapids. She went bungee-jumping and skydiving multiple times before she was even seventeen. She was fearless. I hadn’t been brave enough to do all of that with her when we were dating, but she got me into skiing. So, after she died, I made a pact with myself to start living moments for Kelly,especiallyif it scared me. The more out of my comfort zone, the better.”
“How was jumping out of an airplane the first time?”
He smiled. “Scariest thing I’d ever done up until I jumped. Then, it was amazing.”
I shuddered.
“Did it work? Does anything scare you?”
“I don’t think the fear ever goes away completely—especially when you’re scaling a cliff with a ninety-foot drop beneath you.”
I shook my head.
“The first few years, I forced myself to do the big, extreme things. To honor Kelly. But as I’ve gotten older, now I just do the things I want to do. The things that I think I’ll legitimately enjoy but still push me out of my comfort zone. I try my best to pick my moments. If I’ve learned anything from Kelly it’s that life comes and goes too fast. People are so casual with their time, especially when you consider that it can all be gone in a second.”
I nodded along, thinking of all the Saturdays I spent curled up reading a book and my nights in a hot bubble bath.
As if he could sense what I was about to say, he continued, “And I’m not saying that going buck wild is the only way to live. I couldn’t sustain that type of life. Reading books and swinging on the porch is living, too. There’s definitely a balance to be had. I just think that getting out of our comfort zone every so often is when the magic starts to happen.”
“Like jumping in a pond with ice chunks floating next to you?”
“Exactly.” He turned and looked at me, his brown eyes scanning my face. “Do you have any regrets about jumping in?”
I bit my lip, thinking about that night. It had been scary. I wouldn’t have done it without Miles pushing me, and I was definitely not lining up to do it again anytime soon. But just thinking about it brought back the rush of the moment, and I couldn’t help but grin. “No, I don’t have regrets. But don’t let that go to your head. I’m not doing it ever again.”
He laughed and nudged my arm. “Skydiving next week?”
“Not on your life.”
We both chuckled softly as we sat there, each staring off into space until he spoke again.
“During therapy, I was encouraged to write down whatever I was feeling. That became a powerful outlet for me. Eventually, I began studying English at college, so taking a creative writing course seemed a natural step. The first couple of years, my writing was crap, but I kept at it and eventually got better.”