“And?” she said finally.
“And I didn’t answer her,” I said. “Because I don’t have an answer yet. I know what I feel. I know what I want. But I keep thinking about what it actually means. The logistics of it. What it would cost her, or what it would cost me.” I stopped because I was rambling and trying to find the real excuse. Geography sounded pretty lame when I was putting it all out there. “I don’t know. I called you because you were in her position once. You were the one who had to make the choice about what to leave behind.”
Another pause. I heard her exhale slowly.
“That’s true,” she said. “I was.”
“Was it hard?”
She laughed softly. It was the laugh of someone looking back at something that had been genuinely difficult and yet survived. “Colt, it was terrifying. I won’t pretend otherwise. I had built a whole life. I had my sisters, my work, everything I’d put together on my own terms. And then Charlie came in and rearranged the entire picture.” A pause. “There were a lot of tears, if that tells you anything.”
“It tells me something,” I said.
“But here’s what I kept coming back to,” she said with a wistfulness in her tone. “My sisters have always been my foundation. They are the thing I was most afraid of leaving behind. Not a place, not a job. Them.” I heard her shift again, the soft creak of the bed. “And what I realized was that the foundation doesn’t disappear when you build something new on top of it. It’s still there. It travels with you. It’s not geography. It’s people. You know that saying, ‘home is where the heart is?’”
I stared at the dark window. “I’ve heard it.”
“It’s true. If I had my family, I could live on the moon and be happy. And I mean my husband and children. I’ll live anywhere because no matter what, my sisters will understand. We love each other and that doesn’t change because one of us lives a thousand miles away. God invented airplanes so distance doesn’t matter.”
I laughed. “I don’t think God invented airplanes.”
“You know what I mean. And as soon as someone figures out teleportation, we’re gold.”
“When I moved to Texas, I wasn’t moving away from them,” she said. “I was moving toward something. Toward him. Toward what we were going to build together.” A soft sigh, one that said she was happy and content. “And I had complete confidence that whatever that was, it was going to be beautiful. Because of who he is. Because of who I am when I’m with him.”
Ouch. That was the thing. It’d been on the tip of my tongue but I couldn’t give it words. She just did.
“You never regretted it,” I said. It wasn’t really a question.
“Not for a single second,” she said simply. “Not even on the hard days.” She paused. “The regret I would have had, Colt, if I’d walked away from him because I was scared of what the change looked like? That would have been so much worse. That’s the kind of regret you can’t come back from.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said.
“She sounds like someone worth answering,” Olivia said gently.
“She is,” I said. “She really is.”
“Then answer her.”
“I will.”
“Congratulations in advance.”
“Thanks, Liv.”
“Goodnight.”
I thought about what she’d said. The difference between moving away from something and moving toward something. Something built to last.
I finished my water and turned off the kitchen light and went upstairs. I lay in the dark for a long time, staring at the ceiling while the fan turned overhead. My head was spinning thinking about Summer. I loved Texas. I loved my big, annoying family and the ranch. Mom and Dad. Was I a mama’s boy? Probably. Wasn’t ashamed of it either. Lot of good Texas boys loved their mamas and only wanted their mama’s biscuits and cornbread.
I thought about the family business. Did I have to be on site? What about all the basic shit that happened on the daily? None of it was super important, but it was the rituals. My friends. And what about Christmas? Thanksgiving? The annual livestock auction. My nieces and nephews birthdays, football games andballet recitals. It was all back there. Everything I ever valued in life was there. Home. Texas.
I loved Surfside, but it wasn’t home. Summer would never leave her home for all the same reasons I would never leave Texas. I couldn’t take my mermaid from the water. She would shrivel up. The light in her eyes would fade.
Have I been leading her on this whole time? Am I going to break her heart all over again? Teleportation isn’t a thing and flying back and forth is a lot. Logistics matter. In our case, they change everything.
CHAPTER 39