His voice is small when he asks, “You think she’d be proud of me?”
I have to look away, out at the ocean. We’d stood here once and overturned an urn, and the ashes of her had caught in the wind. She’d blown away into the sea. “I know she would,” I tell him roughly. “She’d tell you to get your head out of your ass, but that you’ve become everything she’d thought you’d be.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, Kid.”
“You too, huh? You know she’d say the same about you.”
My smile is a fragile thing. “I know.”
He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “It’s not Dom. I’m never worried about him.”
“We know that,” Otter says. “You wouldn’t be here if you were.”
“We’re inevitable. Him and me.”
“We know that too.”
“I need you guys,” he says suddenly. “You know that, right? Even though I’m getting married, I need you both. I’ll probably need you both forever.”
He laughs when we both hug him at the same time.
OTTER LEAVES us, saying he’ll tell everyone we’ll be right behind him. He kisses both of us on the top of our head and wanders down the beach, where we can hear the sound of music and bright laughter. They’re waiting for us—for him, really—but we need this, I think.
We’re quiet for a time, watching Otter disappear over the hills.
“He’s the best,” Ty says quietly.
“He really is.”
“Is it—it’s hard, isn’t it?”
“Being married?”
“Yes. No. Okay, yes. All of it.”
“A little. But if you love someone enough to marry them, then you do anything you can to make it work. Most of the time, everything is good. Sometimes it’s not. But I make sure he knows I love him, and he does the same for me. We’re a team.”
He looks out at the ocean again. “I don’t know if we would have made it. Without him.”
He’s not wrong, but I don’t know if that’s precisely giving us enough credit. “Maybe. Or maybe we would have. There’s a difference between being alive and actually living. He helped us to live, I think. We weren’t doing that. Before.”
“We were surviving.”
I nod. “And it worked for us. At the time. But it wouldn’t have lasted forever. Something had to give.”
“You told me once that you knew he was it for you when you were breaking up with him. Because of her.”
It hurts to hear, even now. “Yeah.”
“I knew Dom was it for me that day in the hallway. When I saw him and Stacey together. I thought I was going to break.”
I sigh. “I know, Kid. And look where we are now. It’s funny how things work out.”
“I’m getting married today.”
“You are.”