I’d been so sure that I could handle not telling my parents. That it’d be somehow okay. But there was no way to heal without your parents to hug you. To cry with you. It wouldn’t heal me fully. Or even half. I knew this.
But I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near back to something resembling me without the smell of my mother’s perfume, without my father’s lips at my head.
“It’s gonna be okay,” he murmured into my hair.
And I believed him the only way a daughter believed her father when he told her it was all going to be okay.
Because it wasn’t, not really, on the outside of all this. But inside my dad’s arms, it was.
* * *
Dad and Heath had gone out to get some burgers and beer for dinner.
I didn’t get how it took two of them to do so, but it was likely some sort of male bonding thing. And it was definitely my father trying to protect me.
But then again, he’d taken to Heath almost immediately.
Not that Heath made an exact good first impression, with his beard, muscles, cold demeanor. But Dad looked between us, or more accurately looked at the way Heath had pulled me into his arms, wiped a rogue tear from my eye and murmured, “You okay, Sunshine?”
My father was a shrewd man. He saw things. I knew he saw things about Craig, but he was a good father so he kept his reservations quiet.
And because he was a good dad, the best, I knew he was going to carry that around with him, blame that didn’t belong on his shoulders. And that hurt. Added to the pile of pain I was carrying around. But I didn’t focus on that. I focused on the way he was with Heath, and it warmed me. Heath warmed me. Every day, every new wound I exposed, he stayed, he made roots. Made sure to tell me, to show me that this was permanent. Even when he knew I was broken. No longer that bright and happy girl he’d fallen in love with.
He was showing me that he was falling in love with this new Polly.
And I was falling in love with him all over again.
“You want the veggie burgers from the place that has the preacher out front or from that place that plays that weird music?” he asked, resting his hands lightly on my hips before they left.
My heart almost broke with that simple question. Because nothing was simple between us. And him knowing the places I got my veggie burgers from depending on my mood and cravings—and willing to travel thirty minutes out of the way to get them—was more than a simple question. It was everything.
I smiled. I couldn’t help it. And it was well and truly real. Not an original Polly smile. But a new one. Maybe slightly less bright, a little less naive, but it was real.
“The preacher,” I whispered.
He stroked the edge of my jaw, looking at me in what could only be explained as awe. “Been plannin’ a lot of shit to get that smile back to me,” he murmured. “Didn’t think it would be from getting you veggie burgers. They’re gonna have to be on the menu every day for the rest of our lives.”
Then he kissed me hard and fast on the mouth.
In front of my parents.
I expected my father to be thin-lipped when he released me. But he was smiling. Beaming.
My mom’s eyes were misty, but she was smiling too.
“Right,” Dad said, clapping Heath on the back. “Hamburgers, and the shit the hippies try to sell as hamburgers.”
I grinned.
Whatever Dad said about it, he always drove me to every health store in the area since I’d decided I was vegetarian, without much complaining.
Because he loved me.
That was the secret. People who loved you didn’t have to believe in everything you did. Didn’t have to agree with it. But the fact they’d go out of their way for something they didn’t believe in, for you, that was saying a lot.
It was saying everything.
Heath gave me a long look before him and Dad walked out the door.
I pressed my hands to my lips, still smiling.
“Well,” Mom said to the room, her voice shaky. “He’s the best yet.”
I looked at her. “Yeah, he is,” I whispered.
She searched my face in a way only mothers could. “He’s the one, isn’t he? The real one?”
I nodded.
Mom’s shoulders sagged, like some sort of weight had just been released.
But then they tensed again.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” Mom said, dabbing at her eye. She took a breath. “Something I should’ve told you a long time ago. But I wished I wouldn’t have to burden you with the hard truth when you seemed so beautiful and soft.”
She crossed the room to take my hand and sit us both down on the sofa. She squeezed my hand. “Not weak, just to clarify. I never thought of you as weak. But you are my Polly. My little dreamer. And I thought maybe I could preserve that dream. That I could save you from a truth that would only harm you. But now I see you need that truth so maybe it might heal you.”