Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [100]
I spin around and fly out the door of the room and through the cushy tea salon and down the steps in the front of the hotel. I hear Jack calling me back, tailing me through the lobby, but he stops when I reach the sidewalk, unwilling to chase me to whatever destination I flee to. Then I hear another voice, and turn to see my dad, nearly at my heels.
“Don’t do this,” he says, between gasps. “Don’t run because you feel like you’re out of options. You’re better than that. I should have told you that years ago, but talking was never my thing. You’re better than that.”
I shake my head at him. “I’m not like her. I’m not leaving because I’m out of options. I’m leaving because I have them.”
He pauses, and I see something shift inside of him, then a wry smile turns his worrying face into a kind one. He looks back at Jack, then pulls me into an embrace.
“Then go,” he says, pushing me away from him. “Go to wherever those options take you.”
I nod, then sail down the streets, down the avenues, breathless and cold and sweaty all at once. I run and I run and I run, as I always seem to do, only this time, for once, there is a tiny seed in me that knows that I’m running toward something, not just running from it.
Chapter Twenty-eight
I pace the streets endlessly, unsure of where to go, what to do. I can’t go home—I can’t face Jack and his passivity. He’ll hold his hands up and say, “Whoa, babe, it’s not a big deal, can’t you calm down,” and then he’ll try to wash it all away by kissing me or distracting me or pretending that he’s not complicit in creating the ruins of our relationship. As if by leaning in and watching my mouth move, he was actually listening to who I was and who I needed to be. Maybe that’s why he never pushed me toward my mother: Maybe he simply didn’t love me enough to understand what was best for me, even if I didn’t know what was best for me in the first place. And maybe that’s why I never pushed him harder in his aimlessness; maybe I didn’t love him enough, either. Maybe it was all a lot simpler than it seemed, like one of Henry’s mathematical life solutions. The thought stirs something, and for the first time in seven years, it’s as if our undoing might finally make sense, that this wasn’t a relationship worth saving. It was a relationship that was a stepping-stone to something better.
I wander until I find myself outside of Henry’s, to maybe where I should have been all along. Because now, with freezing air on my ears and the debris of my relationship on my shoulders, I can’t ignore that this whole thing, that being back here, trying to undo the past might have been a horrid, wretched, and irreversible mistake. Not because things might turn out differently, though yes, there’s that, too. But because what I needed to change seven years in the future had nothing to do with Jack or Katie or my mother or even Henry. Now that the patterns of my future life have replayed themselves in my past one, the thing that seems apparent is the only person I need to change is, in fact, me.
I reach for a garbage can outside of his building and vomit. Two pedestrians whisper to themselves as they pass me by. But for once, for the first time really, I ignore those whispers and those judgments and everything that comes with them, and I try instead to stop the waves of regret that now manifest themselves in nausea as they rip through me.
How could I not have considered how this all might end? I hurl again, spewing out slimy bile now that my stomach is entirely purged. How could I have been so focused on reinventing both myself and my life that I never mulled over how much I had