𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐄𝐆𝐔𝐈𝐍𝐄

𝐅𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐓𝐄𝐄𝐍

14. | NO VALLEY LOW, NO RIVER WIDE

❝Remember life holds for you one
guarantee... you'll always have me.❞

●

Nearly a month after their trip to Switzerland, Diana admitted something to the girls she never thought she would. They were at the dinner table when the need dawned on her.

She had spent a long time avoiding the past in a perilous aim for peace, and none of it had been enough. The truth persisted, sitting with her in dark rooms and hitching to places she thought were untouchable.

The truth was that all her children were irrevocably linked to Michael. Not even the baby doing backflips in her stomach was pardoned in their story. It felt selfish, criminal almost, to deny Rhonda, Tracee, and Chudney the truth. Letting them in could go wrong, but she knew it was time. They had spent long enough secretly wondering why a major cornerstone in their lives had receded.

Over slivers of pasta, she prodded her daughters. Was there anything they wanted to discuss? Did they have any questions for her? When the girls offered her nothing and began to excuse themselves from the table, she stopped them. If they had nothing, then there was something, or someone, she wanted to talk about.

Where should she start? Her and Michael's story was a long one, tangled realities that had taken time to converge. She began where she could, not necessarily at day one, but somewhere along that road, starting at the point where their time together became fraught with a closeness she could no longer deny. The Caribbean, likely, or 1979 if she were being honest.

She assumed Rhonda or Tracee would be the first to chime in, but after she was done working her way through the center—"Michael and I—we were incredibly close"—Chudney shot from her seat and surprised them all.

"I knew it!" She screeched so loudly that Ross jolted in his bouncer.

She never got around to explaining how, but Chudney and her sisters did acknowledge one thing. Something changed. Michael's absence stuck out like a sore thumb, and though they had been happy to have new siblings, the shift in their lives was jarring.

The questions began trickling in. She tried to be honest, shaping her answers in ways more suitable for their ears. In time, when they were older, if they ever asked more, she would tailor the answers as needed, hoping they would understand.

At night, with Ross' sleepy cooing in her ear, she thought back to her and Michael's last conversation. That hadn't been her best moment, that much was true. There were things she said that she didn't believe, truths she truncated not out of malice, but out of anger and shame. 

It had taken time, but finally, she understood. She could make choices about her life, whether he agreed or not. The boundary of who she could be to him and who he could be to her was immovable. The impact, however, couldn't be denied. She hadn't expected things to go this way, but maybe that was her naïveté. His love ran deep. If you loved anyone or anything that much, your response to "losing" them—because she had never really left—could be... striking, and that was putting it lightly. The more resistant part of her still wanted to hate his guts, but she couldn't bring herself to do it.

His question was still hanging in the air, and the only way they would truly move on, regardless of how the chips fell, was if she answered, and that would only happen if he gave her the floor.

She did what she always did. Extended the olive branch and waited. And waited. For him, for anything, for nothing. Whatever the Big Man Upstairs was willing to give.