I Want Your Heaven and Your Oceans Too

The Sweetest Devotion

While far from a devout realist; she was a dreamer, a creator, a visionary...she also was aware, from a young age, that faith and fate were not, indeed, one in the same.

Faith was something a Catholic upbringing engrained in her. It was a belief in what one could not see or touch but felt, deeply. Although she'd strayed from the church over the years and her faith definitely wavered during tremulous times, for the most part, it was comforting to know a higher power had everything taken care of.

Fate was an entirely different story. She was always very much someone who refused to rest on her laurels, who refused to adhere to the adage of leaving things to fate alone. Rather than letting the universe decide the future, she subscribed to hard work and just the right amount of stubbornness to get through.

So, while fate wasn't always on the table, it was the only word to describe two specific circumstances.

One was performing at Sean's benefit and Bradley happening to be there. If she preferred to be obstinate, she could have easily argued that they sometimes ran in the same circles and they'd been at events before without ever knowing the other was there. But there was something magically serendipitous about it all; he had been searching for Ally and she had sung and somehow, as insane as the idea sounded on paper, it worked.

The second circumstance, she had a harder time wrapping her head around. She had done everything in her power, pulled out every trick in her arsenal, to bury her feelings. Gave herself (and him) a litany of reasons why they could never work; custody issues and PR backlash and her own personal demons. The list was endless and when he found loopholes in her arguments, she bargained.

That's where faith came back into play. She bargained with herself, with God, with Bradley...with anyone who would listen. She prayed to recover from the broken heart she suffered as she watched him move on, as he became only a voice on the phone, a quick text message, and soon after, not even that.

She did her best to rely on faith and to accept that God's plan for her couldn't and wouldn't include him. And then she got introduced by friends to Michael, who was a good man and by all accounts, was someone who would, inarguably, make an excellent partner.

Michael was also no dummy.

The day he moved out, he took her hands. His eyes held no residual anger like Taylor's had or no bitter resentment like Christian's. Only a flat sort of acceptance, as if he'd finally run out of fragile hope to cling to; the unsaid decision he had made that it was time for him to stop living in denial, too.

There were no tears. At that point, she'd been in the thick of her own denial for far too long and no amount of praying or bargaining or turning a blind eye was going to eliminate the reality that she was in love with another man, had been for years and her heart was his.

"You deserve to be happy, he'd told her after he had gathered his things. "It's not going to be with me. It's okay," he had reassured her when she attempted to protest.

"He doesn't know, does he?"

As it turned out, he didn't. Bradley had his own life by then, one that didn't include her and she was forced to accept that it was all of her own doing.

Fate, however, she slowly came to understand, didn't play by the rules of the universe. It simply lay out its path, neatly and precisely and one day, out of exhaustion, she'd just stopped fighting and allowed it to take its course.