The Reality of Everything (Flight & Glory) Read online

  My eyes jumped back to hers. “More than I should.” All the time. Every minute of every day. If my life was an ocean, then the water was Will. Always there, sometimes calm, deep, and soothing, and sometimes he was a tsunami ready to pull me under in waves of grief so deep I wondered when I’d eventually drown.

  “And who told you that there was an appropriate amount of thinking to be done?” She sipped her tea.

  I blinked. “Everyone, I guess. Family. Friends. My old psychiatrist. I’m supposed to get over it, right? It’s not supposed to still hurt like this.”

  She studied me carefully, but it wasn’t intrusive or judgmental. “How long has it been?”

  “Twenty-two months.” The longest months of my damn life. Every day felt like it was a personal test designed to see how much I could take.

  Some days, I won. Some days, I didn’t.

  “Has it gotten any better? The grief?”

  “Compared to what?”

  “Compared to the first month or so after he passed.”

  He hadn’t passed. He’d been taken. Hell, he’d given his life away.

  “No,” I finally answered. “But I gave up on that a long time ago. Kind of figured this was simply the way things would be now. This is how I am.”

  “And how is that?”

  “Broken.” I stared at the water in my hands. “My previous doctor told me it’s anxiety and depression. You have my file.”

  “I do.” She put her tea down and scribbled on a little notepad. “But I’d rather hear it from you than read another clinician’s notes. When you think of your future, what do you see for yourself?”

  What did I see? It had been so long since I thought about goals that I wasn’t sure I even had them anymore.

  “I don’t know. I mean, I bought my house, and I need to fix it up. I took a job that starts in September.” I shrugged.

  “And past that? What about long term?”

  “That is long term.” Anything past this week was long term as far as I was concerned.

  Her brow puckered for a moment before she gave me an understanding nod. “Okay, and friends?”

  “I have friends. There are a couple I’m still really close to, but the others…” I looked back out at the ocean like it had the answers I needed. “They moved on, and I’m stuck. Like someone pressed pause and I’m still waiting for him to come home from that deployment.”

  She scribbled on her pad again. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know whatever it was she wrote on that thing. “And moving here…was that looking to the future?”

  Yes was what she wanted to hear. A healthy person would have said that moving here was their new start. That they were ready to wake up and greet the morning with the kind of optimism that simply didn’t exist for me.

  “Be honest,” she urged, her eyes kind. “There’s no right or wrong answer. I’m just getting a feel for where you are in the process.”

  “He was everywhere,” I said softly. “In Alabama, I couldn’t go anywhere without being accompanied by a memory of him. I couldn’t teach at our elementary school or eat at the same restaurants, because…he was everywhere. And everyone in our little town thought I should either be over him or setting up a shrine.”

  “So you escaped.”

  I nodded.

  “How did your loved ones feel about the move?”

  “My mother is pretty unhappy with me. She thinks a woman has no business living alone. Guess she forgets she was raising me on her own at this age. The friends I’m still close to are supportive. One of them is here, actually.”

  “So you do have a support structure here?”

  “Sam’s just visiting, and I can support myself.”

  “And the others? The ones who have moved on, as you said?”

  Guilt smacked me.

  “I haven’t told them I moved. Haven’t talked to them in months, really. I can’t…I just need a break from them.” I finished the last part on a whisper. It was the first time I’d said it aloud to anyone but Sam: I couldn’t stand to be near most of my friends. My avoidance was more than declining a call once in a while. It had become methodical.

  “And when is the last time you felt happy? Or at least weren’t thinking about your loss?”

  Happy? I skipped right over that thought. But then again… “A few days ago, I fell through my landing,” I said slowly.

  “Are you okay?” Her eyebrows rose.

  “I’m bruised up, but fine. Thank you for asking.” I swallowed. “But this man—my next-door neighbor—he pulled me out, and there were a few minutes where the only pain I felt was from where I’d gotten scraped. I only thought about…Will when Jackson asked about his truck.” Heat flooded my cheeks as I twisted the cap of my water.

  “I’m glad he pulled you out, Morgan. How did you feel after that encounter?”

  “Besides embarrassed that he found me dangling in my Hello Kitty underwear?” The corners of my mouth tugged upward slightly.

  She bit back a smile but nodded.

  Mine faded. “Guilty that I enjoyed meeting Jackson,” I admitted quietly.

  She studied me for a moment.

  “Okay.” She stood and walked over to her desk, then pulled papers from the bottom drawer before coming back toward me. “I want you to fill these out. Be as blatantly honest as you can. Like I said, there’s no right or wrong.”

  She handed me a three-page assessment and a pencil.

  “Right now?” My stomach twisted as I looked over the questions.

  “If you can,” she answered gently, taking her seat again. “I think there might be a little more going on than your last doctor caught, and this will help me figure it out.”

  I took another drink, then answered the questions as truthfully as I could. I long for Will every day. Yes, it’s disruptive. I’ve accepted this as my reality. Hell yes, I’m still bitter.

  Each question pricked at the raw center of my soul, scraping and cutting until it drew blood. I finished and handed the papers back to her.

  She thanked me, and I walked to the window so I could see the water while she quietly read my answers.

  “Okay. Morgan, I don’t think it’s just anxiety or depression that’s causing your attacks.”

  “You don’t?” My brow puckered as I turned to face her.

  “No.” She shook her head and leaned forward slightly, putting the papers in my file on the table. “I think you have something called complicated grief.”

  I scoffed. “Because we had a complicated relationship?”

  “Maybe that’s part of it. Complicated grief happens when your rational mind has accepted the loss, but your emotional mind hasn’t quite gotten there. It keeps you stuck in that first, sharp, acute stage of grief and doesn’t let you move forward.”

  “Okay? And what am I supposed to do with that?” I walked back to her desk, stopping behind the armchair I’d been sitting in.

  “I’d help you move forward.” She offered me a soft smile.

  I clenched the back of the armchair, the fabric warping slightly under my fingers. “You’d help me move forward?” I repeated, each word a little less kind than the last.

  “Yes. We do a very specific form of therapy that’s been proven to help people just like you move forward in the grieving process.” She sat there calmly while my emotions boiled over.

  “Move forward?” I shook my head. “Move forward to what? To a life without him? To a world where everyone around me is happy because they didn’t lose the only man they’ve ever loved? That’s not moving forward—that’s where I’m at now. There is no forward when it’s the same bullshit I’ve been living the last two years.”

  “I can help you see past all this,” she promised, and the worst part was she believed that garbage.

  “You want to help me? Then bring him back,” I s
napped. “You rewind time and go to that godforsaken valley in Afghanistan and you tell him that his life is worth the same as Jagger’s—not less. You keep him from being the martyr.” My stomach twisted with something hot and ugly as my nails dug into the upholstery. “Then you go into a grocery store in Alabama and stop my phone from ringing, and you catch that jar of raspberry jam before I drop it all over the floor and it shatters.” I shoved the memory away with the chair, and it screeched across the hardwood floor. “You sew my heart back together, and you give us the chance we didn’t get!” A razor-tipped fist of emotion forced its way up my chest, prickling my eyes with pain, and I had to shout to be heard around it. “Everyone else got their shot! Josh and Ember, Paisley and Jagger, Sam and Grayson, hell, even Paisley and Will got their shot, but the minute he decides that it’s finally time for us to get our chance to be happy together, he dies saving my best friend’s husband.” I rubbed viciously at my chest, right where my set of aviation wings should have hung—would have hung if he’d lived. “I don’t want to move forward. I want Will! I want our shot!” I swiped angrily at my face, batting away the tears that had escaped during my tirade.

  God, how long had it been since I’d lost it like that?

  “I can’t bring him back,” Dr. Circe said gently. “I’m so very sorry for the loss you’ve suffered. But I know I can help you if you’ll let me. It’s four months of some pretty intense therapy, but I know we can lessen some of the pain you’re in.”

  “You know?” I snapped. Nothing lessened the pain. Nothing but sleep took it away, and even then, I eventually had to wake up.

  “I honestly think we have a good chance of not only lessening your pain but helping you truly move forward. This program has a seventy percent success rate.”

  “And what happens when I’m one of the thirty?”

  “I don’t think you are. This isn’t something you have to decide today, Morgan. I’ll call in your prescription to the local pharmacy. We definitely want to keep the anxiety attacks under control, but I’d also like to treat the underlying cause, not just the symptoms.” She rose to her feet.

  “No amount of therapy will make me miss him any less.”

  She walked me to her door. “Give me four months. Just think about it. You meet with me once a week. You do the homework. You’ll feel the results. But you would need someone to help support you through it.”

  “I’m all alone.” I shrugged, shutting the door on the possibility.

  A corner of her mouth lifted. “Well, like I said, just give it some thought. And while you’re over there telling yourself that therapy isn’t going to help you, I want you to think about the fact that you just told me what happened to Will without having an anxiety attack.”

  She opened her door, and I walked into her small, comfortable lobby, where another patient was already waiting.

  Maybe she’d help him through whatever he was going through, because there wasn’t a through it for me.

  …

  “Give it to me straight,” I said to the fourth contractor Joey had brought out to look at my property in the last two days. At least this guy was closer to our age and didn’t look at me like I’d lost my mind or suggest a complete teardown.

  He scratched his well-trimmed beard and looked back at the house from where we stood on the driveway. “Well, how much money do you have?”

  “Come on, Steve,” Joey snapped, folding her arms across her chest. Grayson’s older sister had cut her dark tresses to a bob in the years since I’d seen her, but there was no mistaking her for cute when she arched that eyebrow.

  “Don’t be like that, Joey. You asked me for my opinion, and I’m giving it. That house is a wreck. You need a new deck on both levels—hell, I’m surprised they’re still standing, honestly—new siding, new staircases.”

  I left out the tidbit where I’d already fallen through the landing.

  “Okay, but structurally?” I prodded, hoping the inspector had told the truth on the report I’d seen before closing.

  “In that, you lucked out. The foundations around the boathouse and pillars are sound, but they both need better drainage and waterproofing. The bones are good, shape is great for deflecting wind, but it could use a dose of storm-proofing—or you’re probably going down in the next cat three. I’m surprised she made it through this last one, and she took some damage for it. Definitely needs a new roof, and that weathervane looks like it’s about to break off any minute.” He pointed up to the heavy brass arrow that spun circles on my roof when the wind changed.

  “It stays,” I said. “Reinstall it or whatever, but I like it.” Arrows were supposed to be meaningful, right? Getting pulled back to release farther and faster, or something. Besides, if it had survived the storms for this long, who was I to yank it down?

  He sighed. “Ms. Bartley, the weathervane is the least of your problems. Your electrical system needs to be completely overhauled. I don’t know who thought it was a great idea to put a secondary panel in a room that’s literally built to flood.”

  And it just keeps getting better. By grace, the house was just as much of a mess as I was.

  A long shadow came up parallel with mine, and I knew from the general shape that Jackson was its owner. I wanted to feel annoyance, or a little of that temper that had flared when he’d insinuated that I couldn’t fix my own damn house, but neither came. Just a quick kick to my pulse and a weird sense of relief.

  Only because he’s already pulled you out of the shit once.

  And don’t forget he’s seen your underwear, too.

  I mentally cringed for the four-billionth time.

  He came close enough to nearly brush my shoulder, tucking his thumbs into his pockets as Steve paused his list of everything that was wrong with my house.

  “Jackson, how’s it going?” Steve grinned, and the two reached out to shake hands.

  “It’s going,” Jackson answered. “Don’t stop on my account. I’m dying to know your thoughts. If that’s okay?” he asked me. “Steve did the major reno stuff on my house a few years ago.”

  I glanced at him and nodded. He’d be subjected to the noise of the remodel, so it seemed like a fair enough trade.

  “Shit, you did most of that yourself,” Steve countered with a shake of his head. “Now, Ms. Bartley, that list doesn’t even touch cosmetic stuff like the kitchen or the flooring. We’re just talking about what the house needs in order to survive the next decade. I’ve always loved this house, and I want it to stay standing, so when I ask you how much money you have, it’s not because I’m looking to inflate your invoice. It’s because there’s going to be a hefty base price, and then you’re going to have to decide what upgrades you need versus what you want and what you’re willing to pay for.”

  “I definitely want everything you would structurally recommend.” The rest, I would scrape and clean and sand it to smooth on my own. If it took years and every penny I had, so be it. There would be one thing in my life that was perfect. That no one could take from me.

  “What about hurricane-proofing it?” Jackson asked.

  “I definitely want to hear about that.” I was used to tornados in Alabama, but hurricanes were a whole different ball game on the coast.

  Steve nodded. “Sure, if you want to go all-out, you could definitely use some reinforcement.” He studied the house quietly for a moment, his eyes darting over the structure. “We’d probably need lifts, but we could drive a steel support alongside the one you have running through the house, but go deeper, and change the positions of anchors on your roof when we put on the new one so it’s structurally like those new-built, hurricane-proof ones, but you’d still stay within your legal limits for the remodel. I mean, it’s already got those nice faceted lines on the ocean side, which is probably how it’s stood this long. But you’re digging into cost again.”

  “And timeline, I assume,” I said
with a small sigh.

  “That part isn’t too bad. We’d probably get the supports and roof on in about two weeks, and we actually have an opening if you want to start—”

  “So can you give her a couple different estimates?” Jackson interrupted.

  I shot him some side-eye. Listening in was one thing, but this wasn’t a situation where I needed—or wanted—to be rescued.

  “What?” Jackson shrugged. “Don’t you want to know the cost of what has to be done by professionals versus what you can do yourself, versus what you might like to have done by experts?” Those eyes of his cut right through me in a way that was more than a little unsettling and left me feeling exposed, like I was still standing there in my underwear.

  “Of course, but I can certainly handle my own contractor,” I said with a syrup-sweet smile. “And if I want to hire Barnum and Bailey to construct my new roof in the shape of a circus tent, I certainly can.”

  “That would actually be awesome. Not only for wind resistance but for pure visual effect.” He grinned, undermining my entire intent, because I couldn’t help but roll my eyes.

  The man had the damnedest effect on me.

  “Sweet Lord, Jackson, go away. You’re distracting me—Steve. You’re distracting Steve.” Clever cover-up. Not.

  “Concentrate harder, Kitty,” he whispered with a shrug and a wink. Then he waved up to Finley, who enthusiastically returned the gesture as she played on their porch.

  Wait. Shit. Was he flirting with me? He couldn’t flirt with me. I wasn’t available for flirting, or laughing, or…anything. Had I flirted back?

  Guilt gripped me by the throat and squeezed.

  I’d only known this man a handful of days.

  “Where were we?” Steve asked, glancing at his clipboard.

  I sucked in a strangled breath and swallowed past the part of my throat that threatened to close up. The last thing I wanted to do in front of Joey or Steve was take the rescue meds I’d been prescribed for acute attacks. I’m fine. This is fine.

  “You were agreeing to work up three estimates for me.” I stood a little straighter, and Joey smiled, unaware that I’d almost lost it. “I’ll need one that includes every safety issue you first addressed, then one that includes new flooring, lighting, siding, and removing that wall between the dining and living room.” Everything I couldn’t do myself. “And one with the works, whatever you think it needs. Give me details on whatever storm-proofing you like. Oh, and I’d love the entire living room to have the ability to retract the windows like one big sliding glass door.” With every word, the vice around my neck loosened.