When We Let Go by Delancey Stewart (read with me .txt) đź“•
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- Author: Delancey Stewart
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Connor was still grinning, though he looked uncomfortable and nervous.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Why isn’t he saying anything?” I asked my brother, nodding at Connor, who still hadn’t moved.
“I think he’s nervous.” Cam pounded Connor’s shoulder with his fist in a playful punch. “Hey man, wasn’t there something you wanted to, uh, say?”
Connor snapped out of whatever spell he’d been under. “I made your favorite dinner,” he said.
“Chicken piccata,” I said. “It smells amazing.”
Cam was popping a bottle of champagne in the kitchen, and pouring three glasses.
“Champagne?” I shook my head in wonder, grinning along with the boys and their happy surprise. “I guess we should celebrate the house finally being done.”
“Among other things,” Cam said.
“Like what?” I asked. Connor seemed to have gone catatonic again.
“Connor, c’mon, man.” Cam put a glass on the table in front of Connor. “Can we get this over with so we can eat? I can’t handle you being this fruity all night.”
I looked back and forth between them, getting a small idea what was going on. But until Connor spoke, I couldn’t be sure.
He took a deep breath and then stepped around the table, dropping to a knee in front of me.
“Oh my God,” I said, clapping a hand over my mouth.
“Maddie,” Connor said finally. “I’ve spent my life believing that I saved you that day. I thought that when I’d pulled you from the river, and put you down right on this very spot, that I’d saved your life.”
“You did,” I whispered. The room had disappeared, and all I saw were Connor’s bright eyes, his perfect lips.
He shook his head. “No, not really. I mean, yes, maybe I did. But in the past year, I’ve come to realize something else. All those years I spent, all the time I searched for meaning in my life, I think I was really looking for you. And it wasn’t because you were the one I saved. It was because I needed you to save me. And you have.”
I felt tears building in my eyes. They weren’t the forced tears I’d squeezed out when Jack had proposed because I’d thought I was supposed to cry. They were tears of genuine wonder that this incredible man was on his knees before me, saying the words that I’d only ever want to hear from his lips. They were tears of realization that this was right.
“Maddie Turner, will you marry me?”
I felt myself nodding and dropped to my knees facing him, and pulled him into a kiss that made the room spin.
When I pulled away, I heard clapping, and remembered that my brother had been standing there the whole time, witnessing this moment. I hugged Connor again. “Yes, of course I will!”
I got to my feet and stepped around the table to Cameron. I was worried that it might have hurt him watching that, being forced to witness someone else’s happiness so intimately while his heart was surely still in pieces.
Unshed tears shone in Cam’s eyes, but there was something else in them, too—the light that had been missing this past year. The gleam that I remembered from childhood. I reached for him, and his arms went tight around me.
“I’m so happy for you, Mad,” he said. “Congratulations!” He broke away and raised his glass, handing me mine as Connor retrieved his.
I’d been worried that my happiness might hurt my brother, but now I saw that having him there in that moment with me was perfect. As screwed up and imperfect as my world usually was and would certainly be again, it was perfect in that moment, with my brother at my side as I began the next chapter of my life.
I smiled at the men I loved more than anything else in the world and let the tiny bubbles in the champagne fizz on my tongue as I basked, glowing, in that single moment of perfection. Maybe Connor was right, that the little in between moments were the ones we needed to really focus on living, but this big single moment would live in my mind and heart forever. In this moment, as the pieces of my life solidified, I realized that I’d managed to rebuild it—my life, my love, my family. I sipped champagne and smiled in wonder that it was even possible. And as Connor and Cameron smiled back at me, I knew I’d finally found the place where I belonged.
I would never leave Kings Grove. It was where I’d been happiest as a child, and though I’d spent most of the last couple years trying to escape it, it was the place I’d rediscovered myself as an adult. Kings Grove was home, and I was finally the woman I was meant to be.
THE END
“Remember, it’s all about getting the corners lined up.” My mother’s voice floated toward me when I walked into the house, and my stomach clenched.
Oh God. I thought we’d gotten past this.
“Just flip that second corner over the first one on your right hand.” She giggled maniacally after this line. I could deliver this entire thing from heart, getting every single inflection exactly right, I’d heard it so many times.
“Mom, not again.” I walked into the living room to find Mom standing in front of the television, a fitted sheet dangling from her hands and tears running down her face. On the television in front of her, she stood in exactly the same position, a brighter, younger version of herself. “I thought you’d made peace with this.”
She gave me an apologetic shrug and turned back to the television, where her younger self was just beginning to run into trouble.
“It’s just this third corner that is always so difficult, but I promise you, everyone—once you get this one, it all just falls into place. You’ll have beautifully folded sheets from now on and that linen closet will finally be neat and orderly.” A false brightness had crept into TV Mom’s voice, along with a sharp edge of panic. I hated watching this part.
“Mom, we should turn this off.” I walked to the television and reached to stop the DVR, but Mom stopped me.
“No, I need to see it. I just …” As Mom’s TV self started to flail miserably and blush furiously while she tried time and again to fold that bright red fitted sheet into submission on Wake Up Kings Grove, real-life Mom had folded her sheet into a perfectly tidy little square. “How could I have done that?” Mom asked me, setting the sheet on the coffee table and patting it. She sank to the couch. “How did it go so wrong?”
I sat down beside her, dropping my keys on top of her sheet. We watched the rest together, painful as it was.
“Maybe if you try again, slowly?” Angela Sugar, the host of King’s Grove’s morning show was trying to help TV Mom fold the sheet. “I’m sure you do this all the time successfully …”
TV Mom snapped, “I do!” Her voice was high and warbly. “I do this all the time. I’m a professional goddamn organizer. What is wrong with me?” The sheet that filled the TV screen almost blocked out Angela’s shocked face, but not quite.
The segment was nearing its awful end, my mother next to me wracked with silent sobs. “It ruined me,” she was moaning. “It was supposed to launch my business, and instead I’m the organizing laughing stock.”
“You’re overreacting.” She wasn’t, really. The last part of the segment, where Mom began to flip out and her face turned bright red as she flung the sheet this way and that, had gone viral on the Internet not long after it aired. Her desperate attempts to demonstrate how easy it was to fold a fitted sheet became a meme that had even popped up on my Facebook feed. And since half of Mom’s business revolved around her blog, it didn’t take long for her to catch wind of it. When that happened, she definitely overreacted. I thought it would have been great if she’d owned it, and used her flub to promote her business—“Even a professional organizer struggles to get things in order sometimes…”—something like that. But Mom had tried to pretend it never happened. Except at home, where she watched the segment on endless repeat, practicing the skill that had “ruined” her. Our linen closet was extremely tidy.
“You can turn it off,” she sniffed as TV Mom ran from the stage, the sheet bundled in her arms and her wailing voice following behind her as Angela smiled into the camera with wide what-just-happened? eyes.
“No, I like this next part,” I said. I put an arm around her and patted her shoulder. Angela introduced the next guest.
“President of Palmer Construction, and the man who’s singlehandedly saving the Kings Grove campground cottages … Please help me welcome Chance Palmer!”
My heart raced as gorgeous Chance Palmer strode confidently across the stage to give Angela a warm hug. His dark hair was waved over his forehead, cut short around the sides, and the perfect
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