Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 83612 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 418(@200wpm)___ 334(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83612 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 418(@200wpm)___ 334(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
Although I’m here, I still feel like something is missing. I know that’s the loneliness. It lingers in the spaces between conversations, in the pauses when everyone laughs at a joke about the past that I wasn’t around to be a part of. I catch myself watching instead of speaking. I did this to myself. I buried myself in work to forget about the pain of my failed marriage, and my daughter never wanted to see me. I let her think that my career was more important than her, and the ache of that truth sits heavily on my chest.
It’s not the absence of people. It’s the absence of something deeper, something I’ve spent years avoiding. If my daughter didn’t want to be around me, why would someone else?
I closed off my heart after my divorce, and it wasn’t until my daughter opened her heart to forgive me that I realized what I’d done. I’m surrounded by people every day. But I don’t have this. These inside jokes, the connections, the friends who will drop everything and do anything I need. I have colleagues. I have people who work under me. I have an entire team of football players, coaching staff, and more. But at the end of the day, I go home alone. My house is quiet and empty. It’s just me, and even though Bellamy is back in my life and I see her often, the loss, the isolation I brought upon myself, is still there.
I take a slow breath, letting it out like a small surrender. The room carries on around me, full of laughter, chatter, and the clinking of glasses. I may feel lonely at times, but I am also here. I am included.
So much has changed in the last two years, and I know with each day that passes, my relationship with my daughter will only grow. I won’t stop showing up, proving that I’ve learned from my past mistakes.
Two
Amanda
* * *
I feel restless and bone-tired at the same time. Today was incredible. Celebrating my best friend’s daughter with the people who have come to feel like family fills my heart. Bellamy falling in love with Reid changed my life. His family and friends welcomed us so completely that it feels as though we’ve always belonged here.
Today, they loved on my daughter—passed her from arm to arm, when they could get her away from Will, played with her, insisting I rest while they helped care for her. I’m deeply grateful for the break, and yet that’s where the restlessness creeps in. Since the day I signed those adoption papers, my life has been an endless loop of caring for her, working, then coming home to care for her again. Letting go, even briefly, feels unfamiliar. It feels like I’m doing something wrong, letting them care for her.
And the bone-tiredness comes from the same place. I was never meant to be a single mother to a newborn. I was too naïve to see my husband’s betrayal. Too willing to believe every excuse, overlook every mood swing, and every dinner I ate alone. I thought he was working to make a better life for our family, working toward making partner.
I trusted him completely, and he tore my heart from my chest.
“He’s good with them,” Candice, Bellamy’s mom, says, coming to stand next to me, looping her arm through mine.
I turn in the direction that she nods. She can only mean her ex-husband, as he has her granddaughter in one arm and my daughter in the other, as he sits on the recliner, making funny faces at the girls.
“He is,” I agree. I don’t know my best friend’s dad well. He wasn’t around when we were kids—not after the divorce. It’s only in the last few years, since Bellamy met and fell in love with Reid, that he’s been back in her life.
I know that he’s good to Bellamy, and Reid by association, even if he’s Reid’s coach. I know his players, at least this group, and from the way the team’s been winning, all of them respect the hell out of him. I know that his eyes light up when he sees his daughter and his granddaughter, and maybe even a little when he sees his new son-in-law. It’s easy to see that Reid worships his wife.
“I made so many mistakes,” Candice says. “Hindsight and all that,” she says.
“What do you mean?” I have a pretty good idea that she’s talking about her ex-husband, but I ask anyway.
“I never should have let my feelings shade Bellamy’s in any way. I should have insisted that she go see her dad. Will and I were so young when we met and got pregnant with Bellamy. We were just kids, trying to find our way. No matter what happened between us, he was her father. She needed him.”