I close the notebook and rest my head on my bent knees. I can’t help the tears that come now. Fast and free and falling. I say good-bye to a final chapter. With only fresh pages ahead, where do I go from here?
That’s the beauty of life, isn’t it? Every day is a new page, waiting to be written.
When I stand and stretch, I stuff the newly filled notebook into my bag and walk along the beach, padding over the line of damp sand where the sea rushes my soles. About halfway between the shore and the sidewalk I see it. A corked, frosted blue sea glass bottle. My heartbeat ceases to exist.
The bottle is nearly identical to the one I found in the ocean the day I turned my own world upside down. I’ve carried it with me as a memorial token of the choice I made to keep fighting. Could it be more than just a bottle?
I whip my head left and right. It’s Thanksgiving Day. Of course the beach is abandoned. Everyone is stuffing their faces with turkey or enjoying the fall festival in town.
I give the area another once-over before kneeling in the sand beside the bottle.
It’s crazy. We were together little longer than a summer. A moment. A single scene within hundreds. But that moment? Somehow it became my air. A way to breathe through the hurt and the pain and the grief I couldn’t cope with and that all at once consumed me.
Merrick was the first person I didn’t hide from. I opened the door for him. My beacon of light in a raging storm.
This is more than a bottle.
This is Merrick’s way of keeping his promise.
“I’ll wait. However long it takes. I’ll wait for you.”
It takes some work to pull the tight cork free, but I manage. I peer through the hole with one eye. Have I missed what was right in front of me all along? I tilt the bottle until the rolled paper reaches the lip, rip the edges as I tug, but . . . there! It’s free.
I know it’s a message before I unfurl it. When I do, I stare at the words. The note is signed “Prince” and my heart can’t handle the conflicting joy and sorrow within.
Winter can’t last forever. I’ll wait for you through the storm, Brooke. Promise.
How could I ever have questioned him? Why did I push him away when all this time he would have welcomed me into his arms?
I don’t swallow my emotions when I look up. Don’t bother masking my heart behind a blank expression any longer. I see the other bottles then. Spaced every ten feet or so, creating a trail over the sand up the shore and back down again. I rise. Take my time as I kneel beside the bottles one by one. Each letter is dated and signed. One letter for every month over the past year. I follow their path. Read. Relish. Remember. At the end I’m exactly where I began. At my favorite spot beneath the pier.
Our spot.
He’s standing there, waiting. The final bottle in his left hand.
“How’d you know I’d be here?” I ask, though I already know the answer.
“Nikki. Mee-Maw.” He shrugs. “Take your pick.”
“What is all this?”
Another shrug. “You said you don’t believe in fate.”
“I don’t.” Didn’t. My smile reaches my hairline. “I’m starting to reconsider.”
“I knew it was a one-in-a-million chance you’d ever find the original bottle I sent out to sea. So I decided to give fate a little push.” He hands me the last bottle, fingers brushing mine for an instant.
I try to control the wave ready to break loose at his touch. I take the bottle and read the final letter. The short and sweet and perfect letter that says more than all of his messages combined.
Today
Dear Brooke,
I love you.
Promise.
Yours,
Merrick Prince
“We choose our own ending,” he says when our eyes meet. “And, Brooke?”
My lips part at hearing him say my true name aloud for the first time.
“I choose you. For all the endings and beginnings and in-betweens.”
We sit beside each other in the sand, the way we did many summer nights ago. Our fingers weave between the grains, sliding closer to the other’s with each second.
We say nothing for a moment. When the silence is so long neither of us can stand it, he leans close. His shoulder against mine is a pillar. Though I’ve learned to stand on my own, I’ve also found there’s nothing wrong with relying on others.
I can have both.
The sea creeps closer. When the foam reaches us, the past urge to take refuge there lingers. “Once upon a time I believed everything was better underwater,” I say. “Where sounds and colors collide. Where my body becomes weightless.”
His pinky finger finds mine. I link my own with his, relishing the way it feels to make this silent promise with him again. I turn to face him. “Merrick, when this year began, I wanted the freedom I believed only the ocean could bring.”
I wait for the information to register. Watch as understanding settles in his gaze.
My fingers slide over his, pulling back, then pushing in and holding tighter. “I tried to end it.” I find his eyes and hold faster still. “But you saved me.” My shoulders rise and fall in a ripple. I dig through my purse and withdraw a sea glass bottle.
Not one I found today.
The one I clung to nearly a year ago when everything was gray.
His eyes grow wide.
I uncork the bottle now, discover his very first letter from last November. Why didn’t I ever think to look inside sooner?
November
Dear Brooke,
You are not nothing.
You never have been.
You never will be.
You are something to someone.
You are everything to me.
Promise.
Yours,
Prince
Merrick draws a quick breath. “Is that—”
With moist eyes and a full heart, I try to find the words. But, for once, they’re lost to me.
Because Merrick found them first.
“You said it would be a one-in-a-million chance I’d find this.” I draw the message to my heart. “But I did. I found it. And it led me back to you.”
I tell him of the storm and finding the bottle in the sea. Of hypothermia and hallucinations and the night in the cave. It had all been a dream. But now it’s my ending.
“True love”—I choke on the words, so raw and real—“makes life, even a broken one, worth fighting for.”
“If you ever find true love, hold on to it.” River’s voice comes back to me. I think of everything she believed she lost. Of all she left behind.
A tear slips down my cheek. Then another. I can’t stop them. I don’t even try. I sniffle, but I won’t wipe them away. “I once saw emotion as a curse or a disease. I thought love was a fairy tale.”
“And now?” He lifts his hands to my cheeks, catches my tears with his thumbs. He takes care to remove each one, touching them to the ocean and letting them dissolve with the foam as it recedes.