Pirate Smile

“Oh.” My chest tightened as I scrolled down the webpage. It was an involuntary movement.

Seeing Jared’s smirk of a smile, his happiness—it made my heart ache. He looked good with her, his new fiancé. Just thinking of the word in reference to another woman spawned immediate hatred. It should have been me.

“Holly,” I spoke rationally to myself. “You made your bed, now you have to lay in it.”
I was right—I’d done this to myself. I had no right to be angry or jealous.

She was a model.

I fingered the ring around my thumb. It had once been his; he’d given it to me one of the summers I got to spend with the band. We were seventeen, maybe a little drunk, and we walked through the fields behind his brothers’ farmhouse. It late, but we were looking for the stars anyway.

I wondered if he remembered that.

In my head, I knew I made the right decision for the both of us. I was sure of it. I’d convinced Jared of the opposite and freed him. I told myself over and over that it would have been too much of a burden for us to survive together, especially with his music. We would become bitter and we would regret everything. I didn’t want that for us. We were meant to have better fates.
My heart, of course, always questioned it. Always. It was a day to day war waged within my own body.
So I made the sacrifices and blamed nobody.

But she was worth it.

I looked over at her asleep on the sofa, her small body curled into a ball. She would be two in a few weeks. She looked so much like him that I could never let him go. I couldn’t pretend he’d been some random guy. I didn’t want to. While one part of me denied it, another part of me knew that if I ever saw him again I wouldn’t be able to walk away. So I stayed away, I’d put up a solid front these past couple of years when he’d call or email. He’d actually gotten to my apartment door once, but I went into my bedroom and closed the door.

It was stuff like that that made me feel like I’d done the wrong thing—that I’d jipped both my kid and the boy I loved. But then the mother in me thought about the parties, the drugs, the drinking, the women, the noise, the fame. Things just kept stacking up against a normal life. Was I turning into my own mother—or had I just skipped a generation and gone right to my grandmother?

Regardless, Michael Jared Follow would never know about Delilah Michelle Finn. We didn’t need our delicate existence overturned.