The Things We Leave Unfinished by Yarros, Rebecca (best free e reader .TXT) 📗

the branches out and what seems like a tiny choice, left or right, becomes another and another, until the possibilities of what could have been are endless.”

“Like if I hadn’t found out Damian was cheating, I’d still be with him? Well, maybe if there wasn’t a baby.” My voice dropped off, and I shut that line of thinking down.

“Maybe. But you’re on a different branch now because you did. And maybe that other branch exists in the fictional realm of possibilities, but in this one, you’re here with me.” His gaze dropped to my lips and back. “I’m sorry that he fucked up but not sorry you know about it. You deserve better.”

“Gran never wanted me to marry him.” I shifted my weight but left us connected. “She wanted what she had with Grandpa Jameson for me. Not that she didn’t love Grandpa Brian, because she did.”

“It took her forty years to move on. Was she finally happy?”

I nodded. “She really was, from what she’s said. I never really pushed her to talk about it, though. It always seemed too painful. Damian did once or twice, but he was always a nosy ass. Still, even while she was married to Grandpa Brian, she wrote out here, like she was still waiting for Jameson all those years later.”

“She was the ultimate romantic. Look at this place…” He studied the gazebo. “Can’t you feel them here? Can’t you see them happy in some other fictional realm of possibility? Some other branch where the war doesn’t rip them to shreds?”

I swallowed, thinking of Gran—not the way I remembered her, but the way she looked in the photograph, wildly, recklessly in love.

“I can,” Noah went on. “I see them cutting a little landing strip into the meadow so he could fly, and I see them with half a dozen kids. I see the way he looks at her, like she’s the reason the seasons change and the sun rises until they’re a hundred and one years old.”

That was one year more than Gran had lived, and though I knew it was greedy, I wanted it. Out of every year I’d been alive, this was the one I’d needed her the most.

Noah pivoted, consuming the space in front of me, looking at me with such intensity that I had to fight not to look away. He saw too much, made me feel too exposed. But my body certainly didn’t mind how close he was. My heart thundered, my breath hitched, my blood warmed.

“I see them walking hand in hand at sunset to get a few minutes away—after they put the kids to bed, of course. I see her looking up from her typewriter to watch him walk by, knowing if she gets her work done for the day, he’ll be waiting. I see them laughing, and living, and fighting—always passionate but fair. They’re careful with each other because they know what they have, they know how rare it is, how lucky they were to survive it all with that love intact. They’re still magnetic, still make love like they’ll never get enough, still open, bluntly honest, yet tender.” His hand rose to cup my cheek, warm and steady. My breath caught, my pulse leaping at the touch. “Georgia, can’t you see it? It’s in every line of this place. This isn’t a mausoleum, it’s a promise, a shrine to that love.”

“It’s a beautiful story,” I whispered, wishing that had been their fate…or mine.

“Then let them have it.”

I sidestepped out of his reach, then walked across the gazebo to get some perspective. He wove his words into a world I wanted to live in, but that was his talent, his job. It wasn’t real.

“It wasn’t what she wanted, or she would have written it that way, ended it like all her other books,” I said. “You still think it’s a story, with characters who speak to you and choose their own branches. It’s not. It’s the closest she came to an autobiography, and you can’t change the past.” The tightness in my chest transformed to an ache. “What you described is why you’re so good at what you do, but it’s not what she wanted.” I walked to the split in the railing and down the stairs, staring up at the tops of the trees.

“What she wanted or what you want, Georgia?” he asked from the top of the steps, frustration cutting lines on his forehead.

My eyes slid shut, and I took a steadying breath, then another before turning back to him. “What I want has only ever mattered to one person, and she’s dead. This is all I can give her, Noah. The gift of honoring what she went through—what they lost.”

“You’re taking the easy way out, and that’s not who you are!”

“What the hell makes you think you know me?” I fired back.

“You sculpted a tree coming straight out of the water!”

“And?” I folded my arms over my chest.

“Whether it’s conscious or unconscious, there are pieces of me in every story I tell, and I bet it’s the same for you with sculpting. That tree isn’t anchored by earth. It shouldn’t be able to grow, and yet there it is. And don’t think I didn’t notice the lighting. It shined straight through to highlight the roots. Why else would you call it Indomitable Will?”

He remembered the name of the piece? I shook my head. “This isn’t about me. It’s about her. About them. Wrapping this up with a bow, whether it’s a tearful reunion at a train station or showing her rushing to his bedside, cheapens what she went through. The book ends here, Noah. Right at this gazebo, with Scarlett waiting for a man who never came back to her. Period.”

He looked up to the sky like he was praying for patience, and the fire in his eyes had lowered to a simmer by the time he brought his gaze back to mine. “If you force this, it will earn inevitably shitty reviews