Happy After All

by Maisey Yates

It’s a fine line. Being at peace and hiding from your demons.

I would have to put any heroine through the fire on this one. I would have to confront her with the things she really wants, the things that hurt the most, the things she needs to heal from. I would have to make her talk about her deep wound. I would have to make her go and find some kind of peace with her mother. I would have to . . . do so many of the things I’m already doing.

It’s like I had writer’s block and suddenly the words are flowing. But it’s not a page, it’s my life.

“It’s okay to want that,” she says. “I hope you know. It’s okay to want everything.”

“What if I can’t have everything?” “You’ll survive. You’ll keep on living. You’ll smile again. You’ll dream again. You get to be my age, and you realize that you had everything that was meant for you. So you might as well want it all, then see what comes.”

Maybe it’s greedy, standing here in the motel courtyard with so many people who love me, to want Nathan Hart to love me too. To want him to love me most of all. I would let a fictional woman want all o...

I just like him. And that, I feel, is incredible all on its own. It feels like something too big and bright to be contained. I don’t want to contain it. I just want to feel it.

She’s proud, but she doesn’t quite understand him. I realize that’s the lens he sees her through as well. He is astonishingly proud of everything she does. He doesn’t love horses, not like she does. He understands that it matters to her, and because of that it matters to him. They pour so many resources into her endeavors. It is a very real support. He finds a way to love it because she does.

their commitment to being different and supportive is a very rare thing.

I think how much it must’ve meant to him, coming from a family where he was very different from his parents, from his brothers, and finding someone who not only accepted him but who did it while not being exactly the same person he was. That is a gift.

You just do. Because if you don’t . . . then all you have is the pain. It’s there, beneath the surface, whether you want it to be or not.

I’m also strong enough to walk away because he’s not giving me everything. I know what I want. I’m not asking him for everything; I’m just asking him to try, and he won’t do that, so there is no more conversation to have.