The Last Thing He Told Me (Hannah Hall, #1)

by Laura Dave

Watching my grandfather work taught me that not everything was fluid. There were certain things that you hit from different angles, but you never gave up on. You did the work that was needed, wherever that work took you.

Maybe we are all fools, one way or another, when it comes to seeing the totality of the people who love us—the people we try to love.

He never understood that I wasn’t scared of someone leaving me. I was scared that the wrong person would stay.

This is the terrible thing about a tragedy. It isn’t with you every minute. You forget it, and then you remember it again. And you see it with a stark quality: This is what is required of you now, just to get along.

The love was true. His love is true. Because, if it isn’t, the other option is that it was all a lie, and what are you supposed to do with that? What are you supposed to do with any of this? How do you put the pieces together so he doesn’t disappear completely?

He loved my work, loved being a part of it. And every time I saw how genuinely he felt that way, it was another small reminder how lucky I was to love him.

It feels like a victory that we are moving closer to the truth. But when the truth is taking you somewhere you don’t want to go, you also aren’t sure. You aren’t sure you want that win.

How do you explain it when you find in someone what you’ve been waiting for your whole life? Do you call it fate? It feels lazy to call it fate. It’s more like finding your way home—where home is a place you secretly hoped for, a place you imagined, but where you’d never before been. Home. When you weren’t sure you’d ever get to have one. That’s what he was to me. That’s who he was.

You make a hundred decisions. You make decisions all the time. And the one you don’t think of twice shouldn’t get to determine what happens to her: