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

by Laura Dave

(let’s go said he not too far said she what’s too far said he where you are said she) —e. e. cummings

about the men I’d left behind, the men who had left me. He’d called them the could-have-been boys. He raised a glass to them and said, wherever they were, he was grateful to them for not being what I needed, so he got to be the one sitting across from me.

You barely know me, I’d said. He smiled. It doesn’t feel that way, does it?

It was more that his smile—this generous, childlike smile—made him seem kind. It made him seem kind in a way I wasn’t used to running into on Greene Street in downtown Manhattan. It was expansive in a way I’d started to doubt I’d ever run into on Greene Street in downtown Manhattan.

I’m not saying it was love at first sight. What I’m saying is that a part of me wanted to do something to stop him from walking away.

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.

Maybe it’s more accurate to say that what was required to be with Owen didn’t feel like effort. It felt like details.

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

but the point is, there’s not a whole lot you could tell me about who you used to be that would change anything, at least not between us.”

“Do I have a choice?” she says. “Yes,” I say. “Always. With me you always do.”

This is the terrible thing about a tragedy. It isn’t with you every minute. You forget it, and then you remember it again.

If they lie to you, like he did, who are you then? Who is he?

The person you thought you knew, your favorite person, starts to disappear, a mirage, unless you convince yourself the parts that matter are still true. 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?

But that’s not how you learn you can count on someone. You learn it in the moments when everyone’s too tired to be sweet, too tired to try hard. You learn it by what they do for you then.

It wasn’t even that we understood each other in that elusive way that you either had with someone or you could never quite find—that pervasive shorthand in which a look could tell us what the other person needed: Time to leave the party; Time to reach for me; Time to give me room to breathe.

It was a little bit of all of that and something far bigger than all of that. How do you explain it when you find in someone what you’ve been waiting for your whole life?

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.

“Turns out you have a little while to decide,” he said. “Like the rest of our lives?” I said. “I hope longer than that,” he said.

In one way or another, this is the deal we all sign when we love someone. For better or worse. It’s the deal we have to sign again and again to keep that love. We don’t turn away from the parts of someone we don’t want to see. However quickly or long it takes to see them. We accept them if we are strong enough. Or we accept them enough to not let the bad parts become the entire story.