Before I Let Go (Skyland, #1)

by Kennedy Ryan

I kiss her forehead to remove some of the sting, and my own words play back. Defending Yasmen to Deja. Trying to understand. There’s a voice in the back of my mind wondering if I should have done more of that when I had the chance.

Grief is a grind. It is the work of breathing and waking and rising and moving through a world that feels emptier. A gaping hole has been torn into your existence, and everyone around you just walks right past it like it’s not even there.

And I think I’m most grateful for time, which doesn’t always heal all wounds, but teaches us how to be happy again even with our scars.”

“If I waited until I don’t have feelings for Yasmen before I moved on,” I tell Vashti as gently as I can, “I never would.”

Does he really think I can forget what happened? It was fantastic, mind-melting sex. It was like old times, but even better. Apparently absence makes the heart grow horny. Cross-stitch that on a pillow.

“Well, then may all your pain be champagne.”

“Depression,” she goes on, “is a liar. If it will tell you no one loves you, that you’re not good enough, that you’re a burden or, in the most extreme cases, better off dead, then it can certainly convince you that you’re better off without the man you love, and that, ultimately, he’s better off without you.”

Our traumas, the things that injure us in this life, even over time, are not always behind us. Sometimes they linger in the smell of a newborn baby. They surprise us in the taste of a home-cooked meal. They wait in the room at the end of the hall. They are with us. They are present. And there are some days when memories feel more real than those who remain, than the joys of this world.

Do people remember the exact moment they fall in love? I’ve learned it’s not one moment, but a million of them. I fell in love with Yasmen dreaming of our bright future over cheap Chinese food in a raggedy-ass apartment with no heat and shitty water pressure. I fell in love with Yasmen a little more, a little deeper, every time she took me into her body, showed me how passion burns your tongue when you taste it. When she rolled up her sleeves and poured her creativity, her matchless energy, into building a business together we can be proud of. When she gave me our children and became a mother who made magic, who held up everyone else, carried the world on her shoulders with infinite grace. Even when she fell, she stayed; when everything urged her to give up and go, she stayed for us, and she fought until she found herself again. I’ve fallen in love with the warrior woman who walked through fire, the one who came through stronger, reshaped by sorrow, reformed by grief, reborn in joy.