But I had a feeling she wouldn’t have an answer for this.
“Where do you want me to start?” I asked, folding my own legs under me to match her.
“How about telling me why your plus one is missing in action?”
I swallowed, glancing at the dresser where the flowers Jacob had surprised me with once sat. My chest immediately caught fire, because the next memory was a flash of Tyler’s hands on my hips, spreading my legs until that vase of flowers clamored to the floor.
“I broke up with him,” I whispered.
“Clearly. But why?”
I rolled my eyes up to the ceiling as they filled with tears, but it was no use, and when I looked at my aunt, I broke with my admission. “Because I’m in love with Tyler.”
Her next breath came like a long, cool breeze, her eyebrows folding together. “I was afraid of that.”
“Trust me,” I said on a bitter laugh. “You weren’t the only one.”
Aunt Laura reached forward to squeeze my wrist, and then she asked me to start from the beginning — from the very beginning — and so I did.
For two hours, I rehashed every single moment that had led to the very one we existed in. I told her about that day when Mom left, about how he’d called what we’d done a mistake, how I’d spent years trying to forget him and this place, only to come back for Morgan’s wedding and be completely thrown by him again. I told her about Morgan’s confession, that it had actually been she who told Tyler to stay away from me, and how that had changed everything for me.
All that time, I thought he didn’t want me.
And when I realized he did, there was no turning back.
I watched every emotion pass over my aunt’s face as I recounted the years with Tyler, everything from surprise and disappointment to sorrow and understanding. And when I’d finally caught her up, I fell back into the comforter of my bed beside where she sat, my eyes on the ceiling, chest tight and skin hot to the touch.
“Well,” she said after a long while, folding her hands in her lap. “I’m not proud of you for falling into temptation, for doing what you did with Tyler when you both had someone else.”
I felt her disappointment in me like a shotgun to the heart, the shell splintering off and damaging every part of me that I was somehow still holding together.
“But,” she continued, reaching out to run her fingers through my hair. “I am proud of you for realizing you couldn’t be what Jacob deserved, or give him what he was giving you. I know that conversation must have been hard, but you did the right thing in letting him go, and in telling him the truth.”
I blew out a breath, nodding as my eyes filled with tears.
“He was a good man to you,” she whispered. “It breaks my heart that you couldn’t see that.”
“I could,” I argued, rolling over to face her. “I still can, Al. That’s the problem. It didn’t matter how good Jacob was, how good anyone was or would have been. It’s always been Tyler.” I shook my head, throat tight. “And I didn’t realize how much he still had a grip on me, not until I was standing right in front of him again after convincing myself that he meant nothing to me for seven long years.”
She swept my hair from my face, watching me with pinched brows. “Have you talked to him? Since Azra got here?”
I sighed, because I’d purposefully omitted the last conversation I’d had with Tyler in this very room — mostly because I looked back on it now, wondering what the hell I was thinking. “Yes,” I confessed. “He followed me up here, and I told him we couldn’t be together. I told him it was a mistake. He had Azra, and I had Jacob, and we couldn’t break any more hearts pining over something rooted in our past.”
“But you already knew you were going to break up with Jacob.”
“Yes.”
“And you still want Tyler. You still love him.”
“Yes,” I whispered, wincing at the painful shrinking of my heart.
Aunt Laura let out a long sigh, and she tugged on my hands until I was upright again and facing her. She held my hands in hers, staring at where our fingers locked together with a strange smile on her face.
“You know, you remind me of your mother sometimes. Of when she was younger.”
My throat was sticky and dry, emotion strangling me at her words. Part of me leaned into it, longing to hear more about how I was like the woman who had made me. The other part of me wanted to scream and throw things, to never speak about the woman who had left me.
“How so?”
“She always put others before herself,” Aunt Laura said, but a knowing laugh puffed from her nose. “But not always in the right way. She just always felt like she knew what was best for everyone she loved, and once she made up her mind, that was it. There was no talking her out of it. You could tell her what you wanted, what you needed, but if she saw it another way, there was no convincing her. She’d think you were lying to save her emotions, or trying to make her life easier.” She shook her head. “My sister made life hard for herself, harder than it needed to be, all under the pretense of helping others.”
My stomach knotted, and I thought about what I could remember of my mom, of the choices she made, not just for herself, but for us as a family unit.
“What I’m trying to say is that you only have two choices here, Jazzy,” Aunt Laura said, bending to look me in the eyes. “You either fight for Tyler, or you let him go.”
I shook my head. “But I can’t—”
“You have a choice,” she argued before I could get my sentence out. “Whether it’s an easy one to make or not is a completely different story, but the decision is not already made for you. There are consequences on either side of this, whether you run to him or walk away from him forever. But all I ask is that you don’t make the decision based on what you think he wants or needs, or on what you think will be better for his family, or for Azra, or for anyone else. You can’t project what you don’t know for sure. And making a decision based on possible negative outcomes only puts fear in the driver’s seat of your life, my girl.” She paused, shaking her head. “Trust me when I say you don’t want that.”
I rolled my lips together, looking out the window over the dark ocean before I found my aunt’s gaze again. “What do I do? Which one is the right choice?”
“I can’t answer that for you,” she said softly, regrettably. “Only you can. And like I said, there’s no easy right or wrong, no simple path on the other side of whatever decision you do make. You just have to decide which one you want to walk, and whether you want to walk it alone, or with him.”
“And if he denies me?”
Aunt Laura shrugged, and I almost laughed, because it was somehow painstakingly funny that I was in this situation.
There was no answer to be handed to me on a gold platter, no magic words to make everything okay. And even after my aunt had kissed me on the cheek and left my room to go to her own, I lie awake on top of my bedspread with my eyes on the ceiling, thinking over all she’d said, over all I’d been through, over all the different factors that played into the two paths I could take from this moment on.
I didn’t know what to do.