Park Avenue Player by Vi Keeland
Chapter 46
Hollis
I poured two fingers of the scotch I kept in the office for special occasions, sat down on the couch, and opened the envelope. Just seeing her handwriting knocked the wind out of me, and I had to take a few deep, calming breaths. When that didn’t do shit to steady me, I gulped back the contents of the glass in one giant swallow.
Let’s get this over with.
Dear Hollis,
In eleventh grade, you said something that has stayed with me to this day. Your mom was back in the hospital. She was dehydrated from how sick the medicines had made her, and she’d gotten a horrible infection from the chemo port. She was in a lot of pain, and it killed you to see her like that. It killed me, too. I had to go home, and we stood in front of the hospital for a long time holding each other. You were crying, and you said,
“I wish I had the strength to make her believe I don’t need her—so she could let go.”
You knew the constant fighting to hang on was difficult and painful for her, but she’d never stop because of you. Sometimes in life, people need help letting go.
Since you’re reading this letter, I’m gone now. But you let me go before today, and that’s what I wanted. What you deserved. You took care of your mother for so many years, selflessly sacrificing your life to be by her side. I couldn’t let you do that for me, too. You deserved so much more—to be free.
So I lied, Hollis. There was never any other man. Three days before you proposed, I was diagnosed with my illness. I’d been trying to find a way to tell you, and in that moment, when I looked at you down on one knee, I realized what telling you would mean.
I knew I had a long battle ahead of me, one that would inevitably end before I was thirty. So I made a rash decision. I told you I’d met someone else so you’d move on.
But over the years, I kept tabs on you, and I realized you weren’t really doing that. So when I found out Hailey had moved in with you, and then I miraculously stumbled upon an ad for a nanny—an ad with the mailing address of your firm—it was fate.
Elodie is an amazing woman, and somehow I just knew you two would hit it off, if I could get her to apply. Everything else happened on its own—the car accident where you met, you hiring her, the beautiful way you two fell in love.
I’m sure you’re both confused right about now. I can’t even imagine the moment when you figured out your Anna was Elodie’s Bree. So I feel I owe you both an explanation, along with an apology.
I’m sorry I lied to you.
I’m sorry I lied to Elodie.
I’m sorry I made you think I didn’t love you enough to be faithful.
I’m sorry I made you doubt your trust in women.
True love means wanting the best for someone, and for you, that didn’t include me.
Take good care of yourself, Hollis. And take good care of my girl. You deserve each other.
Always,
Anna
***
It took me a full hour before I could even get up from the office couch. I read the letter over and over, fearing I’d missed something of importance. But the entire thing was important—every single word. It was the most important message I’d ever received in my life, so precious and sacred, never to be repeated, never to be clarified. This was it. Her final words.
The first read-through was certainly shocking. But the more I read it, the more everything clicked. For the first time since Anna walked out of my life, it all made sense.
When I arrived at my door that night, I paused before opening it. I knew Elodie had received a letter, too. I assumed she was in a similar predicament of confused emotions.
When I finally entered, I saw her sitting alone on the couch.
She got up fast and ran to me, taking me into her arms. The tension in my body dissipated as I allowed myself to be held by her without retreating. I’d resisted her far too much in the past several days. At the very least, we needed this right now.
We held each other for a long time before she finally let me go and said, “I can’t believe it.”
I let out a deep breath and nodded. “But it’s the first time anything has ever made sense to me when it came to her. Even when I saw her lying there in the hospital, it never occurred to me that she could’ve known about her illness before she ended things with me all those years ago.”
Elodie stared off. “I’ve been thinking back to some of the conversations she and I had when I was dating you. I don’t understand how she could’ve endured listening to me go on and on. That took a lot of strength.”
“Everything she did took strength. Handling the stuff about us was a drop in the bucket compared to surviving every day on this Earth knowing she was going to die young.”
I closed my eyes. That got to me the most: the courage it took to live like that.
Elodie seemed more concerned about me than herself as she placed her hands around my face. “Are you going to be okay, Hollis?”
She didn’t realize that even though this news was hard to grasp, it brought me comfort to know my lingering emotions over Anna all these years hadn’t been in vain.
“Reading her letter was jarring, but it’s brought me a strange sense of peace,” I said. “I’d been so conflicted about whether she would’ve wanted me at her funeral, conflicted about why I was so devastated to lose someone who had apparently betrayed me. It’s going to take a while for this to sink in, but I’m more okay today than I was yesterday, if that makes sense. I thought we’d never get answers, that we’d have to live with uncertainty forever. Now we know everything.”
“Yeah.” She sniffled. “We do.”
We moved over to the couch, and Elodie rested her head on my chest. I wrapped my arm around her as we sat in silence. I didn’t want her to leave tonight. I wanted to sleep next to her and bury myself inside her to forget about the pain of this day.
But I wanted those things to comfort myself.
I still didn’t feel right about jumping back into things with Elodie until I was ready to give her everything she deserved. Just when I’d started to think I might be able to try again to pick up my life where it had left off, this new bomb had dropped. Even though it had brought me some peace, it also brought new emotions that had to be dealt with, namely grappling with the realization that Anna never stopped loving me. She’d died knowing I loved someone else. Despite the fact that she’d orchestrated that, I knew it had to be painful for her.
Hailey walked out into the living room. “Are you two okay?”
“Yeah, we’re fine,” I told her.
Her face said she knew that was bullshit.
“No more secrets, guys, remember?”
Elodie looked up at me and mouthed, “Can we tell her?”
I nodded.
“Sit down, Hailey,” Elodie said.
She took a seat on the chair across from us.
Elodie sat up. “Today we both received letters from our friend Brianna.”
“She wrote you from heaven?”
Elodie shook her head. “No. She wrote us before she died.”
“Oh. What did she say?”
“She admitted something neither of us ever knew.”
“What?”
I spoke before Elodie had to explain it. “Apparently, she found out about her illness just before she ended things with me all those years ago. And so the reason I believed we’d broken up all these years wasn’t true.”
“She lied?”
“It’s complicated, but she didn’t want me to have to suffer knowing she was sick and watching her die, the way I’d had to with my mother. So she pretended to choose to leave so I…wouldn’t love her anymore.”
Hailey looked down at the floor. “That’s so sad.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s a prime example of selflessness.”
“What did she write to you, Elodie?”
“Well, she actually told us both something that’s really pretty unbelievable. She was the one who set me up to apply for this job. She somehow knew it was your uncle’s listing and planned the whole thing so I would meet him. She hoped we would fall for each other.”
Hailey’s eyes moved back and forth as she processed that information. “I always thought God sent you. But it was Anna? She’s better than God.”
Elodie smiled. “She’s basically an angel, both while she was here and beyond.”
“So if she wants you guys together, why are you so sad?” Hailey asked.
Elodie looked at me. That answer wasn’t a simple one.
“I guess we’re still trying to accept how hard it must’ve been for her,” I said.
Hailey got up from her seat and gave me a hug, which was rare. “Thank you for telling me.” Then she hugged Elodie, too.
Talking it out with Hailey had actually helped lessen the tension a bit.
Yet as much as I wanted Elodie to stay the night, I let her walk out the door—again.
