The Chronicles of You ✔

⭐︎ 0.2 ⭐

            On the last day of school, the Monday after your funeral, my math teacher- who had tried to get the other teachers to understand what I was going through- pulled me aside. She said she wanted to talk to me alone about something important. She told me how she had fought tooth and nail with my other teacher to get her to stop failing me. She said she knew exactly what I was going through, how hard it was, and how much it hurt. She said she knew exactly how I felt, that she understood better than anyone.

            I asked her how she could possibly understand, much less know, why she would think that she could even begin to understand how I felt. And then she smiled sadly at me, and told me that her first husband had died of cancer five years before. She was twenty-nine, and he was thirty when he passed. I finally understood why she wanted to help me. She really did understand everything. I had thought that she had been divorced, because that’s the rumor that went around. The story was that she was gone for a year, and when she came back, she was different; she looked tired and sad, and she wore her wedding ring on a chain around her neck, instead of on her finger. No one ever really knew what had happened to her the year she was gone, just that it had something to do with her husband. She got remarried three years later; I just can’t picture myself with anyone but you, Elijah.

            And then she said something that surprised me. "Ellana, I wanted to tell you that I was broken, sad, and distraught for years after he passed. I thought I would never get past the pain, or find someone new. I thought I could never love anyone else the way I had loved him. And then I did. It took three and a half years, but I did fall in love again. I got remarried, and I've got a baby now. I'm happy, something I haven't been in a long time, and I know he would be happy to see me happy like this. I promise you, Ellana, you'll be happy again. I just know there's another boy who would do anything to see you happy again. There was one for me."

        I had just looked at her, and finally got up the courage to ask the question that had been burning in my mind. "How did you meet your second husband?"

        She said the answer I least expected. "He was my first husband's best friend. He was there for me throughout everything."

        There is no way anything romantic could ever arise between Nick and I, if that's what she's trying to imply. Nick is Nick, and so not my type. I thanked her for everything, and then went to get my backpack from my locker and go home. Your brother was waiting for me in the parking lot. Since my brother graduated with you, he was no longer there to drive me home, and Emmett and I had gotten into a routine of leaving school together, so he said he would give me a ride home on this last day of school. I think he really just didn't want me to be alone for the fifteen minute drive. I didn't want to be alone either. I must have still looked really confused, because he asked me what was wrong when I got to his car. I told him everything on the ride home, and after I went on a tangent about how she could ever possibly think that there could ever be anything between Nick and I- which Emmett found very amusing- he only looked at me with a small smile and said, "That's very interesting. I would never let you date Nick; he's definitely not good match for you. Your teacher has lost it."

        We laughed about it for the rest of the ride, and I kept trying to analyze my teacher's words, but I couldn't come to any new conclusions.