❝In which two people call up a helpline in order to find someone just as broken as they are. ❞
"Does...does it bother you that my dad's in prison for murder?"
"Well, judging by the fact that I moved away from America to get away from the memory of a...
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"You know, as a kid, my dad would take me to the beach every weekend." Isabella wasn't really talking to Elliot as she said this, more speaking her thoughts aloud so that she wouldn't have to hear them in her head anymore. It wasn't that the thought of her father was particularly painful, because it wasn't. Not really. Not anymore, at least. It simply felt nice to speak rather than to stay silent and listen all of the time. Because the memories of her dad being a great dad were good ones, and it felt nice to know that someone else knew that. Because, even though he was dead, her dad still deserved to live. To live and be heard in the memories and tales that others told.
Because Isabella was beginning to come to terms with the fact that he wasn't around anymore, which meant that she was beginning to understand the phrase 'what he would have wanted'. And she, knowing her dad as well as she did, somehow knew that he would want her to keep on living. To keep on speaking. And, perhaps most importantly, to keep on smiling.
She felt a little guilty at how difficult some of those things had become. And it was a sad kind of guilt, the kind of guilty sadness that can only come from unintentionally breaking an unsaid promise. Because she couldn't keep those fake smiles up, not forever. And she was beginning to realize that the fake smiles were what was breaking the promise in the first place. He wouldn't want her to smile simply for the sake of smiling. He would want it to be genuine, to drop the fables and not smile always. But to smile genuinely when something genuinely happy occurred, because the rarer the smile, the more precious it becomes.
So she smiled now, as she sat in that small coffee shop by the beach, soaked to the skin, smelling like salt water, and telling stories of her childhood to the first person who she felt would really listen and want to hear what she had to say. Not to listen and pity the poor girl damaged by destruction. Not to listen and be interested by the poor girl damaged by destruction. But to actually listen because they wanted to hear her speak. Not about 'the incident'. Not about how 'she felt about things'. Just to hear her speak and actually hear her words as tales to be told, not events to be analysed.
And Elliot did hear her words as stories, heard the tales of all the hardships she had been through whilst missing her mum so much, how her dad had done everything he could to make his daughter the best person she possibly could be, even without the presence of a mother's love, and how all of this only made Isabella value her family even more.
And it was at that moment that he knew.
He just knew.
He had to go back.
To his home. To his family, no matter how broken they were, because, like it or not, they were his family. No matter how broken, punch-worthy or annoying. They were who he had grown up with. The people who had shaped both who he had become and who he was becoming. And, no matter what kind of tragedy tore them apart, he owed it to them to at least try.
