Swap Vancouver Island for the Amalfi coast and the day was going similarly to how Megan had envisioned their honeymoon. When she let everything go, all her thoughts of real life and the days before and beyond this one, she felt an easy clarity. But then she’d snap back to reality and find herself confused all over again.
Even so, she couldn’t help but compare this day to how she’d felt when she’d chosen Leo. Really chosen him. There’d been no easy clarity, no answers, no peace. Just questions that expanded and multiplied.
Megan shouldn’t have been surprised. Her relationship with Tom was at its strongest when it was the two of them against the world. And so, as they carried their bookstore loot back to the park and stretched out in the shade, flipping through their newly purchased books—sharing photos and passages with each other—of course she could delude herself into thinking that if this day had never looped and she and Tom hadn’t fought, maybe they could’ve had a good life together.
However, she and Tom weren’t the only factors in the equation. There would always be interfering parents and high-maintenance siblings and Leo and Midwest states. Which meant what Megan had to fix was herself. She might not have gotten the solitude in Montana she’d wanted to figure this all out, but spending a day on the water and in a charming seaside town, away from the wedding bedlam at Roche, was almost as good.
Megan was pleasantly astonished to find having Tom around was a welcome comfort. Since the whole time loop started, he was the one person she didn’t have to wear a mask for. There was something to be said for that.
She could be as messy as she wanted with him. As together as she wanted. Being able to just be relaxed her in a way she hadn’t experienced in years. From behind the wisps of her hair blowing around in the breeze, she snuck peeks of his profile: the strong jaw she’d always adored, the slope of his nose, his eyebrows that got so bushy, every few weeks he’d put his head in her lap so she could trim and tweeze them into submission. The custom usually devolved into them laughing as she threatened to tweeze her initials into his eyebrows.
Megan tried to reconcile that image of easy companionship with what had obviously been brewing underneath.
She put down a book of West Coast photography and stretched out her legs. “Who do you think we’d be if we’d grown up in stable, loving households?”
Tom looked up from a book of poetry by Amanda Lovelace. “Do such households exist?”
“I don’t know. I’m just trying to figure out who I’d be if I hadn’t spent my childhood forging signatures on field-trip forms for Brianna while my mom was cruising for guys at the bar. If I’d had parents like Paulina and Hamza.” Her eyes became hot with tears. Tom reached out to rub her calf, his face full of empathy. “I think that was part of what I loved about our time at Harvard,” she went on. “I was so far away from everyone else, it was like I got to take up space for the first time. To make mistakes and…”
She was veering too close to Leo territory and Tom’s hand stilled. Even if they had a million more versions of this day, she wasn’t sure if they’d ever truly forgive each other.
“I’m sorry,” Tom said.
His apology—and the timing of it—was unexpected. She kept her tone light. “For what?”
“For all the times I made it harder for you to take up space.”
She took those words from him. Held them in her hands to feel the weight, the depth. And then made herself a promise: she was going to stop measuring herself against her childhood and people like John and Carol.
“That said…” Tom put his book down, folded his hands in his lap. “I think who you are at your core is who you’d be regardless.”
She sniffed derisively, wondering if Tom still knew her better than anyone. “Oh yeah? And who’s that?”
“The most capable, efficient, bravest, and warmest person I know.”
The compliment hit its mark. She resisted reaching out to him, though the instinct was there. Instead, Megan settled into the reassuring feeling of finally being in a place where she and Tom could perhaps be friends again.
Because she didn’t have to lose everything to this never-ending day. And she was starting to see what she wanted to keep.
Megan might not be able to control how every day in this loop began, but she could certainly control how each ended, and she knew exactly what she wanted to do right now.