It Starts with Us by Colleen Hoover

finding out I have a brother—it all feels like everything I’ve tried running
from has formed a slow leak that’s threatening to sink me.
But then there’s Lily and her impeccable timing being back in my life. She
always seems to show up when I need a lifeline.
I flip through the rest of the journal and see that I’m already halfway
through the last entry she made. I have very little recollection of that night
because of the dreadful way it ended. Part of me doesn’t even want to
experience it from her point of view, but I can’t not know how I left her
feeling for all those years.
I open the last entry and pick up where I left off.
He took my hands in his and told me he was leaving sooner than he
planned for the military, but that he couldn’t leave without telling me
thank you. He told me he’d be gone for four years and that the last
thing he wanted for me was to be a sixteen-year-old girl not living my
life because of a boyfriend I never got to see or hear from.
The next thing he said made his blue eyes tear up until they looked
clear. He said, “Lily. Life is a funny thing. We only get so many years
to live it, so we have to do everything we can to make sure those years
are as full as they can be. We shouldn’t waste time on things that might
happen someday, or maybe even never.”
I knew what he was saying. That he was leaving for the military and
he didn’t want me to hold on to him while he was gone. He wasn’t
really breaking up with me because we weren’t ever really together.
We’d just been two people who helped each other when we needed it
and got our hearts fused together along the way.
It was hard, being let go by someone who had never really grabbed
hold of me completely in the first place. In all the time we’ve spent
together, I think we both sort of knew this wasn’t a forever thing. I’m
not sure why, because I could easily love him that way. I think maybe
under normal circumstances, if we were together like typical teenagers
and he had an average life with a home, we could be that kind of
couple. The kind who comes together so easily and never experiences a
life where cruelty sometimes intercepts.
I didn’t even try to get him to change his mind that night. I feel like
we have the kind of connection that even the fires of hell couldn’t sever.
I feel like he could go spend his time in the military and I’ll spend my