Brian arrived to the airport shortly before 9 o’clock. Visiting hours at the hospital were over, and he’d told Suzanne that he needed some air. He didn’t want to tell her that he was really going to meet Noelle. Suzanne wouldn’t get it. She would just think that he was being insensitive, and he wouldn’t be able to tell her the truth because the truth hurt too much.

Brian ordered a cup of coffee and began pacing the large opened area outside of the terminal. He checked the departure board for the third time. Noelle’s plane would be arriving on time.

It had been less than 24-hours since Brian was in New York performing for a crowd of excited fans. Less than 24-hours had passed since he had woken up with Noelle next to him when he got the phone call everyone dreaded receiving—the screaming call from a relative in the middle of the night. It had been less that 24-hours and everything had changed.

Brian was torn apart inside. He loved Noelle so much and had tried over and over again to convince himself that they were making the wrong decision. He knew that she was going to be coming to Atlanta with the same intentions that he had for being in that airport, but he also knew that he could change her mind if he wanted.

And he did want to change her mind.

He wanted to change the path that their relationship was taking so badly. He wanted to go back and resolve things with Leighanne before he met Noelle. He wanted to go back and tell the person that he was six months ago not to be such a coward, because he would end up losing so much—someone he loved, someone he used to love and his mind all in the same day.

Brian knew that he couldn’t go back. He knew that he couldn’t change the way that things had worked out between him and Noelle, and he knew that he owed it to Leighanne to hear her out and find out why she was so desperate about their marriage ending that she felt the need to take her own life. He hadn’t ever really tried to make their marriage work, and he was paying for it now.

Shortly after 9 o’clock the departure board changed and showed that Noelle’s flight had landed. Brian grabbed the cup of coffee that he’d purchased for her and headed toward the terminal from which he knew that she would be arriving. It didn’t take long before he saw Noelle walking slowly toward him. Her carryon bag was slung over her shoulder and her hair was tucked neatly behind her ears.

Brian walked over to her with opened arms. He pulled her into him and felt her relax against him. He squeezed and felt her squeeze back. He kissed the top of her head softly and then pulled away.

“How was your flight?” he asked as he took her carryon bag from her shoulder and handed her the coffee that he was still holding onto.

“It was okay. It was quiet,” Noelle replied softly. She searched out Brian’s hand and intertwined her fingers with his. She needed his touch now more than ever.

“I hate this,” Brian groaned, squeezing her hand tighter in his own.

“Me too,” Noelle answered. She looked down at her feet. She could feel the tears beginning to sting her eyelids and she didn’t want Brian to see her crying. The last thing that she wanted to do was make him feel badly for what was coming.

Brian led Noelle to a corner area in the terminal lounge. It was late enough that the airport was mostly empty and they were able to have a good amount of privacy. Noelle sat down on the small sofa and Brian sat down beside her. He reached around and wrapped his arm around her back and pulled her close to him. Noelle leaned down and rested her head on his shoulder.

“Do we really need to talk at all?” Noelle asked with a sigh. “Can’t we just sit here like this and then I’ll leave and we’ll both just know?”

Brian breathed out an ironic laugh through his nose. “I really, really hate this.”

“You’ve said,” Noelle replied.

“Everything just sucks. I can’t walk away from my marriage now. I didn’t try hard enough and I can’t just—” Brian stopped. He was starting to get choked up.

“Brian,” Noelle started softly. “I know and it’s okay.”

“It’s not okay,” Brian replied in a whisper. “I made promises to you. I told you that it was over and now I’m the same as that other guy. Rob whatever. The asshole.”

Noelle leaned up and looked Brian pointedly in the eye. She wanted to make sure that he heard exactly what she was trying to say.

“You are nothing like him, Brian. I love you and I know that you love me, but there’s someone else that you made promises to, someone who loves you who you loved at one point in time. Whether you decide that you need to work on your marriage or you decide that you two need to talk and work the specifics out while Leighanne gets the help and the clear mind that she needs, I can’t stand in the way holding you back. All that she’ll see is me and she’ll never see the truth behind the problems that you think that the two of you have.

“You didn’t play with my heart and jerk me around and have no intention of truly being with me. It just took a major slap in the face to see that we both have some unresolved issues to deal with. It hurts and it sucks and I hate to leave it like this—” Noelle paused when her voice cracked. She took a deep breath and then continued, “But I love you and I know that if I love you, I can’t be part of what’s making your life so hard. I don’t want you to feel guilty. If you and I are meant to be, it’ll happen when it’s supposed to happen.”

“You know that I love you,” Brian stated with tears in his own eyes.

 Noelle nodded. “Yes, I know that you love me, but love isn’t enough to keep a fucked up situation together.”

“You and I were good together,” Brian replied. “It wasn’t completely fucked up.”

“I know,” Noelle sighed. “What we feel for each other isn’t, the situation is. It was just bad timing, bad fate, bad everything.”

“Regrets?” Brian asked shortly. He was having a hard time searching for words.

“No,” Noelle answered quickly. “You?”

“Only that I didn’t sort my shit out ahead of time, I guess,” Brian replied. He inhaled deeply and let the breath out slowly.

“Brian, this could be the best thing that ever happened to you,” Noelle responded. This time, the tears began to flow.

“How do you figure?” Brian inquired. His eyebrows were knit in confusion. He reached up and gently wiped Noelle’s falling tears.

“Because maybe you would have walked away. Maybe you would have thrown everything aside without a second look back, but now you get another chance to make things right. You get another chance to see if you were doing the right thing without worrying about resenting me later or me resenting you.” Noelle sat back and leaned into Brian again.

“I would never resent what we have, Noelle,” Brian replied softly, though he knew that he would never really know if that was the truth.

Noelle smiled and sat back up. She reached for her carryon bag and stood up. “I should probably go.”

Brian nodded and stood up with her. They walked quietly back toward the arm of the terminal where Noelle would pass through security to get to the gate. Noelle turned toward Brian and wrapped her arms around him for one final time. Brian pulled her in and held her close. His own tears began to drip down his face. He didn’t understand how something that was right could hurt so badly.

Brian pulled back and he and Noelle locked eyes. He could still feel the pull that radiating between them like a magnet.

“I love you,” Brian whispered.

“I love you too,” Noelle replied just as quietly.

Without thinking, the couple moved toward each other slowly. Brian wrapped his hands into Noelle’s hair on either side of her face as Noelle took a step closer and hooked her arms around his. Brian leaned in slowly and kissed Noelle passionately. Their bodies were pressed against each other, hungry as if they’d never see each other again.

They pulled away from each other breathlessly. Brian ran his hands the rest of the way through her hair. Noelle slowly dropped her arms and stepped back. Without another word, Brian watched as Noelle disappeared through the terminal. Whether she knew it or not, she was taking a large piece of him with her.

Brian sat back down, stunned again by the chain of events. He put his head into his hands, took a few cleansing breaths and told himself that he had to let go—for his own sake, for Noelle’s sake and for the sake of a sane future.

***

Brian went back to his house to shower and change before going back to the hospital. When he walked into the bathroom, his stomach churned. A number of pill bottles were opened and an assortment of pills was lying on the tile floor. Quickly, Brian swept the pills up into his hands and flushed them down the toilet. He would have thrown them away, but he didn’t want any evidence of what Leighanne had done to be left where either of them had the potential to see.

Brian put the toilet seat cover down. He’d turned on the hot water in the shower and was just letting it run. There was such a mixture of emotions running through him that he didn’t know which end was up. He wanted to be mad at Leighanne for doing something so selfish, but he knew that his actions were partially to blame.

Brian breathed in the steam and let himself cry again. He was such an emotional wreck inside it was a wonder that he was able to stand up.

After a couple of minutes, Brian pulled himself together, took a shower and headed back to the hospital. When he got there, Suzanne was pacing the halls waiting for him.

“Where have you been?” she attacked immediately upon seeing him.

“I was out, Suzanne. I told you. I went home to change and shower. Why? What’s going on?” Brian replied; a mild panic was starting to build inside.

“Leighanne is starting to wake up. The doctor said that it’s going to take some time for her to fully be up and cognizant, but I just think that you should be there when she is,” Suzanne answered.

She didn’t want to feel like she was pressuring Brian into playing a game and creating a façade where everything was okay, but somehow she got the feeling that Brian wasn’t going to walk away from Leighanne after this. Honestly, she didn’t know how she felt about that, but it was up to Brian and Leighanne to make their decisions.

Suddenly, there was air back in Brian’s lungs. He’d known that Leighanne was going to pull through, but now that she was actually coming around he felt an unbelievable sense of relief. He hugged Suzanne tightly and then turned toward Leighanne’s room. She was stirring quietly; her breathing tube had been removed. She looked like she was just sleeping.

Brian settled into his chair next to her bed and waited. At some point during the night, he drifted off to sleep. Hours later, he awoke to the sound of Leighanne’s raspy voice.

“You’re here,” Leighanne spoke the best that she could after having a breathing tube jammed down her throat for a day and a half.

Brian opened his eyes and looked over at his wife. He took her hand into his gently. “Yeah, Leigh. Of course I’m here.”

“I can’t believe that it took something so drastic for you to actually be here,” Leighanne spoke, though it was mostly to herself. Silent tears began to pour down her cheeks.

Brian pulled his hand back angrily. “Is this some kind of a game to you? Do you know what I’ve been through? I’ve been pulling my hair out with guilt over this. Of course I care about you Leighanne, of course I love you! Just because I couldn’t—God!”

“No!” Leighanne argued feebly. “I wasn’t playing a game, God no.”

Leighanne paused. Instead of getting angry and yelling at her some more out of frustration, Brian waited and let her continue.

“In the hallway the other day, you dragged me down to AJ’s room and you pulled Noelle out and you told her all of these beautiful things about how you couldn’t stand the thought of being without her and how the thought of it made it hard to breathe,” Leighanne lifted her arm weakly and wiped her tears from her cheeks. “That’s how I feel about you. The thought of being without you makes it hard to breathe. I felt like I was suffocating and like I lost everything, and you didn’t even want to try. I lost hope and I gave up, but I’m glad that it didn’t work. I know that my life is more important than a man not wanting me, but I still want that man. Right now, as I’m lying here in a hospital bed because of something stupid that I did out of desperation, I’m looking at him and I’m just glad that he’s the one that I woke up next to because when I married him I knew that he was the only person that I’d ever want to wake up to.”

Brian’s breath caught in his throat. It was the most honest, heart-wrenching thing that Leighanne had said about him in what felt like years. The woman that he married; the kind woman was still in there somewhere and though Brian knew that they had a lot to work on, he finally saw that maybe there was hope. Maybe Noelle was right in saying that what Leighanne did was the best thing to ever happen to him--to them--because it finally opened both Brian’s eyes and Leighanne’s eyes to what was important.

Losing Noelle still gutted Brian to his core, but he knew that he was doing the right thing. He had to at least give it a shot.

He sighed. “You’re right. I didn’t try as best as I could. I ran away and I gave up.”

“I didn’t make it easy for you,” Leighanne cried. “I should have tried to talk to you rationally, not play games. My games are what sent you right into Noelle’s arms. I bet she’s here somewhere, isn’t she?”

Brian shook his head slowly. “No, she isn’t here. Noelle decided to step aside. She thought that she’d be in the way and that we had a lot of talking to do.”

“That was mature of her,” Leighanne answered softly, though she hated having even the slightest positive thing to say about Brian’s girlfriend.

“Noelle’s one of the good ones, Leighanne,” Brian replied, making the same sentiment about Noelle that she had made about him to AJ. “You don’t let the good ones go unless there’s a really important reason to.”

Leighanne tried to smile. She didn’t want to get her hopes up, but it sounded like Brian was changing his mind. “What does that mean?”

Brian sighed again. “It means that, if you still want to, I’m willing to try. We’ll go to counseling and see if there’s anything left to fix. I’m not making any promises and I don’t want you to think that you can pull some crazy stunt and have me running back to you. It’s unhealthy for me to even be willing to change my mind based on you almost taking your own life.

That’s one of my conditions too. You have to seek your own counseling aside from marriage counseling. You have to get right in here.” Brian tapped the side of his head for emphasis.

Leighanne nodded. “You’re really going to do this with me? We’re really going to call off the divorce?”

“For now,” Brian reiterated. His voice got shaky again and his hands started to tremble. He wrung his hands together and inhaled a deep breath, trying to pull himself together. “I don’t know if what we had can be saved, Leigh, I’m going to be honest with you. You and Noelle were both right. You said that there were things to do, and she said that I should follow through so I don’t end up resenting her or myself later on for thinking I made a mistake.”

“It looks like I owe Noelle an apology,” Leighanne said softly, then looked down at her hands in hopes that her brimming tears wouldn’t start falling again.

“Let’s just make a deal. I agreed to go to marriage counseling and the counselor is going to want to bring up Noelle, but you don’t get to. You and I aren’t going to talk about it because I’m not going to lie to you Leighanne. I loved her,” Brian stopped and stared off across the room. “I love her, but I let that go because of you. We can’t play the Noelle card. Deal?”

“Yeah. Deal. Fine. I don’t want to talk about her either. I want to pretend like she didn’t exist.” Leighanne laid back against her pillows and yawned, suddenly exhausted.

Brian stood up and kissed Leighanne’s forehead softly. “We’ll talk more later. I’ll send Suzanne in and then you need to get some rest.”

Brian left the room in the awkward state that it was in. His world had been completely turned upside down and like Leighanne, he was suddenly exhausted. After Leighanne woke up, the first thing that he wanted to do was call Noelle, but he knew that he couldn’t. He was letting go; he was moving on; and he was going to try to be a good husband to his greatly depressed wife for better or for worse.