And she decided to stretch it out,
Long and quiet,
Giving her room to trace the tangled web of everything they talked through last night.
It felt like a lot to get her head around,
A completely different way of looking at the situation than she ever had before.
She began to see the patterns,
Not just her choices,
But the currents that carried her into them.
Her father leaving,
Her mother's silence,
The way that love had always felt conditional,
Fragile,
As if at any moment it could vanish.
She began to see how much of her life had been spent trying to rewrite that story,
First with Nico's consuming gaze,
And then with Nico's lightness and easy laughter.
Reflecting on everything Nico had shared about their complex childhood,
All the secrets,
All the hurt,
So much had been left unresolved,
Almost as if waiting for the brothers to pick it up and live it out.
She sat back in her chair with a huge exhale,
Letting all of these pieces find a place to settle within her.
It wasn't about excusing herself.
It wasn't about asking Nathan to absolve her.
Forgiveness felt too small a word for what she was grappling with.
What she needed was to understand why it had happened at all.
Why had she reached for both brothers?
Why had she been starving for a kind of love that felt impossible to hold?
Why was secrecy and betrayal almost inevitable,
Given the soil that they'd all grown from?
Understanding was stronger than forgiveness.
Forgiveness implied a kind of simplicity about right and wrong,
Yet understanding cracked it open and showed the full,
Complex story.
As she sipped her tea,
She wondered if that was the only way she could keep from handing it down to the baby that she now carried.
The full understanding was the way to finally let the past stop repeating itself.
Lauren curled under a blanket that night.
The journal once again opened beside her.
She thought about the word forgiveness and how everyone spoke of it,
Like it was some sort of clean break,
A simple choice,
But she was beginning to sense it was something much different and much deeper if taken all the way.
She had friends who shared their forgiveness stories with her about reconnecting with a father after years of absence.
What they called forgiveness often looked like they were swallowing a hurt so big it threatened to choke them,
A hurt that had to be swallowed whole in order to make room for the missing person's return.
It was a kind of forgiveness,
One that bypassed the truth of what happened in order to keep the peace.
She wondered if that was forgiving at all,
Or just another kind of silence,
Another way of digging up what had already been buried for too long.
She knew in her bones that swallowing pain didn't make it disappear,
It only ensured it would surface somewhere else.
The realization actually felt like relief,
A way to make sense of the past and maybe even to protect the future.
What if forgiveness wasn't about pretending the hurt was gone,
Or that what happened wasn't devastating,
But about daring to face it fully,
To name it,
To understand how it had shaped them.
Exploring the whole story,
The patterns that bound them all,
And finally finding a way to integrate them.
Not to excuse it or make something okay that wasn't,
But to free them from the tangled mess that continued tumbling down through generations before them.
Forgiveness might come one day,
Or it might not,
But naming what had been unspoken,
Seeing how the past was alive in them,
Was the first step towards getting out of what felt impossibly stuck.
