All Chapters of The love I'd promised myself to find : Chapter 21 - Chapter 26

By mid-February, life had started to feel normal again.Rhona's dad was doing better. Physical therapy was kicking his ass, but he was doing it. He complained about the diet restrictions and the medication side effects, but he was following the doctor's orders. He was trying. Actually trying in a way that suggested he meant what he'd said about being present.Rhona went to his house once a week for dinner. Sometimes Adrian came with her. Sometimes it was just her and her mom and her siblings. It was building something that resembled what a family was supposed to be, even if it was fractured and complicated.School was picking up. February meant midterms were coming, and Rhona found herself spending more time in the library than she was in her dorm room. Adrian was in the same boat — his internship was taking up a lot of time, but he was learning a lot. He'd already been given real projects to work on, cases he was researching, briefs he was writing.One evening about three weeks into

By June, Adrian and Rhona had settled into something that felt almost normal. Summer internships kept them both busy. Adrian was at the law firm doing real work now, and Rhona was at a nonprofit that handled family law cases. They were both exhausted most days, but it was the good kind of exhausted — the kind that came from doing something that mattered. They saw each other on weekends mostly. Sometimes they studied together. Sometimes they just wanted to not think about work and did normal couple things — went to movies, got dinner, walked around the city. One Saturday in mid-June, Rhona came over to Adrian's apartment. Ken had gone out, which seemed deliberate. They ordered Chinese food and settled on the couch to watch something mindless. Somewhere between the appetizers and the main course, Rhona had shifted closer to Adrian, and her head was on his shoulder. It was casual and comfortable, the kind of physical intimacy that had become their normal. Adrian wasn't watching the T

*Rhona*October in New York had a way of making everything feel like a decision.The leaves on campus went orange and then brown. The air got sharp. People started carrying coffee cups with both hands. Rhona noticed all of it from the third floor window of the apartment while she pretended to read a casebook about civil procedure.She had read the same paragraph four times."You know that book isn't going to turn its own page," Priya said from the couch, not looking up from her laptop."I'm reading.""You're staring. There's a difference."Rhona closed the book. "I'm thinking.""Same thing, with worse posture."Priya had a way of saying things like that, light enough that you couldn't get properly offended, true enough that you couldn't argue. Rhona had missed that in the first week of school when she'd thought Priya was just the loud roommate from Jersey. Now Priya was the person who made sure she ate dinner."It's been two months," Rhona said."Since what? Since you asked him for s