“This is excitement.” She pulled in a deep breath, purposefully blew it out, and amped her smile up a few hundred watts. “Yes-siree, this here, this is raw, unadulterated excitement.”
She wasn’t lying. At least not completely. The buzz in her belly, that was excitement. Excitement for the adventure. Excitement over finally doing what she’d wanted to do for as long as she could remember. Excitement to experience new cultures and start this new chapter of her life.
The rest… The rest was a muddy mess of fear and regret and loss. Along with a wildly unsettling sensation of leaving vital things undone. She couldn’t get over the very real fact that getting on that plane would end any possibility of reconciliation with Dylan.
“You realize that excitement is just the flipside of terror, right?” Maizey asked.
“Then it’s good I’m on the right side of that monster, isn’t it?” Emma put her hand on the door handle and willed herself to pull it open. This should be her crowning achievement. She should be over the moon with pride and joy.
Instead, the signal from her brain to her hand got lost in the mess of anxiety flooding her nervous system. Silence settled between them while they both waited for Emma’s nerve to return.
“It seems,” Maizey said, “the universe has given me this little window of opportunity to say something I’ve been wanting to mention for a while, but didn’t think it was my place to say.”
Emma closed her eyes and groaned. “Just say it.”
“When Dylan broke things off,” she started in a soft, nonconfrontational voice, “he was twenty years old and looking ahead at a stunted life of disability. You’re making this decision as a twenty-nine-year-old physician with the life of your dreams ahead of you. His decision to leave you then and your decision to leave him now are apples and oranges.”
A lick of anger burned her breastbone. ”You think I’m keeping score?”
“I think your emotions and the trip’s time crunch are coloring your judgement.” Her gaze was direct but compassionate. “I feel the need to point out that the very fact you’re getting on a plane to go to Somalia to work as a humanitarian physician is—”
“Because of him,” she finished the thought for Maizey. One she hadn’t been able to shake since she’d been offered this gig. “I would never have had this opportunity if he hadn’t let me go. Yes, I realize that.”
More silence fell in the car. Emma looked at the terminal and all the travelers rolling suitcases and carrying duffels. She fought to see past the haze of hurt and anger and fear, but the emotions created an opaque wall in her mind. She couldn’t continue to focus on the where, why, and how of the past. She could only focus on the future.
“You should go,” Maizey said. “You’ve got to get through customs.”
Fear squeezed the air from her lungs. “Right.”
She’d made the decision and committed to the project. She had a team of other medical professionals expecting her, and a community of needy people waiting on her. People battling far more devastation than she ever would.
Besides, she wasn’t the quitting kind. And she took pride in her ability to persevere despite mental and emotional hardships.
Still, Emma’s body felt like lead. She forced herself from the car and made herself focus on all she was headed toward, not all she was leaving behind. She’d been through worse, and she knew from experience, leaning into the pain and honoring the struggle would get her to the other side. In forty-eight hours, she’d be immersed in another world. There was no better pain management than helping people in need.
The next forty-eight hours, though, those would be hell on earth.
But the sooner those hours started, the sooner they’d end.
Emma pulled her suitcase from the trunk, gave Maizey a long, hard hug goodbye with a million promises to call and text and email. Then she was pulled into the stream of travelers.
She checked her suitcase at the airline counter and rolled a carry-on beside her as she made her way through security. Then customs. The lines were interminable, and she was glad she’d come early.
By the time she made it to her gate, she needed to eat and pee. She found several of her team members and left her carry-on with them as she made her way through more lines. But when she returned, she couldn’t eat. She tried to distract herself by chatting with the others, several of whom she’d worked with during her time at Cumberland General. Many of them had been on humanitarian missions in the past and gave her helpful tips for adjusting and an idea of what her first week would look like.
When she couldn’t keep her mind from straying to the past, Emma excused herself and put her cell to her ear as she wandered toward the windows to look out over the tarmac to take her mythical call.
She couldn’t just keep ignoring this turmoil. It was going to make her sick. She had to get her mind around what she was doing and why she was doing it.
Emma ached to call someone and talk it out. Her mother. Her father. Maizey.
Dylan.
She couldn’t remember the last time she felt this unbearable need to talk to Dylan.
But she knew no one could help her right now. This was her decision, which made it her problem.
The voice of the airline ticket agent overhead made Emma jump. And the announcement for boarding to commence clamped her heart in a vise.