The Family You Choose Read Online Free

was five. She remembered that she was wearing a light beige
dress with small pink flowers and a sash that tied in the back. He
was sitting on a chair in a living room, across from the old woman,
who was sitting on a couch. The couch and the chair had flowers,
just like her dress. Those were the things you noticed when you
were five.
    She couldn’t take her eyes off of him. She
thought he was the most wonderful thing she’d ever seen. His hair
was darker back then, and he had been wearing a dark red sweater.
Burgundy. She had taught herself that color, because it was Alex’s
favorite, and it became her favorite on him. She loved the way it
made his brown eyes stand out.
    She had walked over to the old woman and
taken her hand, then looked down at the floor while she talked. She
didn’t remember what was said. But she did remember Alex’s voice.
"Would you like to come and live with me?" he’d asked. And then
she’d looked up, and she remembered that she’d smiled. He smiled
too; he hadn’t been smiling before. Even as a small child, she knew
that they were going to love each other forever.
    She remembered hugging the old woman goodbye.
She didn’t remember because she wanted to. She remembered because
she couldn’t forget. It was a forever goodbye, which she knew even
though no one had told her. She remembered that she cried, and that
she had cried in the car. But Alex had said that she could use the
phone at her new house to call the old woman whenever she wanted
to, and they stopped to get some ice cream before he took her to
her new home, her forever home.
    Years later, she’d put it together. Her
mother had died. The old woman was her grandmother, and Alex, her
mother’s friend, had come to take care of her. But that wasn’t what
was important. What was important was that she had loved Alex from
that day forward.
    Miranda knew that he loved her too, but she
knew that it was different because his love always came with
distance. For all the times that he would read stories to her, or
take her on day trips to the circus or the aquarium or to museums
with Richard, Michael and even Jessie, for all the times he’d ask
her about her life and truly wanted to know, there were just as
many times when he would push her away. There were the boarding
schools she used to plot frequent escapes from (which was how she
knew how to help Jessie, when that time came), the frequent trips
overseas that she couldn’t go on, the obvious hints about the women
in his life and, always, the distant look of regret.
    Miranda knew that people didn’t always like
Alex, but she loved him completely and she knew that he loved her
too. It had never been a crush; Miranda had always been very
serious about it, and hadn’t become any less so as she got
older.
    She was one long, never spoken question…What
if? Why not? The words may have grown more sophisticated with age
and the sentences might have been a little longer, but it was still
the same question. He was one to reply in short, sorrowful answers;
and with age, it seemed his answers had gotten shorter. But she
would not give up, because she knew that the fact that he couldn’t
say that he loved her didn’t mean that he didn’t want to.
    That was how she knew that Mitch and Emily
could be together because, despite everything that happened after
they’d met, they loved each other; even if they’d been too stubborn
to admit it, nothing, other than their stubbornness and pride, was
separating them. Such things were surmountable. So, Miranda knew,
it wasn’t anything real that was keeping Alex from her. She just
had to convince him of that.
    ~~~
    Miranda knew she didn’t understand all of the
obstacles between Alex and herself. Some of them she wasn’t aware
of. Others she didn’t care about. Michael Abbot was an obstacle of
the latter kind.
    Michael, unfortunately, came in a package
with Alex. He had actually lived with Alex before Miranda did. She
remembered Alex introducing them