Sweet Romance17 min read
Second First Love — The Ticket, the Diary, and the Big Dumb Donkey
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I learned how to measure shame by seconds.
It was nearly midnight when Collins coughed against my shirt and I realized taking her to the emergency room at home would be different than abroad. The fluorescent corridor smelled of antiseptic and tired coffee. I had dragged a bag of torn sketches, a half-painted palette, and a child who called me "Mama" with the fierce certainty of bedtime stories. I was Emmalyn Delgado; I was tired.
"We'll be fine," I told Collins when she feared the hospital lights. "Just milk after, okay?"
She blinked huge, solemn brown eyes. "Okay, Mama."
My phone buzzed with my mother again. "Emmalyn, you have to fix this marriage thing. Auntie's sick, honey; your father is frantic. Bring a grandson back!"
I thumbed a selfie of Collins—her hair in two messy pigtails—and sent it. "Mom, no grandson. I brought back a daughter. Collins is five."
Silence. Then my father, Grant Contreras, called, furious and theatrical: "Emmalyn! Come home! Your mother is fainting from worry!"
"Grandpa won't yell at me," Collins said into the receiver in a voice that made my lips curl. "Grandpa, don't yell at Mama."
"Baby," my father sputtered, softening instantly. I could hear him trying to keep a reputation as the copper-voiced boss he always played. I laughed and covered the phone so Collins couldn't hear me laughing.
We were here because of a fever that could be watched overnight. The doctor suggested observation. I had been in this city for less than a day and I already had enough family drama to fill a small soap opera season.
I left Collins with the nurse to get medicine and wandered into the near-empty lobby to buy formula. Then, from the bright end of the hall, a woman in white smiled like a porcelain flower and said, "Emmalyn, when did you get back?"
"Isabelle," I muttered and walked past. The white dress, the soft voice—everything about her was designed to make people pity her. She turned her head like a rehearsed doll.
"What a surprise." Her smile stretched. "You look... different."
"Different how?" I let my tone slide honey-sour. "More exhausted, maybe?"
She laughed fragilely and stepped aside to reveal the man behind her: Edison. Time had made him older the way a photograph grows sepia. He still had that same severe brow and the small crease by his mouth that made him look like he thought about right and wrong the way some people think about coffee.
"Edison," I said without thinking.
"Edison?" Isabelle's voice slipped an octave. She pushed her hand to her belly like a shield.
He looked at me the way a telescope focuses—quiet, precise. For five years he had been the center of a hurricane I couldn't stop. For five years he had been someone else's grief: his brother Liam Ray's death had been blamed on me, and my punishment had been exile.
"You're back," Edison said, as if it were news to him.
"Sort of." I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and noticed Collins's picture on my phone lighting my palm. "Baby has a fever. We stayed."
Isabelle's smile curdled the way sugar does in tea. "You found yourself quite a man abroad, didn't you? The kind who—"
"Is he standing with you or with me?" Edison interrupted.
His hand brushed my wrist. The contact was ridiculous and electric and, for a moment, I forgot how to be clever.
"He's not with me," I said. "He's somewhere else. He's probably looking at the wrong side of the world." I slipped my phone into my pocket. "But look at Isabelle's belly. Congratulations?"
"Thank you," she purred. "He's a good man. He'll—"
"You're lying," I said before I could stop myself. "Tell me the truth. Mr. Bailey—"
"Edison," he corrected softly.
"Edison," I repeated. "Tell me the truth. Are you really with her?"
He held my gaze. "Are you asking because you want him back or because you want him gone?"
"What a comforting question." I crowded closer, all sarcasm and a smile. "He can be a guest star in my life, a spare scene. Or better—he can be co-star. He can even be the third wheel. I'm flexible."
Isabelle's hand tightened on his arm like a small anchor. "That's not funny, Emmalyn."
Edison inhaled. His fingers found mine, and something cold in my chest thudded. "Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"Okay," he repeated. "If that's part of the deal."
I felt my world tilt. The lobby blurred. I laughed and the thought hit me like a splinter: I had invited a second humiliation when I'd been carrying a child and a suitcase in the rain and thought it might be funny to provoke the past. I should have run. Instead I did something I often do: I smiled and bet on the wrong person.
I took Collins home the next morning after observation. It felt like I was carrying a secret wrapped in a ribbon. In truth, I had known the truth for five years—back then, the night that fractured everything, I had lied in order to protect a dying boy. Liam Ray, the brother who had always been tender, had begged me not to say who had been with him that night. He had smiled at me with cracked, kind eyes and asked me to keep silence because he feared his mother's wrath would devour whoever was truth-telling. I had kept his secret. I had left the town with a name pinned to my label like a disease.
All of that had been made into a story that stuck to me—"the woman who..." They had put the label on me like a scar.
My mother, Clara Morales, kept sending me messages about marriage and grandchildren until my head throbbed. "If you can't do better, fake it. Find a man. Make a show. My friends will be appeased."
I thought about the life I had sewn together abroad: art shows, a small freelance job, Collins and I two against a city of indifferent landlords. I wasn't looking for salvation. I was moving forward one awkward step at a time.
Then Edison walked back into my life like someone determined to light candles inside a hurricane.
"You can't keep changing your life like a painting and expect people to understand," Marie said when she arrived two days later. "Besides, your line art is better than your melodrama."
Marie Clemons had been my constant since college; she was a small, fierce woman whose laugh was almost aggressive. She took Collins hostage the afternoon she came and painted her a new picture book. "She needs sun and sugar," Marie said, tucking a curl behind her ear.
"Don't call it hostage," I scolded. "She adores you."
"Of course." Marie smirked. "Because I'm charismatic."
We were in the garden when my father—Grant—arrived with a theatrical flourish. He looked like a man who had been told the world owed him something and had come to collect. He appraised Edison and did that tiny squint people with private armies make.
"Edison, you see, is a man with interesting offers," my father said loudly over Collins's toppled tea set. "He could help with the cosmetics launch."
Edison shrugged, unruffled. "I thought I was visiting because Emmalyn might need help. Not because you plan mergers."
"Everything's a business here, son." Grant tapped a finger on his lip, like a general considering siege plans. "But—" He sighed with the optimism of a man who reads too many finance blogs. "If you'd like to be more...close to us, we could propose—"
"Don't," I said. "Stop."
"Edison's not a business plan," I told my father. "And I am not a product."
Edison smiled like he had a private joke. "I know. But business can be a pretext to stay."
I wanted to slap him for being so calm and dangerous. I wanted to be angry with him for the years he'd let me drown without a single word. Instead I asked, "Why didn't you explain back then? Why didn't you tell them the truth?"
He looked at the ground and then at me. "I was an idiot and a coward. I tried. I couldn't—" His voice went small. "I thought the fewer of us involved, the easier it would be on everyone."
"Your brother asked for silence," I said quietly.
"He did," he answered. "He did ask. He asked me to promise I'd do nothing. I promised. And then he died and I buried the promise and let you become a story."
I had rehearsed what to say to him for years. I didn't use any of those lines. I let the silence do the heavy lifting.
Then the past did what the past does: it shifted and fell in the middle of us.
Isabelle's plan had been thin as tissue paper; she had wanted to be safe, to have someone sheltering her in the dark of the house of grief. She wanted the advantages that came from walking under the right roof. She had loomed white and soft in the worst of rooms.
"You lied to everyone," I said one night, when we were all supposed to be civil. "You let me leave. You let me go and didn't come after me."
"I tried," Edison said, tired to the soul. "I went to your father that week. He told me I wasn't welcome."
"Your silence built their anger," I said. "It gave them a target."
"I made mistakes, Emmalyn," he whispered. "I watched them throw rocks at you. I wanted to break down those walls, but I was a child trembling under my mother."
"And now?" I asked.
"Now," he said, "I don't want to be a rumor. I want to be a presence."
That sentence should have been a stepping stone to reconciliation. Instead it opened a fissure: Isabelle, furious, drove out to the street with a stab of reckless jealousy. One winter night she hit the brake too late and we were all frozen in the split-calm of an accident scene.
The sound of metal, the smell of burning plastic—it's a sound that never becomes ordinary.
"I didn't mean—" Isabelle sobbed when the emergency lights painted the snow blue and red.
Edison lay on the pavement, his shirt torn near the shoulder, and his face already the color of a sky in which something has been cut out. He looked at me as if my name might be a lifeline.
"Call 911," I said, my voice too controlled for how my hands shook.
Collins watched the chaos like a small, solemn spectator. "Mama, is Daddy hurt?"
"He's okay," I lied. My words dropped like stones. I dialed as if the number was a spell.
At the hospital, all truth pried itself open on me like a stubborn tin can. Edison had a small window of lucidity and he squeezed my hand.
"Collins is mine," I said. The words had to be a bridge across the noise. "Five years ago the night—it was you and Liam." I breathed in, because the confession would either be a balm or gasoline. "I told Liam your name to hurt you. No—I lied. I called out the wrong name on purpose because it was the easiest way to let him go."
Edison fixed on me with eyes that were very tired. "You told me a lie before you told anyone else," he said faintly. "I held my mouth shut and tried to live with it."
"I was protecting him," I said. "He asked me to."
He reached for me and squeezed my fingers.
Then the operation, the nights watching monitors, the word memory—he woke up missing years. The doctor told us the tumor had been removed but some fractures of time might never come back. What stayed instead were fragments, habits, the imprint of love that might persist even if the narrative did not.
Edison woke as if someone had erased parts of a diary. He could not remember the argument that broke us, but his heart—some mapped part of it—still remembered me in small mercies.
"Do you remember that I used to call you my big dumb donkey?" I asked one evening when he blinked awake, staring at the unrolled newspaper like it contained secrets.
He smiled, puzzled. "Big—donkey?"
"Because you were stubborn," I said. "You were kind, idiotic, and stubborn, and I thought it was charming. You would rather be an idiot than hurt people."
He laughed, like a boy.
"Then be my idiot," I said.
Being his supporter that winter was like learning how to love again with two hands—one patient, one terrified. We had small heartbeats of return: he would make me orange slices when I complained about the cold, he would iron my collars, and he would ask me if I had eaten. He could not remember everything, and yet he made that effort that felt like a vow.
But the story had other claws. Isabelle had been playing a long game. She had seeds of jealousy and of something darker; five years earlier she'd slipped something into a glass at a party. I had woken up in my bed with Liam trembling beside me, and later, when the rumor telescope turned, she spun truths that favored her. She had wanted a place in the family and she had tried to engineer it.
One night, a cable show called for a "truth evening"—a staged interview about the accident and the history. We went because Edison wanted to set things straight. I sat under hot lights and read the script of our lives out loud like a theater play, resisting glances that carried undertow.
"Why are you doing this?" Isabelle sniffed on camera.
"Because," Edison said, looking at her squarely now, "we are done letting secrets be our laws."
He set a recorder on the table and summoned the calm that had been kept in him like precious coins. He asked for every message, every file, every proof that people had used to build their versions.
Then we played a cassette that had been hidden by a friend—themit of a certain night. Marie had kept it, like a quiet lioness keeping something under her porch. The cassette revealed several things: that Liam had been lucid about his last wishes, that he had asked me to protect someone else, and that Isabelle had been at the party pouring a drink she'd promised not to.
The room became a theater of reactions. The lies that had sewn themselves through five years pried apart with the sound of recorded voices.
Isabelle's face went first pale, then the porcelain cracked. "This is not—"
"My God," someone said in the crowd. "She did it."
A dozen phones rose like iron petals. The lights bloomed as tabloids fed on blood.
Isabelle tried the familiar cycle: denials, then anger, then a trembling plea. She flailed at the camera beams as if trying to bat down a thundercloud.
"Why would you do this?" Edison asked. His voice had steadiness.
"I wanted it to be our life," she said, raw now, like a person discarded by her own design. "I loved him. I couldn't—"
"You almost killed him," Marie snapped. "You masked your own greed as faintness."
The watchers murmured. A woman in the front recorded everything with a hand held high. "She's a monster," she whispered. People leaned in; the event had the fevered thrill of an accusation released.
Isabelle's expression changed in layers: pride to shock, shock to denial, denial to pleading. "I didn't mean for him to die!" she cried, for the first time tearing at the truth with her bare fingers. "I only wanted—"
"You wanted him, and you took him," Edison said quietly. "You wanted my place."
The cameras picked up the tremble in her throat. "You wanted power," a tabloid reporter said loudly, jabbing a microphone in her face. "You wanted a name."
The foreignness of being the center of a public punishment washed over her. She tried to script calm; her mouth moved like she was reciting lines she'd rehearsed in the dark. But the crowd had the cruel efficiency of the sea: it needs a breach to roar through.
Someone near the front stood abruptly. "You drove Emmalyn out," she shrieked. "You stole a life." People gasped. "You plotted."
Isabelle's face scrambled. She turned to look at Edison. "You promised me—"
"No promises," Edison said. "Only consequences."
Her mother—Victoria Baird—who had always smiled with a barbed kindness, watched. Victoria had coached Isabelle like a pet harpist tunes a string. That evening, even she could not fashion a necklace of excuses.
What followed that night was long and public: local news ran the cassette, the party footage, and the recordings. People debated; Edison read out transcripts with a clarity that made the falsehoods collapse under their own weight. Friends of Isabelle stepped away during interview breaks. A few old acquaintances looked at her like the scene in a novel where a character finds their villainy documented and placed on a stage.
But the punishment that truly unstitched Victoria's social armor came from my father, who had a taste for theatrical counters. He hired a single street performer—someone to follow Victoria with a placard that read in big letters: "This woman maligns others. Beware." The man stood behind her at a charity lunch, and someone caught it on video. The clip went viral: Victoria in pearls, Victoria fuming and then crumbling when the crowd in the comments branded her. The humiliation was small and prosaic and enormous: the woman's private nagging was now public ridicule.
Isabelle's fall was different. It was an exposure in a public hall with witnesses; Victoria's fall was the slow, grinding humiliation of streets and viral comments. Both punishments were public; both had variations: one collapse of reputation before cameras and legal witness, the other the social stripping in viral loops that turned private cruelty into communal scorn.
When Isabelle finally stood in a pressroom, her face wrecked by shame, she looked at Edison as if expecting salvage. She watched as people recorded, as whispers turned to a low hum of disgust. Her posture changed from haughty to pleading to hollow, a metamorphosis the cameras could not make kind.
"Edison, please, forgive me," she panted. "I—"
"Expect nothing of me," he said. "Expect fewer of all of us thinking your scenarios are ours."
People clapped at the sentence as if he had finished a performance. The world loves a neat ending and a villain's collapse; it loves to see justice made immediate.
But the punishment did not heal everything. It cleared a horizon, yes, but it also gave me a complex relief. I had been watched and judged for five years; the truth nudged the scales. Still, truth without a scaffold of care is brittle.
Edison recovered slowly. He relearned habits that bore the embroidery of our shared past: how I liked my tea, which old songs made me drop my guard. He read the notebook he had written before surgery—a diary he had kept like a beacon so that if memory failed, the pages would not. He had written then, with the hand of someone who feared loss: "Emmalyn, you are mine to remember."
He read those lines in the night and wept with a ferocity that frightened and tendered me.
"Why did you write all this?" I asked once.
He blinked. "Because I couldn't bear the thought of forgetting you," he said. "I thought if I wrote it down, even if I lost the name, I'd find the feeling again."
The thing about love is this: it survives on tiny currency—tea cups, an embroidered handkerchief, a nickname like "big dumb donkey." Those small things make a life recognizable again.
Two years passed like this: quiet adjustments, small sweetness, Collins learning to call him Dad on a Tuesday because she liked his laugh. Edison became a father who would read the same book three nights in a row because Collins couldn't pick between the endings. He would hold her in the morning like a man anchoring himself. I watched him, and I watched myself—how we had softened like fabric after wash.
We had built a life beyond the old wounds, and yet there were moments when the past bled through. Once, walking by the bakery, someone pointed and hissed a line about "the woman who..." and Collins tugged my sleeve. "Mama, is he scary?" she asked.
"No," I said. "He's my big dumb donkey." Collins laughed because she thought it was an animal. Edison, who had been one, smiled and kissed the top of my head.
One spring day, there was a publicity gala for my company's new "heritage" cosmetics line. Edison had offered—without my asking—to arrange a collaboration with clinics and spas. My father lit up; he loved the idea of the two families' resources marrying. My father joked the way men with small empires do: loud, theatrical.
"Emmalyn, you are the star," he whispered to me in the green room, where lights felt like specters. "Make them remember you."
I stepped onto the stage to introduce the campaign with a practiced voice. Cameras angled, the speech brief and bright. Then, mid-event, someone from a tabloid office crashed the calm. They had tracked Isabelle's legal suit—petty damages, lack of remorse—and the video clips had been rehashed into a cautionary pile. The crowd reeled. Isabelle's appearance would not be a surprise; she was there for the hearing.
"Isabelle," I heard, and then Edison stepped forward, his hand finding mine as if to steady a ringing bell. "We will not let the past take another life."
A woman in the front row, a volunteer who had an awful sharpness to her voice, then said it plainly into the microphone: "She tried to ruin you. She almost killed you. How can people sit quietly?"
I felt something in the room shift—the audience's mood refocused to righteousness. Isabelle stood, a small silhouette in a big crowd.
She tried to speak. She tried again. But the cameras were merciless. People watched, uploaded, and left comments like pebbles.
She crumpled beneath the weight of being observed.
I did not gloat. I simply lifted Collins onto my hip and let her watch the world. She hummed a tune her grandmother used to sing. The day ended with more applause than I had expected, but applause cannot stitch the years inside.
That night, in the still after, Edison and I sat in the kitchen, a dish of congee cooling between us.
"I was a coward," he said finally. "I should have said true things sooner. I thought silence would protect."
"Silence protected nothing," I answered. "It made a scapegoat."
He laid a palm on my belly where scars and memories lived. Collins leaned into his knee, content as a small animal.
"Do you regret going back?" I asked.
"Regret?" He smiled with a small, ridiculous innocence. "No. I can't imagine a life without this. I can't imagine any of it without you."
I looked at him—the man who had loved me badly and then beautifully; the man who had lost his memory and reclaimed himself with poems on paper. He had become someone who could hold the fragile domestic like a treasure.
"Okay," I said. "Let us be ordinary then."
We made a pact of ordinary things: a grocery list, a yes to a bedtime routine, a promise to be present when Collins fell off the bike, to sit through parent nights and awkward PTA presentations. We vowed to give the future a rhythm: slow, deliberate, full of the little rituals that made a home.
At the end of the year we gave Collins a small gift—a notebook we called "the secret book." We wrote down the silly things she said, the new words she invented, the recipe we ruined together. Edison titled the first page: "To My Big Dumb Donkey, From Emmalyn." He printed it in the night when the house was quiet and Collins asleep with one shoe on.
Sometimes people think big love is lightning. For me, it was a slow current that rewires. It is less about grand gestures and more about remembering to bring warm socks back from the dryer, to record a silly song on your phone, to write down jokes that made you laugh even when you would later forget why.
"Do you think they'll ever forgive me?" Edison asked one night when the house hummed gentle and true.
"Who?" I asked.
"Everyone. For things I didn't do and for things I should have done better."
I kissed the top of his head. "People will forget you and forgive you as quickly as they remember you. But that's not the point. The point is we remember one another."
He closed his eyes like a child whose homework was done.
The secret book sits in a box with a ticket stub we found in an old coat pocket. Years ago, Edison had kept a paper ticket—"Number 27"—for something he never used. He had called that ticket "my promise." He had made me laugh by tucking it into a book and declaring he would one day hand it to me and ask me to board a train to somewhere small and soft and ours.
In the end, I realized that second chances are not fireworks; they are notebooks and stolen orange slices and a nickname like "big dumb donkey" whispered in the dark. They are the ordinary things that make a life recognizable when memory shudders.
Collins—tiny and fierce—once found Edison’s notebook and read aloud a line he had written before his surgery: "Emmalyn, you are the place I want to come back to."
She looked up with solemnity and then declared, as if making a law: "Mama, Daddy wrote you a book. He likes you best."
"Yes," I said, and kissed her hair.
"Do you think he's my real Dad?" she asked.
"He is," Edison said, and suddenly being a family felt close and strange as hand in glove.
We laughed and ate stale cookies and promised the future the smallest things: that we'd go to the seaside next summer if Collins wanted to see starfish. We promised to keep that ticket tucked in the secret book, and every so often we'd open it and read the words Edison had once feared might be forgotten.
Sometimes I still wondered about the cruelty we had been given. Sometimes, alone at night, the shadows of five-year-old accusations would touch the edges of my heart like cold fingers. But then I would pull out the little notebook Edison had labeled for me, and the pages would smell like our life: orange peel and ink and sun.
We had been given a second first love—not a replay, not a perfect new story, but a chance to begin again with knowledge and with scars. We kept our promise in small ways, and the worst punishments—the public exposures, the viral derision—ended up being less about retribution than the noisy clearing of air. Lives reconfigure. People learn to say names they had kept locked.
In the end, my last line in the secret book was a childish, certain note that Collins wanted to keep as a talisman: "If anyone asks, my mom and dad collect tickets and stories. We keep them in a box. We say, 'This is proof that we loved when it was hard.'"
I closed the book and touched the ticket Number 27. I folded the edge of the paper like a promise.
"Do you still want to change your name?" Edison whispered once, in a private hour.
"No," I said. "Keep it. Change anything else but not the jokes."
He laughed. "You are impossible."
"And you," I said, leaning into him, "are my big dumb donkey."
He kissed me, clumsy and perfect.
Out on the kitchen table, the secret book lay open. Collins had scribbled a sun in the corner and written in large childish letters: "DADDY, MAMA, TICKET."
We lived with the ticket, the diary, and our ridiculous nicknames. The past would not always stop knocking at the door, but when it did, I would open and let it know we were busy. We had a small kingdom: a girl with two pigtails, a man who relearned how to love, and a woman who had been exiled once and returned as a resident.
"Are you ready?" Edison asked when the car was packed for a small weekend trip.
I looked at Collins, at the notebook, at the ticket folded inside. I thought of Liam, who had been gentle and kind and who had left the last request like a seed that needed careful tending. I thought of the moments of cruelty and the moments of grace.
"Ready," I said.
The ticket sits in the secret book still. When I'm old and the pages are already soft with years, someone will open it and find a folded rectangle of paper with the words Number 27. There will be a scribble from a child's hand and a line I wrote that no one will be able to steal: "We are ordinary and we are lucky."
And if anyone ever asked how the story ended, I'd point to the secret book, to the orange-slice stains, to Collins's handwriting, and say, "We kept the ticket. We kept the diary. We kept one another."
The End
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