Before i let go, p.1
Before I Let Go, page 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Kennedy Ryan
Reading group guide copyright © 2022 by Kennedy Ryan and Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ryan, Kennedy, author.
Title: Before I let go : a Skyland novel / Kennedy Ryan.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Forever, 2022. | Series: Skyland novel | Summary: “Their love was supposed to last forever. But after two devastating tragedies, Yasmen and Josiah Wade realized love alone couldn’t solve everything…or keep their marriage together. It’s taken a year since their split for Yasmen to finally start feeling like herself again. To finally be able to breathe again. But the more she sees Josiah-whether it’s parenting their two children or working together at the restaurant they co-own-the more Yasmen realizes she may not be ready to completely let go of everything they had together. Like magnets, Yasmen and Josiah are always drawn back to each other, and one almost kiss soon leads to more. It’s hot. It’s illicit. It’s all good…until old wounds start resurfacing. This time, will they have what it takes to make forever last? Or is it already too late?”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022026036 | ISBN 9781538706794 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781538706817 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3618.Y33544 B44 2022 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220627
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026036
ISBNs: 978-1-5387-0679-4 (trade paperback), 978-1-5387-0681-7 (ebook)
E3-20220921-DA-PC-ORI
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
The Beginning
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Epilogue
Discover More
Don’t miss Kennedy’s next book, coming in early 2024
Reading Group Guide Discussion Questions
Recipes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for Kennedy Ryan
To the strong girls,
To the hustlers,
To the superwomen,
Tend your hearts with ruthless care…and rest.
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Author’s Note
Before I Let Go is a story of joy, healing, and recovery. Consequently, it is also a story, at least in part, about loss. When we meet Yasmen and Josiah, they are emerging from the most difficult season of their lives and embarking on a time of joy.
With that said, there is some reflection on past difficulties, including: a stillbirth, loss of loved one (past/off-page), discussion of complicated grief, depression, and passive suicidal ideation (no attempt). Please know these topics were approached with the utmost care, and in consultation with those for whom this was a lived experience and with several counselors/therapists. They were kind enough to beta read for me, so I hope I achieved my goal when writing, which is to edify and do no harm.
The Beginning
Josiah
“In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.”
—Dante Alighieri, Inferno
Do people remember the exact moment they fall in love?
I do. Yasmen brought me homemade chicken noodle soup when I was so sick it hurt to blink. Tasted like day-old dishwater. Not sure how you mess up chicken noodle soup, but my girl managed it. She watched me expectantly with those long-lashed doe eyes. God, I’ll never forget her expression when I spat that soup out, but it was so bad and I was too sick to even play it off.
For a second, Yasmen looked distressed, but then, despite feeling like someone dragged me over hot coals and needles, I laughed. Then she laughed and I wondered if this—finding someone you can laugh with when everything hurts—was the stuff happily ever afters were made of. Not the sugarcoated kisses and hot-air balloon rides and romantic walks under a full moon. My whole body throbbed with whatever plague infected me, but that day Yasmen made me happy. In the midst of a raging flu, she made me laugh.
And I knew.
I tipped over from wildly attracted and more-than-slightly pussy-whipped into the real thing. Into love. That moment is soldered into my memory. It’s one I’ll never forget.
And here, just months later, so is this one.
“What do you think?” Yasmen looks up from something she’s working on at the card table in the middle of the living/dining/kitchen zone of my dilapidated one-bedroom apartment, complete with impoverished student decor.
“Think about what?” I ask, sitting down in the raggedy chair across from her.
“Grits.”
“Baby, please don’t make grits again. I’m still recovering from the last time you tried.”
She glares at me without heat, the corners of her mouth fighting a grin. “Boy, not cook grits. Have you even been listening? I said what if you name your restaurant Grits?”
In an unprecedented move, I took a girl home for Christmas. She and my aunt Byrd hit it off right away, and by New Year’s Eve, the two of them were scheming about a restaurant I could open using my MBA and Aunt Byrd’s family recipes.
“Oh, yeah. Sure. Grits.” I scoot my chair closer and push back the fall of braids cascading over Yasmen’s shoulder. “Sounds good.”
“Sounds good?” She lays the back of her hand across my forehead. “Are you sick again? The Josiah Wade I know picks apart every suggestion and always has a yes, but on the ready.”
She’s not wrong. My father was a military man, a stern taskmaster who never settled for anything a day in his life. He planned each move like a military campaign. Control, discipline, and reason propelled him up through the ranks. That’s what he instilled in me even in the short time I had with him before he passed away, but all of that goes out the window in this moment when I realize that I not only love Yasmen, but I want to love her for the rest of my life.
“Marry me.”
The words slip out soft and certain. And I am certain. An actuary running a dozen risk assessments couldn’t be as certain as I am right now. Yasmen and I belong together.
She drops her pen and her mouth falls open.
“Wha-what?” Jerky breaths stutter over her lips and her eyes go wide.
“
Marry me.”
Improbably—because this, all of this is as out of character for me as a goat tap-dancing—I sink to one knee in front of her, heart skydiving in my chest. Full-on romantic movie proposal posture. I reach up to cup her face, the beveled bones and delicate curves fitting perfectly against my palms.
“I love you, Yasmen.”
She nods, her expression dazed. “I know. I—I love you, too, but I thought we’d wait until you finished grad school.”
“I’m almost done. One semester left. Your lease is up next month. Perfect time to move in with me.” I sweep my arm around the sparsely furnished, shabby apartment. “Don’t you want to join me in this lap of luxury?”
She snickers, a wide smile breaking out on her beautiful face. The first time I saw her, my friends laughed because I stopped in the middle of whatever bullshit I was saying and stared. That’s not me. No matter how fine, no girl ever dropkicked me at first sight the way Yasmen did. I want to see her smooth brown skin, these sweet, full lips, the thick fan of lashes, on my children.
“You’re crazy,” she whispers.
“I’m sure of you.” I trace the silky dark arch of her eyebrow. “Are you sure of me?”
And I see it. I see the calm, the certainty, the love suffocate her doubts, smother the hesitations. She leaves the rickety chair, goes down on her knees to face me on mine, and scatters fleeting kisses across my face. They ghost over my lips and eyes like butterflies that float out of reach before I can grab them. I want to capture her face again, make her be still so I can kiss her back, but my hands hang at my sides, numb from the magnitude of what’s happening. Finally, she takes my hands in hers and looks directly at me. Tears pool in her eyes and slip over her cheeks.
“Yes, Josiah Wade,” she breathes. “I’ll marry you.”
My body comes back to life and I pull her into me by the curve of her hips, press my palms into the warm suppleness of her back. She’s all tight heat and temptation. In the absence of a ring, I seal our pledge with a slick tangle of tongues and tears.
The kiss is hot and sweet and ravenous. This, this must be how forever tastes.
I’m sure of it.
Chapter One
Yasmen
You rarely see good things in the rearview mirror.
A lesson I should have learned by now, but I flick a glance to the back seat anyway, watching my daughter break the rules. Her brother in the passenger seat beside me is just as bad.
“Guys, you know it’s not screen time.” I split my attention between the interstate and the two of them. “Put your phones away, please.”
“Mom, seriously?” My daughter Deja’s sigh is heavy with a thirteen-year-old’s exasperation. “I just finished school and dance lessons. Gimme a break.”
“Sorry, Mom,” Kassim says, lowering his phone to his lap.
Deja expels another breath, like she’s not sure who irritates her more, me for making the rules or her brother for following them.
“Brownnose,” she mutters, gaze still fixed to her screen.
“Deja,” I say. “That phone is mine if you don’t put it away.”
Her eyes, dark and gold-flecked, clash with mine in the mirror before she sets the phone aside. It’s like staring back at myself. We’re so much alike. Skin as smooth and brown as polished walnut. Her hair, like mine, prone to coil and curl, always contracting at the slightest bit of moisture in the air. Same stubborn chin hinting at a will to match.
“She’s just like you,” my mother used to say when as a toddler Deja barreled into mishaps despite my warnings to take care. When she’d pull herself up to run off again with fresh scrapes and bruises. “Serves you right. Now you’ll see what I had to put up with raising you.”
I always thought it would be a blessing, mother and daughter, two peas in the proverbial pod. And for a long time, it was…until thirteen. God, I hate this age. I can’t seem to get anything right with her anymore.
“So how was your day?”
I ask because I want to make good use of all this time we have in the car commuting. They’ve only been back in school for two weeks, and I should start this year as I mean to go on.
“Jamal brought his lizard to school,” Kassim says, his amused eyes meeting mine in a brief sidelong glance. “And it crawled out of his backpack in class.”
“Oh, my God.” I laugh. “Did he catch it?”
“Yeah, but it took like twenty minutes. He’s fast. The lizard, I mean.” Kassim twists a button on the crisp white shirt of his school uniform. “Some of the girls started screaming. Mrs. Halstead stood on her chair, like it was a snake or something.”
“I might have freaked out too,” I admit.
“This one was harmless. It wasn’t like a Gila monster or a Mexican beaded lizard,” Kassim says. “Those are two of the poisonous types found in North America.”
I catch Deja staring at the back of her brother’s head like he sprang from Dr. Who’s TARDIS. With Kassim’s constant stream of factoids and fascination with…well, everything…it probably sometimes seems like he did.
“Never a dull moment with Jamal,” I say with a chuckle. “What about you, Deja?”
“Huh?” she asks, her voice disinterested, distracted.
When I check the mirror again, I only see her profile. She’s studying I-85 through her window. The six o’clock traffic is basically a parking lot, a fleet of Atlantan commuters inching forward and negotiating tight spaces in a game of vehicular Tetris.
“I was asking how your day went,” I try again.
“It was all right,” Deja says, eyes fixed on the traffic beyond her window. “Dad’s at the restaurant?”
So much for connecting.
“Uh, yeah.” I tap the brakes when a Prius cuts in front of me. “You guys can eat dinner there and your dad’ll take you home once you’re done.”
“Why?” Kassim asks.
“Why what?” I wait for the Prius to decide what he wants to do.
“I mean where will you be?” Kassim presses.
“It’s Soledad’s birthday,” I tell him, carefully switching lanes. “We’re taking her out to dinner. Make sure you get your homework done. I don’t want you to fall behind.”
“God, Mom,” Deja sighs. “We’re barely back from summer and you’re already up our asses.”
I ping a sharp glance from Kassim in the front seat to Deja in the back.
“Day, don’t cuss.”
She mumbles something under her breath.
“What was that?” I flash a look at her in the mirror as I pull off the exit. “You got something to say?”
“I said it.” Defiant, resentful eyes snap to meet mine.
“I didn’t hear it.”
“Is that my problem?”
“Yeah, it is. If you’re big and bad enough to say it, say it loud enough for me to hear it.”
“Mom, geez.” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Why are you so…ugh.”
I have a thousand replies to that, but all of them would only worsen the tension between us. If I had spoken to my mama that way, she would have pulled over to the shoulder and popped me in the mouth. God knows I love my mother, but I don’t want that. I draw a calming breath and try to remember all the ways I promised myself I would do things differently with my kids, landing somewhere between gentle parenting…and my mama.
I stop at a red light, turning to glance over my shoulder, meeting Deja’s hard stare. It always feels like she’s fortifying a wall between us, piling up the bricks before I can touch her on the other side. I miss the girl who loved our pillow fights, s’mores over the backyard firepit, and Saturday morning mommy-daughter manis. Is it all part of growing up, or are we just growing apart? Or both?
“Your dad and I expect you to set a better example for your brother,” I tell her.
“Well, Daddy’s not around as much anymore.” She turns her head, shifts her eyes away from me, and stares back out the window. “Is he?”
Even though Josiah doesn’t live with us, he’s only two streets over and they see him every day. Still, my heart clenches with a guilt-tinged ache because as much as I’d like to believe it’s only the big one-three that eroded things between Deja and me, I can’t lie to myself. The trouble started with the divorce. Those eyes, before never far from sparkling with laughter, now seem too old for the rest of her face, and not just from seeing one more year pass, but from witnessing the dissolution of her parents’ marriage over the last few.
