The ceiling was a blank canvas. I stared at it for hours.
At some point, the tears came. Silent and steady, soaking my pillow.
This was the right choice. Pulling away now, while the wound was clean. Before I was in too deep to survive the loss.
But the voice in my head, the honest one I couldn't silence, whispered the truth.
You're already in too deep. You've been in too deep since the craft table.
And another truth, crueler still:
You're not protecting yourself from loss. You're creating it. Right now. With your own hands.
The mountain wasn't taking them from me. I was pushing them away. Choosing to lose them because the uncertainty of maybe was worse than the certainty of now.
It was the stupidest, most self-destructive logic I'd ever employed.
And I couldn't stop.
The wind picked up again around midnight, howling through the pines like a warning. Or maybe a lament.
I lay in the dark, listening to the mountain breathe, and told myself this was protection.
It felt like dying.
But dying slowly, on my own terms, seemed preferable to dying all at once when the ranger came again.
When, not if.
That was the lesson the wilderness had taught me. Love was a loan, and the mountain always collected.
I pressed my face into my tear-soaked pillow and waited for morning.
It was going to be the hardest conversation of my life.
But it was better than waiting for a knock that would end it for me.
Better than standing on another porch, hearing another ranger's careful words, feeling my world collapse into rubble.
Better, I told myself.
Better.
I knew this was not reality.
It was a lie.
But I clung to it anyway, because the alternative was hope.
And hope, I had learned, was the cruelest thing of all.
13.Emma
Imade a six-year-old cry on a Saturday morning. If there's a lower circle of hell reserved for people like me, I'd like to submit my application now.
The two days before that Saturday were a masterclass in cowardice. I'd elevated avoidance to an art form, perfected the craft of disappearing in plain sight.
Thursday morning, I arrived at school forty minutes early. The hallways were empty, my footsteps echoing off linoleum like accusations.
