And now I'm alone.
Just like I always knew I would be.
Chapter 18
Noah
Ididn’tsleepawink last night and I took off at dawn.
I had to get out of Rika's house. I had to put some distance between us, and the basement apartment wasn't nearly far enough.
I'll still honor my promise to care for Matthew and Zoe until the end of the school year. There's no way I'll betray those kids.
But I know that each day will be torture.
Which is why I'm standing in the garage of Gramps' house, cleaning up decades of accumulated stuff. It's a job I've been putting off for years. Somehow, this morning seems like a fitting day to start.
Taking out the trash. Making way for a fresh start. With or without a broken heart.
The fishing lures gleam dully in the dusty shaft of morning light, their painted surfaces faded but still recognizable. I look at them, as familiar to me as the countless days I spent with Gramps on the water. The red and white striped one, the battered green fake fish one that Gramps swore could catch anything if you knew how to work it.
He was the only one who knew how to work it. I never managed to catch a single fish with it.
I hold the tackle box in my hands, feeling its familiar weight, and wonder when exactly I became the kind of person who stands alone in a garage on a Saturday morning, sorting through a dead man's possessions to avoid thinking about the woman who broke his heart.
The answer, of course, is last night.
I set the heavy box down on the workbench. The sound echoes in the empty garage, swallowed almost immediately by decades of accumulated silence.
I've been here since before sunrise, throwing myself into the work of sorting and packing because if I stop moving, if I let myself be still for even a moment, I'll have to feel the full weight of what happened. Of what I said. Of what Rika didn't say.
I'm in love with you.
The words hang in my memory like a noose I willingly put around my own neck.
And Rika's response:I'm sorry.
I scrub a hand over my face and rub my eyes, scratchy with dust and exhaustion. I'm running on nothing but coffee, and my stomach growls in protest. I ignore it.
The garage smells like motor oil and sawdust and time. It has that particular scent of a space that's been closed up too long, where memories gather like dust on every surface. Gramps' tools still hang on the pegboard in neat rows, organized with the precision of a man who believed everything had its place.
I wonder what he'd think of me now. Standing here at thirty-three, selling the house he left me because I failed at the one thing he always told me mattered most: to create my own family.
My phone buzzes on the workbench.
I stare at it for a long moment, my heart doing that stupid, painful lurch it's been doing all morning. Half of me is hoping it's Rika; half of me is terrified it might be.
It's not.
The screen lights up with an incoming video call: Sharnia Jarvis.
For a second, I consider letting it go to voicemail. I'm not sure I can manage the cheerful small talk, the performance of being fine when I feel like I'm held together with duct tape and spite.
But Sharnia helped me get the job offer at Drakesmere. The least I can do is answer.
I swipe to accept, and Sharnia's warm, familiar face fills the screen.
"Noah!" Her smile is bright and genuine, her purple scales catching the light. Behind her, I can see floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city, modern furniture, the Singapore skyline stretching to the gleaming ocean. It's beautiful. It's fitting. "There you are! We've been trying to reach you."
