Her apartment building was one of those renovated brick places in Music Row—the kind with exposed beams and big windows that let in too much light. The kind of place I could picture her loving. I sat on my bike across the street for a long moment, engine cooling, envelope in my jacket pocket, thinking about what I was about to do.
Five days of riding for a single envelope—cheap motels and gas station coffee and too much time alone with my regrets. Some of my brothers would call me crazy. Maybe I was.
But this was about giving her the truth I should have given her from the beginning. And that was worth every mile.
I walked up to the building and slid the envelope into her mailbox. No dramatic confrontation, no forcing myself into her space. Just a letter, waiting for her to find it when she was ready.
Then I got back on my bike and pointed it west.
I didn’t look back at her building. Didn’t linger. Just turned the key, felt the engine rumble to life beneath me, and pulled into traffic.
The same distance home. Five more days of highway and silence.
My hands were steady on the handlebars. My chest felt lighter than it had in months.
Chapter 13
?
— Indira —
The envelope was waiting in my mailbox when I got home Monday evening, wedged between a credit card offer and a notice about building maintenance. Plain white, no return address, just my name in careful block letters that didn’t match any handwriting I recognized.
I carried it upstairs to my apartment, tossing my bag on the couch before examining it more closely. Something about it felt deliberate—the weight of the paper, the care taken with the address. This wasn’t junk mail.
My stomach dropped before I’d even opened it. Some instinct, maybe, or just the paranoia that came from having spent months trying to disappear. Only a handful of people knew this address. Priya. My employer’s HR department. Vaughn. Emma, Sarah, and a few other Nashville friends.
And apparently, someone else.
I tore it open with hands that weren’t quite steady.
The letter was typed, not handwritten, but signed at the bottom in a familiar scrawl:Jacob.
My heart hammered against my ribs. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Could only stare at that name—not Dutch, but Jacob. His real name. The name I’d whispered against his skin in the dark, the name that had felt like a secret between us when everyone else called him by his road name.
How dare he? How dare he track me down at home, invade the life I’d built without him?
But even as the anger flared, something else flickered beneath it. Curiosity. And underneath that, something I didn’t want to name.
I sank onto the couch and started reading.
Indira,
I’m not writing this to ask you to come back. I’m not writing to make excuses or explain why I did what I did. I’m writing because you deserved the truth, and I was too much of a coward to give it to you when we were together.
I was raised to believe that women were supposed to accept whatever men dished out and be grateful for it. My father cheated on my mother for forty years, and she stayed because she thought she had no other choice. I watched that my whole life and thought it was normal. Thought it was just how things worked.
You were asking for basic respect and fidelity, and I couldn’t give you either because I didn’t understand what they meant. I thought love was about possession—about having someone who belonged to me. I didn’t understand that love is about choosing someone, every day, and making sure they never doubt that choice.
I gave you the illusion of commitment. I let you believe you were special to me while I was still fucking other women behind your back. That wasn’t love. That was selfishness dressed up as affection.
When you walked in on me with Crystal, I saw myself through your eyes for the first time. And I hated what I saw.
I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m not asking for anything. I just wanted you to know that you were right to leave. You deserved better than what I gave you, and I’m sorry I didn’t figure that out until it was too late.
I hope you’re happy. I hope Nashville is everything you wanted it to be. I hope you’ve found someone who treats you the way you deserve to be treated.
Jacob
