I nod once.
That’s all I’ve got.
Because loving someone doesn’t mean surviving them.
And walking away doesn’t mean I didn’t try.
It just means I finally stopped pretending I could fix something that was already breaking me.
CHAPTER 18
ETHAN SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
Beth’s doorclicked shut across the hall, soft but final, and the corridor went quiet in that way only hotels ever managed—carpet swallowing sound, air too cold, lights too bright. I stood there for a second longer than necessary, my key card warm in my palm, Sage’s last email still buzzing unanswered in my pocket.
She’d asked if I was coming back on the eight o’clock flight.
If I was “done being dramatic.”
If I missed her yet.
I didn’t answer.
I swiped into my room instead. The lock chimed. The door swung open to a space that felt suddenly, unmistakably mine.
Suit jacket over the chair.
Tie loosened.
City noise bleeding faintly through the glass like a distant tide.
I set my briefcase down, rolled my shoulders once, and exhaled.
I wasn’t going back to Boston tonight.
Not tomorrow.
I’d work out of corporate on Monday. Buy myself time. Space. Peace.
Whatever this thing had been all summer—whatever I’d been living inside—I needed a pause before it swallowed me whole.
The city meets me the second I step outside.
Not gently.
It hits—heat and noise and motion, a living thing that doesn’t wait to see if you’re ready. Taxi horns snap like impatience. A bus exhales at the curb, diesel and metal and something burnt underneath. Steam crawls up from a grate and wraps around my ankles, damp and warm, like the city is breathing on me.
New York.
I’d forgotten how it smells.
Garlic frying somewhere I can’t see. Coffee—dark, bitter, alive. Hot asphalt still holding the day. Cigarettes. Perfume. Sweat. A thousand lives brushing past each other without apology.
I walk.
No destination. Just forward.
My shoes strike the pavement in a rhythm that feels like mine again. Not hurried. Not careful. No calculating how fast I should move, how much space I’m allowed to take up, whether someone will read my silence as rejection or my smile as betrayal.
