Logan made decisions for a life he didn’t even recognize.
He had drowned himself in the monotony of office hours, leaving Sandy to plan the wedding without him. He couldn’t even recall his wedding rehearsal. She had hired a wedding planner, taking every decision into her own hands while Logan offered nothing but a single, stubborn request: keep it small. Logan also lied his way out of the honeymoon, sayingsomething about work and about having traveled enough. He had a vague recollection of those conversations with his father and Sandy. While his father was pleased, after all, Robert Vaughn loved work and people who worked, Sandy was mad about the lack of a honeymoon.
But Logan couldn’t feel the edges of the world anymore.
He moved like he was walking underwater—each step slow, muffled, detached. Conversations passed through him like wind through mesh. He saw mouths move, heads tilt, hands gesturing, but none of it landed. Emotion had become a distant frequency—something happeningaroundhim, nevertohim. A faint murmur behind glass. Life continued at a safe remove, as though he were watching himself from the wrong side of a mirror.
Inside, he lived elsewhere.
There, beneath all the days and dinner tables and white linen, was a quiet shoreline. Adrian stood there, just beyond reach. That life, their life, still clung to him like salt in his skin. It was dim now, blurred by time, but it hadn’t left. It waited in the folds of memory, in the tremble between blinks, in the silence just after someone said his name.
He didn’t miss Adrian as one misses a person.
He missed him the way lungs miss air.
The way fish miss water.
Then came the house hunting. Logan had felt like a shadow of himself, watching as Sandy held his hand and picked out a place they would call home. His parents approved, of course, thrilled by the proximity to Logan’s work, pleased that it would keep them close. The Vaughns had always lived close, never straying too far from one another. But Logan wanted to run, to escape, to leave it all behind. Instead, he had smiled, amask of forced joy, and let Sandy hug him when he agreed to one of the houses she loved. Tomorrow, as the wedding unfolded, the decorators his father hired would finish their work on their new house. Most of Logan’s things were already there. Everything was already moving forward, even as Logan remained anchored in place, adrift in an ocean of apathy.
His younger sister, Ann, had come home, filled with excitement for the wedding, her wide-eyed enthusiasm a stark contrast to Logan’s numb resignation. Jane, however, had seen through him. She knew something was wrong, had known it from the first moment she saw him when he got back to the States after his trip. But Logan couldn’t bring himself to explain. He couldn’t bring himself to speak the truth.
Logan rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, feeling as if he were trapped beneath the surface of some dark sea. He reached for his laptop, feeling the ritual of it call to him like a lifeline. With his earphones in, he clicked on the familiar secret folder, and there was Adrian’s face, beaming from the screen, tanned and sunlit, eyes bright with laughter that now felt like a balm and a wound all at once. He watched as the waves rolled gently behind Adrian, saw his hair, wet and tousled, saltwater glistening on his skin.
A sob tore free from Logan’s chest, ragged and helpless. He pressed a trembling hand to his mouth, as if he could somehow damn the flood, as if he could swallow down the ache threatening to drown him. But the past was cruel. The video played on, unyielding, Adrian’s voice curling through the room—warm, sun-drenched, touched with that sand-smooth accent that had once felt like home.
He watched as Adrian laughed, that wild, unrestrained joy spilling from him, a sound that had once filled Logan with something weightless,something unbreakable. And then… there he was, in the glow of the screen, grinning as he reached for the camera, his hands sure, his eyes alight with mischief. “You want to film something good?”he had said, teasing, effortless.“I’ll give you something good.”
And then Adrian was gone, leaping from the bow of the yacht, cutting through the air like he belonged to the ocean itself. The water swallowed him whole, endless and blue.
Logan clenched his jaw, but the joy—theirjoy—felt like a mirage now, slipping through his fingers, dissolving before he could hold onto it. It was a ghost of something beautiful, something that no longer existed.
With a sharp, shaking breath, he slammed the laptop shut. The screen went black. The room swallowed him in silence, thick and suffocating, pressing against his ribs like a weight he could never lift.
Logan lay in the dark, pulling the blanket tight around him, as if it could shield him from the ache clawing inside. He could still see Adrian’s face, the memory vivid even with his eyes closed: the way the light had glinted off the water, the unfiltered happiness in Adrian’s gaze. Adrian had looked at him then with a joy so pure it was like sunlight breaking through fog, but now, all Logan felt was the hollow ache of absence, the bitter salt of what he’d lost.
In the early dawn, after barely an hour of fitful sleep, Logan dragged himself through his morning routine. He stared at the reflection in the mirror, at the dark circles under his eyes, the hollow lines of his face. Theperson staring back was a stranger, someone who barely ate, who barely slept. He was just the shell of someone who had once felt alive.
When he made it to the kitchen, his family was there, bustling with excitement. Ann called out, “Good morning, groom!” with a teasing smile, while Jane gave him a concerned look, muttering about how tired he looked. His mother offered breakfast, but he just shook his head, reaching for the coffee Jane handed him. Food was tasteless now; even coffee felt empty, dull, like drinking shadows.
As his mother and sisters bustled out the door for last-minute preparations, his father’s voice boomed down the hall, announcing that Cole, his best man and Jane’s husband, would be arriving soon. Logan forced a nod, but the words barely registered. The only voice he wanted to hear, the only person who filled his mind, was as unreachable as the ocean on a distant shore.
Logan turned back to his room, each step heavy, every inch of him weighed down by the knowledge that , he’d step into a life without the one person who had ever made him feel alive.
A few short hours later, Logan stood in the sterile silence of the hotel suite, the air thick with the scent of polished wood and lavender. Everything was ready for the day: gleaming surfaces, the soft buzz of unseen preparations outside the room, and the eager whispers of a future unfolding. Yet Logan couldn’t shake the heaviness pressing on his chest, a weight too familiar, too unyielding.
From the large window, the green grass of the garden stretched out, punctuated by the gentle drift of white tulle. Photos hung around the venue, frozen moments in time. Some were taken before Logan had left for his trip, capturing smiles he now realized were half-truths. Others were from the past few days, Sandy glowing with excitement, her arm wrapped around him as they posed for the camera in picturesque locations nearby. But all Logan could see in the images was the absence, the gap where something, someone, used to fit.
Guests were starting to trickle in. Their voices hummed through the walls, distant but invasive. He turned away from the window, his eyes briefly catching sight of his father and Cole standing across the room. His father, dressed to perfection, looked the part of the proud father, while Cole’s furrowed brow spoke of something else, something Logan couldn’t articulate.
“You ready, son?” his father asked, his voice warm with a routine kind of joy.
Dressed, yes.
Shoes polished, yes.
Hair styled, yes.
But ready? No. Never.
