Her father came out before I made the decision.
He walked down the driveway and stood at my window until I rolled it down.
"She doesn't want to see you," he said.
I looked at the house, not believing it.
"Cody." His voice was not unkind; just final. "Go home."
I went home.
I sat in my father's kitchen, and I felt the crushing weight of being turned away from a door by a man whose daughter I love more than fucking anything. And I thought about every decision that led to that driveway. I stayed in my father's kitchen for six hours, not moving.
Then I went to her café when she started picking up shifts again.
I didn't go inside. I sat in the parking lot across the street, and I watched her through the window. She was behind the counter in her apron. Her hair pulled back, and she was laughing at something the girl beside her said. Seeing her smile hit me in the chest like a punch because I hadn't seen her smile in so long.
She's fine, I told myself.
She's healing, I told myself.
She doesn't need you, I told myself.
I drove home, picked up my phone, and stared at her contact for a long time.
I gave her the six weeks.
I gave her every single one of them, and they cost me more than anything.
Now she's in my lake house.
The decision not to talk to her, not give her a choice — that was a unanimous decision. All three of us. We voted that she doesn't get to walk away from all of us with no solution. She doesn't get to send us out the door and call that an ending.
That's not an ending.
That's not how this ends.
She stays until she chooses.
A few weeks ago, Theo found me outside of her dorm. I was in my car at the end of the lot doing the thing I'd been doing three times a week — sitting in the dark looking at her window, telling myself it was enough, knowing it wasn't — when his car pulled up beside mine. He got out and knocked on my window like we were two normal people in a normal parking lot and not two men who had been trying to destroy each other for the better part of a year.
I rolled it down.
He looked at me for a moment.
"She hates you," he said. Like he knew it was a fact. Like he'd been carrying that fact around and had decided tonight was the night to hand it to me directly.
"She hates me, too," he admitted.
I looked at him.
He looked back and said nothing else for a moment.
"What do you want, Theo?"
He looked at Adela's window. "Same thing you want."
Something moved through me. Not anger — I was too hollowed out for anger by that point, seeing the love of your life suffering in a hospital bed doesn't leave much room for anger.
