He blinks again, clearing his vision, before his chin slowly lifts. “Annie, I—”
I cut him off by pushing through the door. “So, this is it, huh? Where you went? What you abandoned me for?”
My gaze sweeps the small, cluttered living room. The cabin can’t be more than a thousand square feet, yet every inch feels heavy with the life he’s been building without me.
The couch is pushed awkwardly to the side, cushions worn and slouched. There’s a workbench wedged against the front window, bathed in natural light, littered with clamps, chisels, strips of rosewood and maple. Half-finished guitarbodies lean against the wall like sleeping ghosts, and a soldering iron rests beside a coiled cord.
A cracked coffee mug holds picks and nails. Sketches are pinned to the wall with thumbtacks that showcase blueprints, wiring diagrams, and fretboard designs. It smells like varnish and pine.
This isn’t a living room.
It’s a refuge. A workshop.
A war zone.
“It’s nice,” I murmur, panning back to him. “Cozy. I’m happy for you.”
His hand grips the doorframe, every muscle stretched tight, every vein dilating. With his back facing me, he stares out at the silent street.
Toaster races over, winding around my ankles, his soft fur a small antidote to this wound of sadness hellbent on taking me down.
I crouch to pet him. The only sweetness buried in the rubble.
“I’m sorry,” Chase says, barely a breath, hardly loud enough to hear.
His words only fuel my fire.
I lift to a stand, heart beating like a conga. “That’s not good enough. It will never be good enough.”
“I know.” Exhaling a long breath, he finally pivots, wedges his shoulder against the frame. “You weren’t supposed to find me.”
“I’m well aware,” I bite out.
“I didn’t want you to see me like this.”
“Like what? A coward?” I can’t let go of this anger. I’m choking on it. Suffocating. “Too bad. Tag told me where you were. And if you thought for a second I wouldn’t burn the whole world down looking for you, then you don’t know me at all.”
His jaw tightens as he stares at me from across the room.
I chomp down on my lip, holding back the emotional dam. “I have to say, it kills me you wouldn’t do the same.”
Breathing heavily, he closes his eyes as the door thunks shut. “You don’t understand.”
“Of course I don’t. I don’t understand any of this. How you could vanish into the night without a goodbye. How you could leave us all stranded in Vegas withno answers, no explanation. How you could leaveme. I thought we were…” My words get clogged.
He takes a slow step forward. “We were everything you thought we were.”
“Liar.”
“No.” Another step. “We were. We are. Nothing has changed for me—not the way I feel about you, the way your songs and your voice have followed me around for eight torturous months like a ghost I can’t shake. I hear you in every awful fucking silence. I feel you in every sunset I don’t deserve. In every moon, every midnight. There’s only you.”
“Bullshit!” Tears burst from my eyes, hot and wild, as I slash a hand through the air, cutting his words in half. “Bullshit, Chase. If you loved me, you would have stayed. Fought. But all you gave me were empty promises and this broken fucking heart that feels too heavy to carry around most days. You abandoned me. Betrayed me. Even now, you wish you never saw me again. That I never found you. I see it in your eyes.”
He visibly flinches, as if I reached across the room and slapped him. “I never wished that,” he murmurs. “I want to see you more than anything in this world.”
“Prove it.”
His eyes burn, locked on mine, but there’s something fractured behind them, something unspoken. He opens his mouth like he’s going to say more, then clamps it shut.
