After several minutes, when my breathing had steadied slightly, she pulled back to look at me.
“Did you meet someone over there?” she asked softly.
The question shattered the last of my defences, and I nodded against her shoulder, fresh tears spilling over.
If only she knew that the someone I had met over there, the same someone who had my heart in her hands, was the very person I had been gossiping about to her over the phone that day, when I was huddled in the toilet cubicles of Roxie’s.
“It’s okay. Don’t hold your tears in, or else you might get those nasty migraine attacks,”,” she said as she held me.
And I closed my eyes, comforting myself with the memories of a certain green-eyed woman thousands of miles away.
XXI
“The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief — but the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love.”
— Hillary Stanton Zunin
Chapter Twenty-Two
Marley
I dropped onto the bench, the wood rough against my palms, and let out a long, shaky breath that felt like it had been trapped in my chest for weeks.
The April sun sifted through the cherry blossoms, dusting the path with pink petals that clung to my boots like tiny accusations of beauty I couldn’t appreciate anymore. I tugged at the collar of my jacket and watched a kid chase a kite across the lawn, his laughter filling the park with the kind of joy I’d forgotten existed.
The wind kept tossing my hair into my eyes until I finally shoved it back. I couldn’t even tell the last time I’d bothered with a trim. Plus, it felt strangely soft against my fingers, which felt like a lie since everything else in my life was currently coming undone.
Irrespective of that, it reminded me of her hands threading through these same strands months ago. I still remembered the way she’d twist them around her knuckles while we lay in my bed, talking about everything and nothing. How she’d tug gently when I said something that made her laugh. How she’d smooth it back from my forehead when she thought I was sleeping.
I had come here to escape the suffocating silence in my apartment, to run from the ache that had burrowed itself so deeply in my ribs that I couldn’t tell where it ended and I began. To stop thinking about her for five fucking minutes.
But even as I sat there surrounded by strangers and an open sky, everything felt too taut and too immediate. The brightness of the day mocked the darkness spreading through my chest like spilled ink. And the craziest thing was that such brightness had always reminded me of her anyway.
I pulled out my phone, my thumb already swiping to Instagram before I had made a conscious decision. Maybe I could lose myself in mindless videos, let someone else’s perfectly curated life distract me from the wreckage of my own.
But as I scrolled through my main feed, watching people celebrate promotions and new relationships and ordinary Tuesday afternoons, my finger slowed, then stopped.
Without any permission from my rational mind, I found myself tapping the search bar.
I stared at the blank space for a long moment, my heart already picking up speed like it knew what I was about to do to myself.
This was all shades of stupid. Pathetic, even. This was exactly the kind of behaviour I used to mock in other people, the desperate digital stalking of someone who had already walked away.
But my chest felt hollow and scraped raw, and I needed something, anything, to fill the space where hope used to live. I needed to know she was okay, even if knowing would destroy me a little more.
My fingers trembled as I typed her name, each letter feeling like a small betrayal of my promise to myself to let her go.
K-e-l-e-c-h-i space O-b-i.
The letters blurred slightly as my vision wavered, but I kept typing anyway.
Several accounts populated the screen. I scanned each profile picture with the desperation of someone looking for water in a desert, my chest tightening with each wrong face. Most were clearly not her, too young, wrong features.
But one made my breath catch in my throat like a fishhook.
The profile was sparse, almost empty. Just a heart emoji in the bio and a close-up photo of lips as the profile picture.
But I knew those lips.
