The sob came out of nowhere, a loud, childish wail that spilled into the empty room and echoed back at me with perfect,pitiless clarity. I heard myself howling, heard my own voice break on the rocks, but I couldn’t stop.
I folded forward, arms gripping my shins, forehead pressed to my knees, shaking so hard my teeth clacked. I rocked, back and forth, back and forth, like I was trying to soothe a child, and maybe that’s what I was.
A child. A fool. He’d left because that was what he did. Because he was built for it.
I cried because Caiden, for all his violence and all his tenderness, was the only person who ever saw the real me and didn’t look away. He’d made me laugh, made me want, made me believe in a future that wasn’t just a repeat of every previous disaster. And then he’d vanished, like always, taking my last good hope with him.
I had finally accepted him as a potential lover, not as an enemy. Everything he had done was erased that night in the motel, as if he had been awakened as a fresh, new person in my eyes.
I buried my face in my arms, tried to inhale dust and dead skin and let it choke out the memory of his hands on me, his mouth pressed so tight to mine I could almost believe the rest of the world wasn’t a threat.
But every time I blinked, I saw him. The look on his face when he came, wild and hungry, like he’d found something worth breaking for and was terrified of how badly he wanted it. The way he’d kissed me at my door, soft as a bruise, and then left without turning back.
The pain was rooted in some pre-language part of me that still wanted to claw and bite and maybe, god forbid, be held. I screamed into the mattress, a long, strangled sound that didn’t ease the pressure in my chest.
I rocked and howled until the well of my body ran dry, and then I just sat there, numb and ruined, staring at the peeling paint above the baseboards.
He’d left me with nothing but the echo of him.
I wondered if he’d cried when his mother left, or if he’d just packed up the grief and moved it to a place in his chest nothing could touch. Maybe that was what he wanted for me: to harden, to not need anybody so badly it rattled your bones when they went.
I hated him. I hated myself more.
I hated the world for making all of this possible, for letting us delude ourselves into thinking that broken people could be made whole through proximity alone.
I loved him, too, in a hot, searing flash that made me want to claw my own chest open and excise the part that wouldn’t let go.
I rocked and howled and hated and loved in equal measure until my body had nothing left but the tremble, the cold sweat, the stunned silence that comes after a tornado has torn a path through your childhood home.
I didn’t realize that Sabrina had sat next to me until I felt a tender hand on my shoulder. She was rubbing my back in a way that a mother would comfort her heartbroken daughter.
“I’m so sorry, Amelia. Let it out. Let it all out, honey.”
I wailed louder. “It—It hurts. So bad. I thought he felt the same way. I thought things were different now. I thought all the bad between us had melted into dust. But he left. He left me.”
She let me cry, she let me scream, she let me work out this pain.
When I finally came down, she set an envelope next to me.
“He left this for you. I think you should read it. It might help.” She gave me another sorrowful look, and walked back up the basement steps.
A letter.
He wrote a fucking letter?
Everything that had happened between us came down to a letter and a vanishing act. As if our newfound connection never mattered to him.
I considered ripping it up. I considered leaving it there and running back up those steps. I considered calling him and telling him to say the words to me face-to-face.
Unfortunately, I was too weak to do any of those things.
Once the tears had dried and my hands weren’t shaking so badly, I opened the envelope and stared at his handwriting.
It was a grimy sheet of notebook paper, spiral shreds clinging to the edge.
The handwriting was what stopped me: fast, angry, still war-wounded from all those years of turning words into weapons. It was barely legible in some places, but the violence of it meant he’d written it all at once, hot and scared.
Amelia,
