Eventually, even grief grew tired.
Hope did not die in one moment. It thinned. It left through small changes I noticed only after they had already happened. I stopped looking at the door when it opened. My hand quit reaching for my phone the second it lit up. Hayden’s name, when it crossed my mind, no longer brought warmth or longing first. Anger came sometimes. Hurt came often. Beneath both sat something colder, the exhausted recognition of a pattern I should have known better than to trust.
Because this was the real Hayden, wasn’t it?
The man who held my daughter as though she was the center of his ruined world and the man who disappeared without a word were not separate people. The regret in his eyes, the softness in his hands, the pain in his voice—none of it had made him safe. This was Hayden when it mattered most, intense enough to make promises sound sacred, broken in ways that made me excuse him, and still capable of vanishing the moment staying required courage.
And God, I hated him for it.
Helena had waited because of him. I had lied to my daughter because of him. He had dragged hope out of the grave I had buried it in, placed it in my hands again, and then left me to watch it rot.
When I came back from the university that evening, rain was coming down hard enough to blur the streetlights.
I had cupcakes in one hand, my bag slipping from my shoulder, and a headache behind my eyes from a day of pretending I was fine. I was halfway to my apartment when I saw him. Hayden stood near the steps with his coat damp from the rain, shoulders slightly hunched against the cold, a cigarette caught between his fingers. He was trying to light it, but his hands were too unsteady for the task. The flame kept dying in the wind.
For a second, I stopped.
It had been a long time since I had seen him smoke. He had not done it while he was with us, not around Helena, and some part of me had started to believe he had quit. He once told me he smoked because of grief, because he needed something to do with his hands when the memories got too loud.
So why the hell was he standing outside my apartment in the rain, trying to light a cigarette now?
I moved closer before I could decide whether I wanted to slap him or ask if he was alive. He looked awful. Ragged, thinner than the last time I had seen him, his face drawn so sharply it made his cheekbones stand out, his eyes dark and bloodshot beneath wet strands of hair. The anger that had carried me through the past days flared hotter at the sight of him, because he had no right to look ruined after being the one who disappeared.
“Hayden.”
His hand stilled around the lighter.
He looked up, and the cigarette slipped slightly between his fingers. Neither of us moved for a moment. Rain ran down the side of his face, catching at his lashes, his collar, the tense line of his jaw. Then he dropped the cigarette to the ground and stepped toward me.
I should have backed away.
I didn’t.
He reached me too quickly, his hand coming to my waist as if the distance between us had been choking him. His forehead hovered close to mine, close enough for me to feel the heat of his breath against my skin. Uneven. Broken. Alive. His coat smelled of rain, cold air and him.
“Don’t,” he said before I could speak.
My body went rigid beneath his hand. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t ask me questions yet.” His voice was wrecked, scraped raw in a way that made my anger sharpen instead of soften. His fingers tightened once at my waist, a brief pressure that told me how badly he was holding himself together. “Not yet.”
I stared at him with fury burning in my throat. The unanswered calls, Helena’s disappointed face, the lies I had fed my daughter because of him, everything came rushing back at once.
“You disappear for days,” I said, my voice shaking with rage, “and the first thing you say to me is don’t? Where the hell have you been?”
His eyes closed for half a second, and when they opened again, whatever I saw there made my anger stumble. It did not leave. Fuck no. But for one dangerous moment, it lost its footing.
“Edwina,” he said.
“No.” I pushed at his chest, not to move him, just to remind both of us that I still could. “Do not say my name like that. You vanished, ignored every call and broke Helena’s heart, and now you’re standing here looking half-dead as if I’m supposed to understand without you giving me one damn word.”
His jaw tightened. Pain crossed his face, fast and ugly.
“I know,” he said.
The answer was quiet enough to hurt, ruined in a way I did not want to feel.
“Do you?” I snapped. “Because she asked if you stopped liking us. She asked if you were coming back or not.”
