“I’m trying to fix this,” she says. “I’m sorry that it hurts.”
“I need to think about it.” My eyes are stinging. Wiping them doesn’t release the burn. She tries to stop me, though I am off the bed and walking toward the door.
“Where are you going?” she asks, getting up from the chair, too afraid to come any closer.
“I can’t be here right now.”
Her eyes beg for me to stay, and the plea shrouds her face in shame. “Ryan, please don’t go, please don’t do this . . . Please talk to me.”
She is weak and desperate, crying and trembling. I think it’s too late.
“I can’t be here,” I tell her again.
The door slams behind me and all I can think to myself is that I hate my wife.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
ABBY
I have lived in fear much of my life, mostly of thoughts that were fighting to come out. For the first time, I am plagued with real danger.
It’s over. He’s going to leave me.
I can’t breathe. I sink back into the rocker, and I wish for it to wash me down, taking the feelings along with it. But it won’t. Instead, I have to face the panic, accept the feelings, and ride out the thick layer of emotions that curdle my insides and make me want to run. This is what Jeannie has been describing to me. This is the test of how far I have come. Jeannie’s voice reminds me to experience the feelings. Anger can no longer be turned inward. Fear must thrive. Though the fury of the emotions makes my body tremble, and it feels like I’m dying, I cannot die from a feeling.
My eyelids close, and I find my inner balance. After a few satisfying breaths, I am able to guide my feet the few steps to the bed, where I collapse. I turn over and smell Ryan on the covers. The tears roll off my cheeks, and I quiet my brain from shushing them away. My mind once called me a coward for crying, so I am allowing myself to cry. My beating heart once told me I was crippled when its rapid speed paralyzed my arms and legs. So I tell my heart she is okay. She is just scared. I comfort her. My soul screams at me: “You are evil and bad for what you did, and no one will ever love you.” So I whisper to her: “You are human. You make mistakes. You’ll get through this.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
LAUREN
I am in the parking lot of my favorite indie bookstore, and I don’t expect Ryan to show up. I know his feelings for me are mingled with anger and regret. Besides, I’ve read in the paper that he’s gearing up for the state championship.
One of the few things I missed while shooting the falls, far from city lights, was this bookstore. The bustling world moves at a frantic pace, but I slow down when stepping into the cozy space with pathways to the imagination. The rooms are filled with my closest friends, and the welcoming no longer eludes me. For years, I have disguised myself behind my work, my pen name a shield, the armor that protects me from critics’ scrutiny. It has also distanced me from readers who have written letters to Quinci about how they’ve been touched.
I never set out to become a well-known author. Though I enjoy the process of spinning words into sentences that matter, it is carving out the story and intersecting characters’ lives that moves me to sit at my desk each day. I’ve always said there are great writers and great storytellers. I’m no Wharton or Brontë, but I can tell a good tale.
Searching for the travel section, I pass a long line of books promising adventure. It’s hard to feel alone when possibilities are summoning me to slip inside a book’s pages.
I’m looking for a specific title. Quinci asked me to check out a book that claimed to have a similar premise as ours. My cell rings, and I know it is her. The woman has an antenna that stretches across time zones. “Did you find it?”
“What’s it called again?”
“The Mountain River or River Mountains. Something like that.”
My eyes catch sight of the shooting cascades of Iguazu on the cover. The book is half the size of ours and not nearly as dramatic. It feels flat and artificial. “I’m not worried, Q.”
“Did you visit our friend, Ms. Sutherland?”
She knows I never visit my books. Once I have given birth to one, I see the book as no longer mine. Except today I can’t squelch the curiosity.
“Go look!” she squeals, as only Quinci can.
As I turn the corner of travel and cross in to romance, he finds me.
“I’ve gotta go, Q.” She keeps talking, but I have zapped her from the screen.
He’s standing in front of me, and around me, the words from the pages seem to fill the aisle, shouting our names, screaming their versions of our story.
“Hey,” he says.
I dressed casually for the day: jeans, Uggs, black sweater. My messenger bag is over my shoulder, and I drop my phone into the opening at the top. He is leaning against a shelf of Roberts, Steel, and me—Virginia Sutherland. His Giants sweat suit is gray and somber like his face. “Hi,” I say to his clear green eyes.
“Do you remember when you had that horrible stomach virus and I read to you?” he asks.
I nod.
“You were always a sucker for a mystery.”
He grabs my arm and leads me down another aisle. It is not the way I’d imagined him touching me again, angry and unkind. We pass John Green and Lauren Oliver when he says, “I’m the one who’s been in the dark.”
He looks tense and preoccupied, guiding me through more aisles and then the cafe. “She told you?” I ask.
“Do you really want to talk about this here?” he asks.
I thought the faces of my friends would shield us from any eruptions. I realize now what a mistake I’ve made. He knows the truth, and he is about to explode.
Neither of us speaks as we exit the double doors.
“My truck’s over there. Let’s go for a drive.”
The truck is huge. There are large doors and windows, and it seems to go on for miles. Inside and out, the color is dark and masculine, almost mean. When it roars to life, I expect it to holler at me, too. I pull my jacket around me, and he instinctively turns up the heat. It feels wrong and unnatural being there in Abby’s seat. Though she hadn’t thought it was wrong to take mine.
We drive in silence before I ask about her.
“She’s all right,” he says.
“I used to be able to read you better.”
He doesn’t answer. He fingers his messy brown hair with one hand and grips the wheel with the other.
The lightly trafficked streets are leading us into the town of Davidson. As we enter the bucolic land of our youth, the memories resurface, tugging us back in time. We are quiet with our thoughts, revisiting a past that once had meaning. It’s nearing Thanksgiving and already the trees and storefronts are decorated with holiday lights. Summit Coffee. Raeford’s Barber Shop. The sprinkling bulbs spring life into a chilly, gray afternoon.
The thing about nostalgia is that it sneaks inside of you when you’re not expecting it. When you get used to living without someone, you think you’re immune to the emotions that grab you when they reappear.
I have lived a hundred lives without Ryan. I have immersed myself in the pages of my books, something he knows nothing about, and the cracks in the land—without him as my anchor. I have fallen in love. I have made love. And still I drive the streets where we began, and I am thrust through time, harnessed to his memory, tethered to his heart. The anger has lessened, replaced with a sentimental whiff that clouds my judgment. I’m not entirely sure if what I’m feeling for Ryan is real, or the memory of what used to be.
“This is what you meant when you said it was complicated. Were you going to tell me today?” he asks. “Is that why you called?”
“Yes. In part.”
He finds a spot on Main Street and pulls the truck to a stop, turning to me: “I don’t know if I can handle much more honesty.” Then he opens the door and hops out. I take a deep inhale before following him.
We cross the street toward the campus. Davidson is a mere squ
are mile, so it doesn’t take us long to pass the main academic building with its impressive dome, the library, and the new science building. Around us, students are rushing to class to finish assignments and exams in time for the extended break. We had walked these pathways for four years. Now they feel haunted, as though our former selves had trickled into the brick and are fighting to come out. The buildings are more beautiful than I remember. I feel both safe and vulnerable here. The innocence of my youth is colliding with forbidden feelings.
We follow the stone path and pass Phi and Eu Halls, and the open porches where some of the greatest student debates were held across the lawn. The church pops up on our right, and we end up at the well. The trees are bare, jutting into a gray sky. Deep green ivy swaddles the brick arches. The last dying leaves are gathered on the floor in brown piles. They are a reminder of the fragility of life. I know that now. There is no in between.
He is agitated. He sits on the cold stone, then gets up again.
“This is where you told me you loved me for the first time,” I say. “Right there.” I am pointing at the stone benches that surround the arch and its pointed green crown. There is a streetlight behind us. It is flickering, caught between daytime and the shade of an early moon.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were there? Didn’t I deserve to know the truth?”
I begin, but the words won’t come out. I have rehearsed them a million times, and now, seeing how much pain I have caused, I forget how to speak.
He raises his voice when he asks again, “Why?”
We are standing a few inches apart. His accusations crowd the air rising above us. I feel something damp flow down my face. His eyes burrowing into my own cause the pain. I gently ask, “How could you?” but I can’t finish. His eyes stop me like a kiss, and words don’t come.
I have to turn away or I will do something desperate and wrong. I gaze out at the place we first fell in love. Ryan sits again, with his head is in his hands, and waits.
My frustration gushes to the surface. I am a geyser, bursting with bottled-up emotion. “What did you expect from me? I was halfway around the world with no reception, and when I found a landline, no one answered the phone. Maybe I should’ve left a message, maybe I should’ve called a thousand more times, but I wasn’t thinking. All that mattered was getting to you. When I walked in the door . . . She was . . . God, Ryan, what were you thinking? Do you have any idea what you did to me? I spent weeks in shock—which turned into years. So no, I didn’t think to let you know I was there. It wouldn’t have changed what I saw.”
He can’t look at me.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” I ask.
“What do you want me to say? I can’t tell you my life with Abby hasn’t meant anything. Or that I didn’t think about you all these years, that I wished I would have married you. She’s my wife, Lauren! I know what pain feels like. I lived with it when you left. I waited every day for a call. Anything to let me know you still cared. Everyone said I was a fool, but no one had what we had—no one.”
I take the empty seat beside him on the bench. We aren’t touching, though every part of him is so close I am sure we are joined somewhere inside. I don’t look at him when I tell him I love him. “Not just back then, not all those years ago. Now,” I say. “I still love you now.”
Love and pain are so closely related, it hurts to tell him what I’ve longed to say. But when the words dissolve around us, I find his eyes and I know that true love does exist. I don’t blink. I love Ryan with all of me and I know he feels it.
He doesn’t answer. He’s thinking about it, pressing it against him, pushing it away, this feeling that neither of us wants to carry into the present. Cars are honking around us, and a few students walk by. The only thing in life I’m sure of is that the world will go on as though my loss means nothing.
“Why are you telling me this? Why now? It would’ve meant a lot more if you had told me years ago.”
I am sorry I hurt him with my silence, and I tell him so. My body shrinks beside him, letting him know that I’m not proud, that it was a mistake. “I was stupid to think I could leave and nothing would change. I should’ve told you I came back. I should’ve screamed at Abby and fought for you,” I tell him. His silence is killing me, and I want this thing between us to make it impossible for him not to touch me, to forgive me. Slowly, my fingers find his hand. They stay there and he doesn’t move them away. “I wasn’t going to return to the program. When I walked in the door to your parents’ house, I had already decided it was too hard to be away. I thought we were going to start our life together. But when I saw her . . . Something inside me snapped.” We are connected. I feel every part of him sprouting through his palm. “All that bitterness, I stuffed it away. I wonder if we could have lessened the damage if the three of us weren’t so darn stubborn.”
He stares at me, and I wonder if my words are lost in his ears. We thought we had forgotten what touch could do to us. His hand on mine tells me more than he’s willing to admit. He knows it and swiftly pulls away.
“I’m tired of running, Ryan. I should’ve told you how I felt sooner, but I didn’t know how. And then I just kept running. But when I saw you, it all came back. It was as though I’d never left. There were too many secrets. You needed the truth, and all of it. Maybe being here to finish the book is the closure we’ve all needed.”
I stand up from the bench. “I’ll be leaving soon. A few more falls and then I’ll go. This time it’ll be for the right reasons. There’s nothing keeping me here anymore. I need to get away from this place. From you.”
“Where will you go?” he asks.
“I’m not sure. Maybe Atlanta, New York. That’s the nice part—I can go anywhere I want.”
“What about the house? You love it there.”
“I do. And I’ve lived without it for this long. I can meet my parents there for a quick weekend whenever I want. I just can’t live there full-time.”
He nods as though we hadn’t shared the greatest love of all time in those mountains. I want to shake him and kiss him, and I want him to grab me in his arms and insist that I stay. I hate who he’s become. I hate what Abby has done to him. His composure stings.
“Just know that I love you,” I say again. “I never stopped. I thought I might have. I thought I knew how to live without you. Being near you right now, I know that I don’t. Everything reminds me of you, of us. I don’t know how to fight it anymore. I don’t think I can.”
Either he moves away from me or it is his words that make me feel distant.
“I’m a married man, Lauren. I’m not free to love you. I was waiting for you. Always waiting for you. You chose to leave. You could’ve come to me. You could’ve called. Every second that went by was another betrayal. You let me believe you didn’t care. You handed me over to somebody else. Now I have a family. I have a wife. What you’re asking of me is wrong.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything.”
“Then why tell me you love me?”
“I thought I felt something between us.”
“You let me go. I moved on. I did what you wanted. It’s too late.”
“You slept with my best friend.”
He is getting angry. “I did. And it was wrong. I was suffering and she made me feel good, but I have a daughter from that night. Hurting you was a mistake, but creating Juliana wasn’t.”
“I just need you to know. I lost you once before because I didn’t let you know. I won’t make that mistake again. Take from it whatever you want.”
He grabs my arm and he pulls me toward him. His face is so close I can smell his breath, the familiar taste of his lips. I fight myself to lean forward. I fight myself to feel those lips against my mouth. I want to make him want me again. “I would’ve done anything for you,” he says. “Our love made me believe we were bigger and stronger than anything that tried to keep us apart. I’m sorry, Lauren. I’m sorry I hurt you. I loved you. Man, I loved you. Different
from how I’ll ever love anyone else.” Then he takes my hands into his and squeezes. “You were the love of my life. I’m so sorry we didn’t make it. I’m so sorry for what happened to us.” And I know he means it because the regret that falls from his lips twists the words into a whisper.
I can barely breathe, and the tears are creeping down my face. The effort to pull away from him is bigger than both of us.
“You and Abby have fought long and hard. You should be happy. I want you both to finally be happy.” Then I force myself to say: “I’ll manage without you, Ryan. I promise. I did it once before.”
And he touches my cheek with the back of his hand, and I let the warmth of his fingers fool me into thinking what I’m saying is true. I’ll never manage without Ryan, but I love him too much to say otherwise.
CHAPTER THIRTY
RYAN
The drive back to Lauren’s car is a quiet one. She doesn’t wait for me to put the truck in park before she jumps out. She’s a vision in black and orange.
She trips over something on the way to her car, and a man with his son helps her to her feet. I should have gotten out, but my legs wouldn’t move. I watch the man search her eyes and appraise her, and I want to circle back and punch him.
I press on the gas a bit harder than I should, making the tires squeal, and I hightail it out of the parking lot, away from Lauren and everything I spent years trying to forget—the way she bounced when she walked, the way her lips pursed in a sulk when she was sad, how I felt when she whispered that she loved me. Normally I would snatch those three words from the sky. Today I let them go. I let her go. And it broke my heart to see the words trail off into nowhere.
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