Chapter Twenty-Seven
Later, Hannah would swear there was something off from the moment she returned to Ethan’s home that afternoon. The air was thicker, or maybe thinner—either way, it had changed. The sunlight streaming through the kitchen windows seemed dimmer, the house colder.
“Ethan?”
She set her bag down on the kitchen table and made her way through the house towards the bedroom at the back. She didn’t toe off her shoes like she usually would, and later she would wonder if it was a kind of premonition, like knowing she shouldn’t get too comfortable. The door to the bedroom was open. Ethan stood in front of the closet, staring at the row of her sundresses hanging alongside his button-downs.
“Ethan?”
He turned to her, his jaw tense and skin ashen, and she knew. Her heart sank into her stomach, a strange tingly feeling climbing up the nape of her neck, like when she’d watch a scary movie and the music would change, her body responding to information she had yet to receive but knew was coming.
“What happened?”
she asked, her mouth dry.
He didn’t respond at first, his eyes skittering away from hers as though the answer to her question might be found in the bed they’d shared for the last several weeks.
“Just say it,” she said.
“I don’t think I can do this.”
She’d known it was coming and yet the words still landed like a blow. Or maybe more like shattering glass, a priceless vase knocked off its ledge and smashing at their feet, a gulf of brittle shards forming between them.
“I thought I could handle it. Fix it. But I just keep making it worse.”
Hannah held up her hand, closing her eyes. Mercifully, he stopped talking. She didn’t need to hear his reasons why she wasn’t worth the circus their lives had become. Hadn’t she always known she wouldn’t be?
“Say it,”
she repeated.
“I think it’s better if we end things.”
Another breath in and out, another moment to let those shards of glass sink into her skin before she began the awful process of extracting them—and him—from her life.
She moved to the closet, still open, her sunny yellows and purples next to his muted olives and taupes. As if she needed even more evidence that they didn’t fit together.
One by one she removed the dresses from their hangers, draping them over her arm as she worked, slow and steady so her fingers wouldn’t shake. Methodical. If she could keep this unemotional, just another item on the to-do list, another step and then another and another, then she’d be back in New York, back in her lonely little apartment before her brain would have time to catch up with her heart. She could be back in her real life before she had time to mourn the ending of this fantasy.
But what a fantasy it had been.
“Say something,”
he said, his tone pleading.
“I think I left my bag in the guest room.”
She glanced around the bedroom, eyes skimming over the rumpled sheets, the little pile of books on the bedside table on her side of the bed, frozen moments of a life that didn’t belong to her.
“Don’t you want to know why?”
he asked, and there was that glass again, though this time it was fashioned into little jagged darts lining his words as they sped across the room towards her.
Why was she so tired all of a sudden?
Focus on the list. Get your clothes, don’t forget your things in the bathroom, pack a bag and call a car. Or take a train? Maybe call Micah and let him sort it out, so long as he does so quickly.
“My business is falling apart. It’s only a matter of time before my family is caught in the crossfire,”
he said. “The way I feel about you hasn’t changed, but—”
“But it has, Ethan. Less than a week ago you sat on that bed,”
she jabbed a finger at the offending furniture, “and said we’d figure it out together. You said you wanted to marry—”
The words broke off as she swallowed the sob climbing up her throat.
Taking her armful of dresses, she marched down the hall to the guest room she hadn’t slept in since her first few days in Aster Bay, her mostly empty suitcase open on the bed where she’d left it.
Focus on the list.
Ethan appeared in the doorway, his face contorted in pain. Good, she thought. I hope it hurts.
“I meant everything I ever said to you,” he said.
She loosed a bitter laugh as she slammed the dresses into the suitcase and pushed past him to gather her creams and lotions from the bathroom. “I’m sure you meant it in the moment.”
Her hairbrush next to his comb, her shampoo on the little ledge next to his woodsy body wash. She hesitated as she reached for her mouthwash, her cool mint beside his wintergreen, then stormed back to the guest room.
Keep moving.
“In a few months when things calm down—”
She turned on him. “Don’t. This is my life, Ethan. It’s messy and chaotic and I—”
I would have given it all up for you.
But she hadn’t. Maybe if she had, this wouldn’t be happening.
Or maybe it would have happened anyway, and then you’d really have nothing.
She squeezed her eyes shut, unable to see the hurt on his face without either becoming completely enraged or falling apart herself, and neither seemed like the right choice. His words from the other night in his backyard came back to her. She couldn’t choose him, not when he was clearly unwilling to choose her, but she could do one better.
Choose yourself.
“I’m standing in the middle of a storm, and I thought you wanted to stand in it with me. Storms don’t last forever, Ethan. They don’t. But if you can’t stand in the chaos with me now, then you don’t deserve to stand with me when it’s calm.”
When she opened her eyes, the devastation in his was more than she could bear.
“I wanted to,”
he said softly. “I wanted to be that guy for you.”
“Be that guy for yourself.”
She dashed away the tear slipping down her cheek. When had she started crying? “You think no one can handle all the parts of you, but you don’t even give anyone a chance to. You think you’re fixing things or protecting people but you’re just hiding—and, trust me, I know hiding.”
“What am I hiding from?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Ethan. But I hope you figure it out.”
She shoved the last of her things into the suitcase, zipping it closed. “I’ll call a car from the vineyard. Please don’t follow me.”