Chapter Twenty #2
By the fourth call, my fingers hurt around the phone.
The ringing became unbearable as every unanswered second stripped away another piece of pride I was trying to keep together in front of my daughter.
Each time, his voicemail came on with the same cold, mechanical message, over and over, while the man who had promised to be here remained unreachable.
He did not come.
He fucking did not come.
The truth hit hard. It cut through me with humiliation sharp enough to turn the warmth of the café cruel.
Across from me, Helena kept trying to act normal, picking at her fries with a seriousness that broke my heart.
She knew something was wrong. She did not understand it yet, but she knew enough to hide her disappointment badly, and that was the part that made anger rise in me.
He had promised.
He had looked at me with those ruined eyes and spoken with that rough certainty of his, the sort of certainty that made dangerous words sound sacred. And I had believed him again.
God, I had actually believed him.
Stupid.
Foolish. Pathetic, perhaps.
Once again, I had looked at Hayden Stone and mistaken intensity for truth. His voice had cracked in the right places. His hands had known how to hold pain and tenderness together. Helena loved him, and he softened every time she said his name, so I let myself believe he had become safe.
Once a liar, always a liar.
This time, the betrayal cut deeper because I was not the only one left sitting with it.
Had it been just me, alone with my pride peeling away through every unanswered call, I might have swallowed it.
I might have folded it into the long private list of wounds Hayden had already given me and carried on the way I always did.
But Helena had been there.
Helena had asked for him in that hopeful little voice.
She kept looking at the door every time it opened, asking when he was coming, how late he would be, and whether he had forgotten us.
And I had sat across from her with my own hope turning sour in my mouth, forcing myself to smile while the truth became harder and uglier to ignore.
I had trusted him again.
Fuck, I had trusted him again.
After leaving Helena with Mrs. Graham, after kissing her forehead and giving her some soft excuse I hated the second it left my mouth, I drove straight to his apartment.
I did not stop to think. I did not slow down long enough to decide whether anger or fear was behind the wheel.
I only drove through wet, darkening streets while every thought inside me sharpened into something meaner.
The city looked beautiful in that distant, useless way cities sometimes did when your own life was coming apart.
All reflection, rain, winter light. Inside me, there was nothing beautiful.
Only the old, familiar rage of being made to wait for a man who had once already taught me how much damage silence could do.
When I got there, he was not home.
That nearly undid me. If he had been inside, even hiding behind a locked door, I could have aimed my anger at him.
I could have knocked. Shouted. Demanded answers. Instead, the apartment gave me nothing. The windows were dark. The stillness felt wrong.
The university was still on break. He was not at the café. He was not answering his phone. His apartment sat empty in front of me.
So where the hell was he?
Where had he gone? Why today, after everything we had dragged into the light, after all that dangerous hope I had hated myself for feeling? Why after promising Helena, after promising me, did he choose this one day to vanish?
I stood in the cold with my phone clenched in my hand while rain settled into my hair and coat.
For one terrible moment, panic rose so fast it almost knocked the breath out of me.
Disappointment, humiliation, even heartbreak—I knew how to survive those if I had to.
This was different. This was the first edge of another silence, large enough to swallow everything I had fought to rebuild.
And if Hayden broke me again now, after I had been foolish enough to believe him, I did not know what would be left worth saving.
A week passed.
Then a few more days slipped into it, cold and ordinary in a way that felt almost cruel. Winter break ended.
Midyear exams began. Still, there was no sign of him.
His silence gave me nothing to hold on. His silence gave me nothing to work with. He had disappeared completely, leaving only absence where a message, an explanation, or even a late arrival should have been.
Giselle asked about him first.
She noticed the way I startled whenever my phone lit up, then went still again when it was not him.
For days, she watched without saying much.
When she finally asked, I did not deny anything.
I did not have the energy to pretend I was fine or act as if Hayden’s disappearance had not put a blade through the middle of me.
One afternoon in my office, she set her coffee down, looked at me with that calm gaze of hers, and asked, “Have you heard from him?”
I said, “No.”
Giselle lowered her coffee slowly, her eyes staying on me with the kind of care that made it impossible to hide. “You haven’t heard from him.”
“Nothing.”
Her mouth tightened. “Edwina.”
A humorless laugh slipped out of me. “He disappeared, Giselle. After promising Helena he would come. After promising me.”
Her expression shifted, and I pressed my fingers against the edge of my desk before the old humiliation could rise any higher in my throat. “Hayden has always been good at leaving wreckage behind and letting silence do the dirty work for him.”
Giselle stayed quiet for a moment. Then her voice softened. “How is Helena? Does she ask about him?”
That was the part I could barely say without wanting to break something.
“She asks about him every day.”
“What do you tell her?”
“Whatever I can manage without making him sound like the bastard I’m starting to believe he is.”
The words came out sharper than I intended, but I left them where they were. I had spent enough time making his absence easier to swallow, enough time trying to explain him in ways that did not make me feel stupid for believing him.
Helena asked because children always did.
They named the things adults buried under pride, fear, and shame, and the innocence of it made the wound worse.
She would look up from her toys, from Snowy, from whatever serious little task had captured her that day, and ask in that trusting voice, “Is Uncle Hayden coming today?” or “Why isn’t Uncle Hayden answering? ”
Once, sitting on the living room floor with Snowy in her lap, she looked at me and asked, “Did he stop liking us?”
That question stayed under my skin.
I knelt beside her, smoothed her hair back from her face, and gave her the softest answer I could bear. He was busy. Adults were complicated sometimes. This had nothing to do with her. Each word sounded weaker as it left me, each reassurance turning sour before it even reached her.
She missed him. That was the awful truth of it.
Helena missed her Uncle Hayden with the open ache children carried when someone became part of their world and vanished without warning.
Watching that absence settle into her days did something ugly to me.
She had let him in so easily, trusted him with the simple faith children gave before life taught them better.
And he had repaid her with the one thing he seemed to know how to give best.
Silence.
Still, I could not reach him. The calls became humiliating. The texts sat unanswered. Waiting stopped feeling hopeful and began to feel too close to grief.
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?