Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
LILY
I haven’t moved from this spot on my bedroom floor for hours. The sun has been creeping across my carpet, marking time with shifting light, while I sit here in the wreckage of a life I thought I’d buried. A ghost among the ghosts I thought I left behind.
Mom has called four times so far, and Cassidy’s texts have gone from concerned to worried. Her last one threatened to come over if I don’t answer. I should care. I need to move. I should be doing anything but sitting here drowning in memories.
The sun fades. Amber turns to deep gold, then the bruised purple of approaching night. Normally, I love this time of day. The hush before night settles, when everything turns soft and quiet. But tonight, the silence feels like it’s going to choke me.
The box still sits open beside me, its contents scattered across the carpet. I’ve been reading through everything again. The little notes we passed during school, his notes in the margins of his book, and the letter I found tucked inside it. The one he never sent to me.
I smooth out the page one more time, my lips moving with each word.
Some people are born knowing they belong to the world.
Others spend their whole lives trying to earn a place in it.
And some of us … some of us learn too young that no matter how hard we fight, the world will never make room.
So, we steal places where we can. In books.
In borrowed beds. In moments that were never meant to last. And we tell ourselves it’s enough, even though we know it isn’t.
And then there’s you.
There’s a drop of ink, a smudge, like he hesitated before writing the next part. My fingers trace the mark, feeling the slight depression where his pen pressed too hard.
You with your ridiculous words, and your laugh that always catches me off guard. You, who never asks for things I can’t say, but somehow hears them anyway. You, who walked into my life like the brightest light, and made me want to believe in things I know better than to trust.
If there was ever a word for you, it would be something untouchable. Something that slips through your fingers, but leaves warmth behind.
I knew from the start that you were borrowed time. That I could never keep you. And still, I wanted.
The ink is smudged in places, as if he dragged his thumb over the words after writing them. I never got to ask. By the time I found it, he was out of my reach.
My throat closes around the ache that spreads downward through my chest and into my stomach. I remember finding this note. I’d been packing everything of his away, and it fell out. I read it in the bathroom, my back pressed against the cold tile, tears streaming down my face.
I read the words again until the letters blur and my throat feels too tight. I can’t decide if I want to scream or crumple the paper in my fist or press it to my heart and never let go.
I thought he just liked the way words fit together, that he chose them for how they sounded, for the poetry of them. The way some people collect stamps or pressed flowers, just another beautiful thing to possess for a moment before it faded.
I never realized they were pieces of him. Pieces of us.
And I never knew that even then, when I thought I was just a girl sitting beside a boy who loved words, he was already telling me goodbye.
My phone buzzes again with Cassidy’s name lighting up the screen, along with a string of messages I can’t bring myself to read. She’s probably already on her way, ready to break down the door if I don’t answer soon.
But right now, I can’t face her questions or the look in her eyes that says she knew this would happen eventually.
I need to move. I need to breathe. I need to get out of here.
Pushing to my feet, I grab my coat, leave the apartment, and walk down to the building’s entrance.
The evening air wraps around me, cool and damp with the promise of rain.
My hands burrow deeper into my jacket pockets while my feet pick a direction without thought.
It doesn’t matter where I go as long as it’s away from that scrap of paper, the ghost of who I used to be, and the impossible news that Ronan Oliver is back in town.
Except it’s not impossible because it’s real.
My legs carry me down familiar sidewalks, past storefronts where everything looks exactly the same as it did yesterday, as it did last week, as it did years ago when my world fell apart.
The sameness should be comforting, but it isn’t.
How dare the world continue unchanged when everything inside me is screaming?
Main Street is winding down with the bakery closing up, its warm light spilling onto the sidewalk.
Old Mr. Wilson is sweeping outside his hardware store, the same way he has every evening for as long as I’ve been alive.
A few teens linger outside the movie theater, their laughter loud in the quiet street, probably planning which party to crash or which parking lot to hang out in until someone chases them off.
Then I see him.
At first, my brain refuses to process what my eyes are telling me.
It’s just a man walking with his head down, hands tucked into his hoodie pockets.
Someone I almost recognize, someone whose movements tug at something deep in my bones, a cellular memory that recognizes him long before my conscious mind catches up.
The set of his shoulders, the way he walks, the distance he keeps from the world around him as he moves along the sidewalk.
Dark hair flops forward over his forehead. Tattoos wrap his throat and disappear beneath the collar. That’s new. The ink covering skin that used to be unmarked except for scars he’d never explain. My eyes catch on the designs, trying to make sense of them from this distance.
Then he lifts his head.
And the world stops breathing.
My heart slams against my ribs. Once. Twice. The air turns thick and hard to pull into my lungs. My vision narrows until all I can see is him, backlit by a streetlamp. He looks nothing like the boy from my memories, but I recognize him all the same.
He’s broader than I remember. Harder looking, if that’s even possible, with shoulders that carry muscle, instead of the lean wiriness of someone who survived on too little food. This man is carved from stone instead of drawn in sharp lines.
But the eyes. God, those eyes. I know them better than I know my own name.
Not possible. It’s not possible.
Except it is. It’s him.
Ronan.
The world tilts sideways. My stomach drops. Years collapse between one breath and the next.
His steps falter. His shoulders lock. Something flickers across his face, gone too fast to read before the mask slams down—that careful blankness I remember too well. The one that says, I’m not here.
Everything drops into silence. The teenagers’ laughter fades. The sound of traffic dulls. Even the air feels thinner, as though all the oxygen has been sucked out of the space between us. My pulse hammers in my ears, each beat a countdown to something I’m not ready for.
I should turn around and walk away. I should do anything but stand here while my heart tries to escape from my chest. Instead, I step off the path.
The logical part of my brain, the part that survived college, and building a career, and learning how to exist without him, screams at me to stop. To leave this alone, and protect myself from whatever fresh damage this is going to cause.
But my body doesn’t listen, and my feet carry me forward—eighteen again, and still believing I can reach him if I just try hard enough.
Cars pass between us, masking him from sight for a second each time, and some distant part of me notes that I should look before I cross, and check for traffic.
But I don’t stop moving, because there’s another part of me that’s scared he’ll disappear during one of those seconds when I can’t see him.
His jaw tightens as I get closer, but he stays where he is. The muscle there jumps—an old tell, one I used to catalog.
Jaw tightens when he’s fighting to stay in control.
Fingers clench when he’s overwhelmed.
Eyes dart to exits when he needs to run.
I stop when there’s three feet of space between us. Close enough to see the changes prison has carved into him, and far enough that I can’t give in to the desperate urge to reach out and confirm he’s real.
Words rise up in my throat. Questions. Accusations. All the things I never got to say. Why he pushed me away, why he didn’t fight, why he gave up.
Nothing comes out when I open my mouth. No sound. Just air and the ghost of his name.
He doesn’t move. Maybe he’s hoping I’ll walk past and pretend I haven’t seen him, so he can go back to whatever life he’s made for himself since being released.
But it’s too late for that.
“Lily.” His voice is rougher than I remember. Deeper. Gravel and smoke turned into sound.
At the sound of my name in his mouth, something inside me cracks wide open, and splits down the middle. I try to speak, but nothing comes out, just a wounded sound that doesn’t belong to any language I know.
What do you say to someone who broke your heart? Someone who took pieces of you with them when they left and never gave them back?
A car passes by too close, horn blaring and he flinches.
A slight move, almost hidden. It’s the kind of reaction most people wouldn’t notice.
But I see it. I’m still watching him the same way I used to—noting every micro expression, every shift of muscle, every tell that might give me access to what he’s thinking.
“You’re back.” My voice is a stranger’s. Thin, tight, and wrong.
The words are stupid. Of course he’s back. He’s standing right here in front of me. But I can’t seem to access any of the dozen speeches I’ve rehearsed over the years. Angry speeches, sad ones, the ones where I’m cool and collected and show him exactly how well I’ve done without him.
His eyes shift away, finding something over my shoulder. The muscle in his jaw jumps again.
The silence between us is heavy enough to drown in. He used to be fluent in silence. He could say more in a glance than most people could with a thousand words. I used to understand it. Now he’s a language I’ve forgotten how to speak.
“Why?” The word escapes before I can stop it. It sounds raw, torn straight from my heart, bleeding all over the space between us.
Why are you back? Why now?
The muscle in his jaw ticks again. His fingers flex. His weight shifts. For a second, I think he might actually speak. His lips part. His chest expands with an inhale.
Then nothing.
“Where are you staying?” I don’t know why I ask.
His throat moves as he swallows. “Cedar Street.”
Cedar Street? That part of town is filled with houses that cost more than my yearly income. Historic homes with yards that get professionally landscaped.
It doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense.
A car door slams somewhere. Someone calls goodnight to Mr. Wilson. The world keeps turning, oblivious to the way I’m standing here on the sidewalk, drowning in all the things I want to say.
His stance is too stiff. He’s coiled, waiting for something to snap, ready to run. But he doesn’t. He remains where he is, not quite looking at me, while the space between us fills with ghosts.
A group of teenagers pass by, their laughter too loud. He takes a step back, and panic flares hot in my chest. He’s leaving. He’s going to disappear.
Again.
“Don’t!” The word rips out of me before I can shove it back down.
His eyes snap to mine. And for one single, splintered second, I see him. The boy who used to read like breathing. The one who carried words like armor, and traced poetry into my skin with his fingertips. Then it’s gone. Replaced with something colder.
He turns and walks away … and I let him.
I stand there, frozen, watching until he disappears around the corner. Until my eyes burn from not blinking. Until my legs stop threatening to give out beneath me.
I don’t remember the walk home, but my apartment feels smaller than it should when I walk in. My phone buzzes. It’ll be Cassidy or mom.
I let it ring.