Chapter 48
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
MICAH
Wind tore over my face, cold and brutal, but not as brutal as the blade I dug into my forearm. Still, neither thing was helping.
I knew this was coming. I thought I’d prepared myself for it.
I’d repeatedly told myself not to imagine it. I’d been so careful not to say the hopeful words out loud. I even would’ve been fine had she decided to get rid of it herself.
But seeing that much blood on my sheets this morning was a sight I never could’ve prepared myself for, as much as I’d tried to believe otherwise.
I hadn’t realized how quickly my empty future had filled itself in.
Dakota.
Then the baby.
Then nothing again.
I was a fool for ever allowing myself any amount of hope, for ever believing for a split second that I might be granted something so beautiful with her.
I was sitting on the cliff’s edge now, feet dangling over into the void, eyes staring out at the ocean but not seeing anything other than those red stains on my sheets.
It felt like all I ever did was come to this cliff.
So many times over the course of my life I’d been here, and it was only getting more frequent now.
I’d tied all my ghosts to this piece of the Earth where forest met ocean.
Haunting my own origin story.
Beyond the shoreline, the ocean stretched into a sheet of dull steel, restless enough to remind me it was alive, calm enough to hide what it was capable of swallowing.
Anything, everything. The pines behind me swayed with a sound that was almost like whispered conversation, sounds I’d never be able to untangle.
Needles drifted loose every so often, carried across the frosted ground before disappearing over the edge.
I found myself watching them longer than I should have, envious of how easily they surrendered themselves to the wind.
I’ll never escape this forest.
I’ll never escape my own labyrinth.
The wind twisted the smell of salt and pine together, stripping the warmth from my face, the cold becoming impossible to separate from the ache in my chest. Blood and ichor were dried on my arms, the gashes almost entirely healed, skin stitching itself back together invisibly.
In another life, I might’ve done it over and over, slicing myself open until my head was on straight and I held the reins again, but in this life, I knew I was too far gone.
I’d left Dakota when she was in the middle of something emotionally and physically devastating. Something she’d never been through before. She was probably scared.
But if I’d stayed, she’d see it on my face. So would Mason.
They’d both know.
They’d realize I’d wanted it, and I couldn’t survive that realization.
They probably knew anyway.
But it felt so much more real like this—once it was gone.
Below, the waves reached endlessly for the cliffs, only to fall back into themselves again in a foamy wash, bubbles rushing over darkness and roughness. There was something cruelly familiar about the constant rhythm of it. It was never ending.
Immortal.
It overwhelmed me sometimes, thinking about the unreachable end.
Forever is a long time.
I’m not sure I’m capable of that.
I turned my gaze outward again, searching the horizon for something I’d never find.
Sea and clouds met in a pale, colorless blur, dissolving into each other.
I was a fucking coward. That’d never been a question in my mind; I just hated seeing it displayed so plainly.
What could I fall back on once my strength faded?
How could I ever be around her without the control I so desperately needed?
I have to try.
I gave myself another few hours of sitting there, letting my heart sink like a stone, further and further into my stomach, dropping into the darkness of lost hope.
Then I stood up away from the edge, turning into the forest and making my way through those layered shadows.
My truck remained where I’d parked it, and I drove back to my house in silence.
Mason’s car was still parked out front, which meant Dakota was still here.
The confirmation was soothing to me. My house could still be a safe place for her, even if I was failing. I entered through the garage quietly, trying to listen for any noise coming from upstairs. Dakota and Mason were conversing about something in my bathroom, and I heard her sniffling.
I stood in the kitchen, staring at my useless hands, trying to work up some courage or something.
The rush of water echoed through the pipes as the upstairs toilet flushed.
My stomach lurched like I’d been punched.
It wasn’t like I’d believed there would be some miracle waiting for me when I came home. But the sound carried a kind of finality I hadn’t even considered.
A sharp ache climbed into my throat.
I left her.
While Dakota had endured this, I’d been sitting on a cliff convincing myself solitude was easier than visible grief. Now there wasn’t even the possibility of going back. No goodbye.
I pressed a hand against the kitchen counter, my fingers tightening around the edge until they hurt.
I couldn’t tell whether I wanted to scream or be sick.
My jaw clenched, my fingers curling against the marble, my stomach twisting. The ground seemed to shift beneath me, tipping me that much more off balance until it felt like I was barely clinging to the edge of the world.
Breathe. Fucking breathe.
It’s fine.
You’re fine.
Get it together.
But I couldn’t.
I slid down the cabinets until I was sitting on the floor, head in my hands, my throat closing. I’d tried so hard to tell myself not to want it, and stupidly thought I’d succeeded in crushing my own hopes before they could grow, but I was wrong. Even more wrong now.
But I didn’t have the right to feel upset about her decision because I hadn’t fucking been there.
I didn’t deserve a say. I didn’t deserve anything.
All I knew was that I had abandoned the woman I loved in one of the worst moments of her life, and in doing so, I’d robbed myself of the chance to mourn the child I’d been too frightened to stay for.
Tears stung my eyes and I couldn’t get a full breath in.
I heard footsteps, my head instantly whipping in the direction of the doorway. Mason appeared, then halted, probably shocked to see me sitting on the floor trying not to break down.
“Micah—”
“Stop.” I took his sight, his eyes blank before he got a chance to look at me very well. I didn’t want him to see me like this. His jaw flexed. “I don’t want to talk.”
“I know you—”
“You don’t know shit, Mason,” I said as I walked past him toward the stairs.
“She’s asleep. Don’t go in there,” Mason said over his shoulder, anger clear in his tone, his hands clenched into fists.
“She’s not asleep.”
“She’s trying to be,” he snapped, still not facing me.
It wouldn’t have made a difference, though.
He wouldn’t have been able to see me if he was.
Wouldn’t see the red around my eyes or the blood soaking my sleeves.
“And she doesn’t need you right now. She needs to rest. You don’t get to come back whenever you feel like it and start making all the decisions again. ”
I didn’t have anything to say to that, because he was right.
“If you want to be helpful, go to the fucking store and get stuff for her,” he added. “Don’t go up there.”
My feet carried me to the door without another word and, for the second time today, I fucking ran.
━━━━━
The week after Dakota’s miscarriage was miserable. It blurred into something I only experienced in sharp fragments, isolated moments lodging themselves into my veins until I bled. She’d eventually gone to Mason’s apartment on that night, and I hadn’t seen her since then.
Faculty meetings about changes for next semester came and went, emails accumulated in my inbox, and meetings over coffee about funding for my lab in the upcoming year somehow reached their conclusions without me remembering half of what I’d said.
More than once, someone asked if I was feeling alright.
Another colleague commented that I seemed distracted.
I answered each question the same way: with practiced composure and whatever excuse required the fewest words.
Something vague and professional, something that didn’t invite further questions.
They couldn’t have known I was stuck on a loop replaying that terrible day in my mind, or that no amount of work was enough to drown out the silence waiting for me every time I returned home.
I’d washed the sheets after Dakota left, and sometimes I wished I hadn’t.
But it almost didn’t matter, because no amount of scrubbing would erase the image from my mind. A miracle, reduced to nothing but bloodstains on cotton.
I was sitting on the cliff again now.
I’d come here every day since.
The control, the distance, all the things I needed to survive, had pushed her so far away from me that I could no longer touch her at all. It felt just as terrible as vulnerability did, and I understood now that I’d picked the wrong wound to position her blade over.
A twig snapped somewhere in the forest, and I turned over my shoulder.
The wind was strong, but not so strong that I couldn’t smell her.
My nerves tightened.
Dakota appeared at the edge of the clearing a few moments later, her eyes wide when she caught sight of me. She probably hadn’t expected me to actually be here. Her lips parted, mouth slightly open, her body frozen.
Then, before I could say a word, she turned and ran.
She bolted into the trees.
Like a deer darting away towards safety, slipping between pine trees, her boots heavy on the forest floor. I took off after her, the trees blurring past as we ran together through perhaps the most significant place on Earth to me. The first place I’d ever touched it.
Branches whipped past my face, sharp needles and rain tipped pine cones.
She was fast, but not faster than me.