Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Grady
The latch on my front door clicks shut, and it echoes in the empty cabin.
I lean my cane against the wall and stand in the dark for a moment, not moving, giving the room time to come into focus. Through the window, the water beyond the pines is black, and the only light is the pale smear of stars between the branches.
My knee throbs badly with a deep, grinding ache.
It starts at the kneecap and runs in both directions, down the shin and up into my hip joint.
The cramp from the locked position in the bedroom aggravated the tendons, or maybe the scar tissue around the pins, and every step across the hardwood adds to the pain.
I move through the cabin in the dark, limping into the kitchen to fill a glass with tap water. I drink, standing at the sink, three full glasses, registering somewhere in the back of my mind that I have no memory of drinking anything since the wine at dinner.
The cottage is very far away now, as are the conversations about joining the Wright Pack together, the discussions about how we’ll function as a family, and where we’ll live.
I carry the fourth glass of water into the office and drop onto the narrow couch with my bad leg stretched out, one hand pressed to my thigh above the knee.
Everything that happened today settles into me all at once, heavy as the walnut desk sitting three feet away in the thin starlight coming through the western window.
A proposal, I had joked, but Emily hadn’t wavered for a second. Leaning forward, I hook my cane around the leg of the padded footstool beneath it and drag it over to prop my bad leg up. The relief is immediate and infuriating in equal measure.
She put such thought into ensuring it was the perfect height, and I hate how much I need it. If not for this injury…
I pull my phone from my jacket pocket and turn it over in my hand. I unlock it, stare at Emily’s name in my message list, and lock it again.
What should I say?
‘I’m sorry I left?’
The three words are simple, but so inadequate. They don’t encompass all the confusing emotions that drove me from the cottage mere hours ago.
It wasn’t the embarrassment of sharing a bed with Leif and Jared, which I thought would be the sticking point. No, that had been…not beautiful, exactly, but primal and intoxicating, watching Emily take the other men with such need before she turned those desires on me.
For a moment, I had thought, this can work.
But then there had been immense pressure, and pain spiked up my leg, and confusion landslided into panic. And she was hurting, and I was hurting, and everything became a hazy mess.
I could see her horror, and I couldn’t be the person who made her ashamed of her biological function.
No, ‘I’m sorry I left’ doesn’t begin to brush the surface of my thoughts.
‘It wasn’t about you.’
No, that’s possibly the most useless sentence in the English language. I’ve edited enough manuscripts to recognize how, when a character says it wasn’t about you, it’s always about you. Everything is about you. That’s the whole problem.
I should have stayed to talk in person, but my head wasn’t in the right place. When Leif explained how Ruts could last for days, I had chosen the coward’s way out instead of sticking around listening to something I couldn’t physically join in on.
No, I can’t send a careless message that Emily will read when she comes back to her senses and misunderstands. She deserves better from me.
Struggling upright off the sofa, I hobble over to the desk, drag the footstool back over, and take a seat.
The legal pad is in the single drawer I’ve stocked, along with two pens and a box of paperclips I’ve never used and can’t explain why I keep around. I slide the pad onto the desk, uncap a pen, and write the only opening I can manage.
Emily.
Not dear Emily, though she is dear to me. I don’t want to start with how so many letters of endings begin.
I want you to know that what happened was not a reflection of how I feel about you or about what we’re building together…
I get three sentences in, stop, and read them back. They sound like a form letter I would have written to a difficult author whose manuscript I was passing on.
I cross them out.
The second attempt is simpler.
I panicked.
True.
I needed air.
True.
I should have told you before I left.
Also true.
I didn’t tell you because I couldn’t explain it, and I couldn’t explain it because I was overwhelmed and panicking and didn’t want to mess things up.
The next sentence flows without pause.
Then I panicked some more because Leif and Jared knew what to do without hesitating, and I didn’t understand. They fit in the moment, when I so clearly did not.
I pause and consider crossing it all out.
The words come across as though I’m blaming them for my ignorance instead of explaining myself.
It sounds jealous, though I wasn’t jealous.
The emotion I felt was closer to grief. A feeling when you see people who are designed for each other, and you understand, at the basest level, you will never be that for her, and you are not sure if it matters, and you are terrified because it does.
Ignorance has never sat well with me, and I assumed I understood, in theory at least, what was going to happen. And I had been right, at the beginning. But not right at all when the moment mattered.
More time should have gone into researching the physiological differences between our secondary genders. More questions should have been asked, though the right ones didn’t occur to me until the moment arrived.
I backtrack to before the Rut, writing about how much our Saturday dinners have come to mean to me, how much I enjoy when she pops over in the middle of the day with lunch, and how I hate my disability but love how she fusses over me without ever treating me as if my injury turned me into less of a person.
I flip to the second page. The light through the window has deepened from gray to black, and the stars between the pines have brightened. I write about how much it had meant to me for Leif to meet me at the airport, when my own family hadn’t even bothered to send a car.
Then I describe standing in this cabin for the first time, knowing Emily had a hand in building me a home without ever demanding more of me or trying to attach strings to the gift.
On the fourth page, my hand starts to ache where my fingers have tightened around the pen without my noticing. I pause to read back the last line I wrote.
I’m not sure how to explain how much leaving hurt, but staying would have hurt more.
I have not apologized once. I realize this sitting in the quiet of the cedar-scented office with my bad knee propped on a footstool Emily built for this purpose and four pages of handwriting spread across the desk she made for me to work at.
I haven’t apologized once, and the letter is four pages long, and I’m not finished.
The pad of paper runs out sometime in the middle of the next morning. I don’t notice until the pen scrapes across the cardboard backing and catches. Mild surprise ripples through me, the same way an empty coffee cup catches you off guard when you go for another sip.
I find the single ream of printer paper in the closet, still in its plastic wrapping, and I tear it open and carry the stack to the desk and keep going.
My phone buzzes from the sofa, but it’s out of reach, and I need to get these thoughts out. It lights up in my peripheral vision, the screen going bright, dark, and bright again.
I write about the first Saturday dinner at Emily’s cottage.
The way the rosemary hit me before I stepped through the door, layered over the warm, yeasty scent of fresh bread.
The way she stood at the stove with her back to us, her feet planted, a wooden spoon in one hand, and she welcomed me with a warm smile, as if we’d been doing this for years.
Next comes the evening Jared and I shared drinks on the back patio, the summer garden blooming around us. I felt so at ease I never wanted to leave.
As the light through the window turns a flat white, I flip to a new page.
Leif follows. Saturday Markets. Shared conversations. The ease of it all. Then the confusion and hurt when it suddenly ended.
I admit to allowing him to pull back, to not trying harder to find out why, to accepting the silence and my regret. And how easily it was all fixed with simple apologies in an airport elevator.
Finally, I turn to my family, both before university and during my most recent trip to Connecticut.
I write about the expectations, the disregard, and Caroline, trapped beneath the weight of her own family’s expectations.
I write about the guilt over how I could have saved her, but didn’t, because the cost was too high.
I forget to eat until my stomach cramps in demand and sends me into the kitchen to find crackers in the cabinet and a jar of peanut butter someone pre-stocked alongside some apples and two containers of yogurt.
I eat at the counter without sitting down, not tasting any of it, already turning the next sentence over in my head.
The pages are a complete mess of my rambling thoughts. Nothing concise enough to send in a text message or organized enough to give Emily in a letter.
So, when I return to the office, I start putting it in order, ripping pages to separate paragraphs where I jump between timelines and sorting them into chronological stacks, hoping that if I can straighten the tangled mess, it will pull my thoughts into alignment, too.
I fall asleep in the office chair, my head on the desk, and when I wake again, the light through the window is the pale gray of dusk or very early morning.
I have a stack of papers under my cheek and a crick in my neck that takes twenty minutes of slow, careful movement to loosen.
My knee locked during the night, the footstool having shifted while I slept, and I straighten it by degrees, bracing my palms on my thigh and waiting out the grinding until it releases.
The coffee cups accumulate on the corner of the desk. Three, then five, then seven, each one cold before I’ve finished it.
My laptop sits open and dark. At some point, I had started to transcribe my messy scribbles into a document.
As I wake it up and pull it closer, I realize, somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to write an apology or an explanation, and I’ve simply been writing about us.
Not just Emily, nor Jared and Leif, but me, too, a Grady written in third person on the page, a separate creature I’m watching from a distance, falling in love with a pack.
It’s messy. Everyone in this story is broken and imperfect. We stumble, we fall in love, but love isn’t a Band-Aid, and we hurt each other. We run away, we hide, we come back.
I pull the laptop closer, my fingers finding the keys once more, needing to know how the story ends.