Epilogue Left Behind #3
The flower bed around it has already begun to go leggy without her hands in it. Nobody's watered these in days.
My jaw comes loose on its hinges. I stare at those four white letters until they stop making sense and then start making a terrible new kind of sense, and the whole thing clicks into place all at once, cold and total.
She doesn't live here anymore.
She sold it. She's gone.
Where did she go — where did all of them go —
"She moved," I whisper into the phone.
"What?" Iris's voice pitches up. "What do you mean she moved? You're literally standing at her place—"
"I'm at her cottage, Iris." I hear how hollow I sound. "Seabriar. Right now. And there's a sign in the yard. It says SOLD."
The silence on the other end goes absolute. I hear her swallow, an audible little gulp, the sound of a woman realizing the gossip she was enjoying just turned into something with real weight.
"Cade," she says slowly, carefully, the way you'd talk to a man on a ledge. "Did your pack...did they move away without you?"
I have no words for her.
I stand on the porch of a sold and empty house with a dead phone number in my pocket and a truck full of my whole life behind me, and I have absolutely nothing to say.
Because Amber's voice comes back to me then, clear as the morning it was spoken. Cold and even and kind in the worst way.
If you want to sit down and discuss logistics like adults, that door's open. My cottage. You remember it.
She knew.
She knew this morning.
She stood in that tent in her wedding dress and told me the door was open at a house she'd already sold. She wanted me to come here.
She wanted me to drive all the way out to the lonely end of this gravel road, hat in hand, ready to grovel, and find a locked door and a SOLD sign and the ringing dark where a whole life used to be. She didn't need to scream at me or slap me or list my sins.
She just handed me an address and let the empty house say the rest.
She's gone. They're all gone.
Unreachable, untraceable, a pack of ghosts with a new gate and an ocean of NDAs between them and the likes of me, and there is not one single thing I can do about any of it.
"Cade?" Iris's voice is small now. "Hey. Are you okay?"
I open my mouth to answer her, and instead the tears come, hot and fast and silent, spilling over before I can stop them, tracking down a face I no longer recognize in the black reflection of that locked glass door.
I don't sob. I don't make a sound.
I just stand there and leak grief onto a stranger's porch, and the strangest part, the part I can't get past, is that I can't even feel sorry for myself. There's no room for self-pity in me.
I gave it all away.
I allowed every single piece of this.
I left her at an altar, five and a half years ago, because I was too much of a coward to stay. Now she has left me at a doorway, and there is a terrible, perfect symmetry to it that I'll be chewing on for the rest of my life.
She didn't do it out of cruelty. I understand that, even now. She did it because she finally learned the one lesson I spent years teaching her without meaning to: that you don't wait around, hoping, for a person who won't fight for you.
I taught her that with my own two feet, walking away from her once already. It only makes sense she'd graduate. The cruelest teachers make the finest students, I suppose, and I was a very good teacher of exactly the wrong thing. I gave her a master class in leaving, five and a half years long.
Tonight she handed in her final exam and passed with honors. I'm the one left standing in the cold, reading the grade off a real estate sign.
The fortune-teller's voice hums up through all of it, soft and certain, from a lifetime ago this afternoon. Knot in the Wedding Cards.
A knot dealt into a hand I threw away. A wedding that was in the cards the whole time, for four people, and never once for me — because I read the danger and ran from it, the way I've run from every good thing I was ever lucky enough to be handed.
I let fear make every decision I ever made, and fear made this one too. Now the future I truly believed was just going to sit there waiting for me has slipped clean through my fingers while I stood around being afraid to hold it.
I have to accept it now.
That's the only thing left to do. Stand here in the cold, in the dark, on the porch of a house that was never mine. Accept that this is the shape my life takes now, and that I built every wall of it myself.
The marsh goes on whispering behind the house, indifferent.
A car passes way out on the main road, headlights sweeping and gone. The stars don't care.
The town at my back has already moved on to its next piece of gossip, and the four people who were briefly, impossibly, almost my whole future are asleep tonight under a roof I'll never see, in a life I'll only ever hear about secondhand, months late and half wrong.
I lower myself onto the cold top step of a house that isn't hers anymore. I put my head in my hands.
I let the full weight of it settle.
It's truly a heavy burden to bear...and this is truly the cards that reflect my end.