18. Noah
Chapter eighteen
Noah
B laze is curled against me, warm and solid, his head tucked against my side like he knows I need something to hold onto. I keep my hand buried in his fur, but it’s not really the warmth or comfort I’m after. It’s her.
Her scent’s still on him, Vanilla and a hint of cinnamon clinging to his coat. It lingers softly without trying, and I figure she must have hugged Blaze before sending him over a few hours earlier. Parker’s syrupy shampoo is layered underneath, sticky with sunlight, laughter, and innocence.
It’s woven into the fabric of my flannel shirt, into the ache riding my chest like a weight I can’t shake loose.
God, I miss them, and they’re on my property.
I close my eyes and lean my head back against the couch. The fire crackles low, the logs split and settle, but everything inside me feels louder than that. As though my own thoughts are trying to crawl their way out of my skin and swallow me whole.
If I need more convincing that she’s holding back now and letting go, it will be the fact that she didn’t look at me when she left the field today.
That hurts more than anything she could’ve said.
I drag my hand down my face, palm rough against the stubble on my jaw, and I try to tell myself that the way she’s letting go doesn’t make sense. No fight. No storm. Just silence and distance.
But deep down, I know why.
I left her with nothing to hold onto.
When she asked what was going on between us, I could’ve told her the truth. About Josie. About the fear that grips my spine every time I start to feel again. About the guilt that still claws at me like a goddamn ghost.
Instead, I shut down because I was afraid she would leave.
Thinking back now, I know I was wrong.
I should’ve said something. Last night. This morning. Hell, any of the million chances I had between pulling her against me and watching her get dressed like it hadn’t meant the world to me. But my mouth dried up. My body knew how to touch her, but my mind… it still belongs to ghosts.
And she felt it.
I know she senses the shift in my mood after making love, the wall I throw up, how I retreat behind that quiet, guarded part of me that I’ve kept locked up since Josie.
She didn’t press and just left with Parker, holding his hand and her own heart in check like she’d already made peace with losing me.
Maybe some part of me wanted her to fight harder, to prove she was worth the risk of letting Josie go. But I should’ve known—Kate knows her value. She’d never beg a man to see it.
I grip Blaze tighter. His collar digs into my forearm, but I don’t let go.
When Parker hugged me at the end of the game, I thought I was holding it together. I thought I could manage that. After all, it’s just a kid’s hug, something easy. But then he looked up at Kate and asked if they could come home with me.
He said home .
And she said no .
There’s no hesitation, and she sounds like she’s already decided that was a boundary she couldn’t afford to blur. She gave me exactly what I thought I wanted. Distance. But now, I realize I don’t want it.
I stare at the flames until my vision blurs. My chest feels too tight, like there’s not enough air in this house or in my lungs. My throat stings. I don’t cry, not really. But something in me feels close to breaking. A thread pulled too tight for too long.
I whisper her name. Just once.
“Kate.”
That name comes with a realization that I don’t want to let her go. I want to chase her. I want to tell her I feel like I’ve been holding my breath since the moment she touched me.
That when she laughs, it knocks the dust off every part of me I thought was dead.
That when she walked away last night, she took something I didn’t know I’d given her.
I shift Blaze off my lap, and he lets out a low, unsure whine, his eyes tracking me like he knows something cracked open in here. He doesn’t move far. Just watches.
My legs feel like they don’t belong to me as I push up from the couch. I’ve sat in this ache so long it’s fused to my bones—and now I don’t know how to move without it.
I turn left down the hallway. Past vacant rooms, past the parts of me I let rot behind closed doors.
Then I stop in front of the room that I only open once a year, on Josie’s anniversary. Today will be the first time I’m opening the door outside that day.
The doorknob sticks when I try to open it, like it always does. The wood’s swollen, warped by time and the kind of grief that seeps in slowly like rot. When it gives, the sound it makes is almost reluctant, like the house itself is asking you sure?
The air is still. Cold. Preserved.
It feels like stepping into a memory that never finished forming; in a sense, it is because it’s the nursery we never finished setting up.
It’s half a room, half a ghost. One wall is painted that soft sage Josie loved; she said it looked like spring. Like something green could still grow even after the frost.
The rest is untouched.
Boxes stacked in the corner, sealed shut like they’re keeping something dangerous in. A tiny mobile, unopened. Crib parts leaning haphazardly against the wall, untouched for twenty years.
The rocking chair she found at a secondhand store—only ever used once, the day we brought it home—sits in the far corner, turned, like someone just stepped out of it.
I drop to my knees before I even realize I’m falling.
My palms hit the rug, and the smell hits me next; dust and wood and the faintest trace of the lavender detergent Josie used on everything baby-related. My lungs fold in on themselves. The air feels sharp, like breathing through broken glass.
And then I break.
Just the sound of something giving out inside me. Quiet. Hollow.
It’s the kind of collapse no one hears until they walk into the wreckage.
My chest caves, slow, and then all at once, something bone-deep is tearing loose. The sob that comes out of me isn’t clean or cinematic; it’s the raw sound a man makes when he’s out of places to bury his pain.
I press my forehead to the rug and fist the fibers as if they’ll hold me steady. As if I can claw my way back in time.
Back before the silence in that sterile delivery room.
Before I had to learn what it means to hold someone while they die with their arms around your future.
It comes out of me in waves. Ugly. Loud. Years of silence rupturing into sound.
I don’t know how long I cried.
But it’s long enough for Blaze to edge in beside me, pressing his body against my ribs like he’s trying to carry the weight for me. His nose bumps under my arm, nudging until my hand finds his fur and grips.
I bury my face into the side of his neck. His coat still smells like Kate, now combined with something warm and alive. It hurts.
God, it hurts because it smells like Parker. Like Kate. Like the life I never thought I’d be brave enough to want again.
When the sobs slow, still jagged, still sharp, but not constant. I whisper to Blaze hoarsely and quietly, “Do you think she’d forgive me?”
Blaze stops nudging against me. His tail taps once against the floor, then stops again.
“Josie,” I say, voice splintered. “Do you think she’d forgive me… for moving on? For wanting something more than the ache?”
I don’t know who I’m asking. Him. The walls. Her. Myself.
I was eighteen when I lost her. Just a kid with a full ride and a mouth full of promises I didn’t get to keep. I gave it all up for her, for the baby. And now I’m thirty-eight.
Thirty-fucking-eight.
And all I have to show for it is this house, this broken-down room full of dreams that never got to breathe, and a heart that starts beating like it belongs to someone else every time Kate walks into the room.
I bury my face in Blaze’s fur, shaking with the kind of cry that leaves me empty and untouched, “I’m sorry,” I whisper into the stillness.
I don’t know if I’m talking to Blaze or Josie, or the part of me I lost back then.
“I didn’t mean to leave you behind. I never could.” Now, I’m definitely talking to her.
My voice cracks, splinters against the quiet, my lungs burning. “But she’s here, Josie. And I see her… in the kitchen. On the porch swing. In every damn sunrise, I thought I’d stopped noticing.”
I drag in a breath, thick with dust and sage paint that never made it past one wall. “She makes me want things I told myself I couldn’t want again. And I know that’s not fair. I know it.”
My hands tremble as I press them flat to the floor. The rug’s worn, threads curling from the years I’ve avoided this place. My chest still heaves, but the storm’s easing now. What’s left is quieter. Still broken. Still aching. But clearer, too.
I lift my head, eyes catching the mobile sticking out of its box, tucked behind the crib. Little wooden stars. Josie picked it up because it played the lullaby her mom used to hum.
I pick it up and set it in my lap.
“I hope you’ll forgive me,” I say softly, brushing dust off the plastic window. “For wanting more. For needing more. Because I think if I don’t… if I let her go… I’ll drown in this house. In the silence. In the damn what-ifs.”
Blaze shifts beside me, resting his head on my thigh like a weight and a blessing. I thread my fingers through his fur, and something shifts.
The ache doesn’t go away, but it hardens into something else. A pull. Not guilt. Not grief.
Hope.
I place the box gently on the floor and stand slowly, like I’m testing new legs after a long fall. My joints crack. My hands feel too big. But my heart? It’s moving. For the first time in a long time, it’s not just remembering; it’s reaching.
I turn toward the hallway.
Toward the front door.
Toward her.
I don’t know what I’ll say. But I know I have to try. Because maybe losing Josie wasn’t my fault. But losing Kate would be.
And I don’t think I can survive watching her walk away again, knowing I didn’t fight.
So, I wipe my face on my sleeve. Open the door. And step into the night.
Because some things are worth chasing, especially the ones that scare the hell out of you.