Chapter 55 Annalise #2
Then he looks down at the wooden porch like he still wants to hide.
My hands curl at my sides. “Surprise,” I whisper.
He blinks again, clearing his vision, before his chin slowly lifts. “Annie, I—”
I cut him off by pushing through the door. “So, this is it, huh? Where you went? What you abandoned me for?”
My gaze sweeps the small, cluttered living room. The cabin can’t be more than a thousand square feet, yet every inch feels heavy with the life he’s been building without me.
The couch is pushed awkwardly to the side, cushions worn and slouched.
There’s a workbench wedged against the front window, bathed in natural light, littered with clamps, chisels, strips of rosewood and maple.
Half-finished guitar bodies lean against the wall like sleeping ghosts, and a soldering iron rests beside a coiled cord.
A cracked coffee mug holds picks and nails. Sketches are pinned to the wall with thumbtacks that showcase blueprints, wiring diagrams, and fretboard designs. It smells like varnish and pine.
This isn’t a living room.
It’s a refuge. A workshop.
A war zone.
“It’s nice,” I murmur, panning back to him. “Cozy. I’m happy for you.”
His hand grips the doorframe, every muscle stretched tight, every vein dilating. With his back facing me, he stares out at the silent street.
Toaster races over, winding around my ankles, his soft fur a small antidote to this wound of sadness hellbent on taking me down.
I crouch to pet him. The only sweetness buried in the rubble.
“I’m sorry,” Chase says, barely a breath, hardly loud enough to hear.
His words only fuel my fire.
I lift to a stand, heart beating like a conga. “That’s not good enough. It will never be good enough.”
“I know.” Exhaling a long breath, he finally pivots, wedges his shoulder against the frame. “You weren’t supposed to find me.”
“I’m well aware,” I bite out.
“I didn’t want you to see me like this.”
“Like what? A coward?” I can’t let go of this anger. I’m choking on it. Suffocating. “Too bad. Tag told me where you were. And if you thought for a second I wouldn’t burn the whole world down looking for you, then you don’t know me at all.”
His jaw tightens as he stares at me from across the room.
I chomp down on my lip, holding back the emotional dam. “I have to say, it kills me you wouldn’t do the same.”
Breathing heavily, he closes his eyes as the door thunks shut. “You don’t understand.”
“Of course I don’t. I don’t understand any of this. How you could vanish into the night without a goodbye. How you could leave us all stranded in Vegas with no answers, no explanation. How you could leave me. I thought we were…” My words get clogged.
He takes a slow step forward. “We were everything you thought we were.”
“Liar.”
“No.” Another step. “We were. We are. Nothing has changed for me—not the way I feel about you, the way your songs and your voice have followed me around for eight torturous months like a ghost I can’t shake.
I hear you in every awful fucking silence.
I feel you in every sunset I don’t deserve.
In every moon, every midnight. There’s only you. ”
“Bullshit!” Tears burst from my eyes, hot and wild, as I slash a hand through the air, cutting his words in half.
“Bullshit, Chase. If you loved me, you would have stayed. Fought. But all you gave me were empty promises and this broken fucking heart that feels too heavy to carry around most days. You abandoned me. Betrayed me. Even now, you wish you never saw me again. That I never found you. I see it in your eyes.”
He visibly flinches, as if I reached across the room and slapped him. “I never wished that,” he murmurs. “I want to see you more than anything in this world.”
“Prove it.”
His eyes burn, locked on mine, but there’s something fractured behind them, something unspoken. He opens his mouth like he’s going to say more, then clamps it shut.
“You talk about ghosts?” I continue, fighting through the misery. “I became one. And now you want to stand here and tell me you still love me like that makes this okay?”
His face crumples as he takes another step forward. “I wanted to tell you. Every goddamn day, I wanted to call. To explain. But I couldn’t find the words that wouldn’t break you.”
“So break me,” I demand. “Tear me apart. Rip out my heart and stomp on it, because at least then I wouldn’t be walking around with this hollow, useless thing rotting in my chest where our story—our future—used to be.”
“Annie…” He moves toward me, gait intensifying.
But then he stumbles.
Not on something small. Not on a loose shoe or some stray cord.
A whole-ass coffee table right in his path.
His shin slams into it hard, and he grunts, catching himself on the wall.
Something cold licks down my spine.
He doesn’t curse. Doesn’t laugh it off. Doesn’t even look at the table like it betrayed him.
He just…freezes.
I study him, brows bending. “What’s wrong?”
My gaze zips around the room again, taking in the half-completed guitars, covered in a thin layer of dust. Enough for me to know he hasn’t touched them in weeks. Maybe longer. The workbench is messy but undisturbed. No fresh sawdust. No wood glue scent. Even the soldering iron is cold.
That’s when it clicks.
He hasn’t been working.
Not even on the one thing that’s always saved him when his world fell apart.
Chase wipes a hand down his face, cups his jaw. “You need to go.”
“Absolutely not.” My eyes widen as I peer back at him, head shaking with disbelief. “I drove fourteen hours to get here. I’m not leaving until you talk to me. Until you explain yourself.”
“It’s better if you go. Live your life.” Pain streaks through his voice, splintering the edges. “Pretend you never met me.”
Agony breaches my bones. Digs a hole in my chest.
“You don’t mean that,” I breathe out, finally unlocking long enough to move forward.
My eyes drink him in, his twitching muscles, his hand braced on the wall like it’s the only thing keeping him standing.
He’s pale, brittle, and breaking. And I don’t know how to slip through his cracks.
“Chase, please. I’m right here, begging for you to talk to me, to see me—”
“That’s the goddamn problem,” he snaps, shoving off the wall, his hand tearing through his hair like he could rip the pain out by the roots.
I still, my breath hitching.
His eyes meet mine.
Frantic, haunted.
“That’s the problem, Annie,” he says. “I can’t.”