Chapter 30
Carrie
“Jess,”
I croak, finding my voice.
I step toward her, and she sniffs, scrunching up her nose. “You were expecting Tom, weren’t you? Don’t lie to me. Don’t you bloody lie.”
Her anger, hot and quick, catches me like a punch. I jerk back, blinking rapidly. “Jess, what—”
“He’s been here, hasn’t he? I know you saw each other. I know you’ve met up. Was he here again tonight? What is this, Carrie? After all these years, you want him back?”
I swallow, staring at her, the way her features are all twisted up. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes smarting, and I wonder if she’s about to cry. “Jess, that’s not—”
“Well, he’s mine,”
Jess says, her voice cracking. “You can’t have him. You made your choice that day you left him. Remember that? Remember your wedding day? I was there afterward. Me. I’ve been here ever since. You can’t just, you can’t just breeze in, you can’t just change everything—”
“I’m not, Jess. Please, I promise I’m not,”
I say quietly. She blinks, caught off guard. Surprise flares in her features, as though she wasn’t expecting me to say that, but it’s gone in an instant, quickly stamped out.
“What?”
I lick my lips, feeling the ghost of that knife of pain as I left, knowing I wasn’t coming back anytime soon. Knowing I was leaving everything—Tom, Jess, my whole life in Woodsmoke—firmly behind. And I didn’t know if I’d ever be coming back. “I’m only here to renovate Ivy’s cottage. I guess I hoped I’d find my place here, find I belong . . . I don’t know. But I promise it has nothing to do with Tom.”
“You met up with him, though. You came back here, not once thinking to come and find me, but him? You met up with my husband.”
Jess narrows her eyes, like we’re picking up a conversation that’s been going all this time. Like we haven’t been apart for a decade and we’ve been batting these words back and forth. “You made your choice, you left. I didn’t. We’re married, we have a child, we—”
“—have all the trappings. I get it. I know. You did the right thing, and the whole town loves you for it,”
I say, pinching the bridge of my nose. “You stayed. That’s old news, Jess. I’m not here for him, and I think if you were actually honest with yourself, you’d know that. I haven’t carried him around with me for the past ten years. Leaving was right for both of us, and I don’t regret our breakup. It should never have gotten as far as it did; we shouldn’t have gotten engaged. I am not here to break up your family.”
Jess tucks her hair behind her left ear, agitation marking her staccato movements. “Is that what you talked about? With him?”
I frown. “Yes. But also—”
She sucks in a breath, blinking hard. “Why? Was it closure? Couldn’t you have just come over, not all this sneaking around, discussing me and my marriage without me present?”
“Jess, come on—”
“Nothing’s changed, has it?”
she says quietly. “You don’t see it. You left everything behind, your entire world. Like it was nothing. And now you expect to move back and for everything to be fine. You know I can’t move in this town without hearing people talk about you, at the book club, on the school run . . . you’re everywhere. And yet I haven’t seen you. It’s been ten whole years, Carrie, and you went and met with Tom and not . . . and not . . .”
I close my eyes for a minute. “This isn’t about Tom at all, is it.”
“No. No, I guess it’s not,”
she says, blinking quickly.
“I left you.”
Jess draws in a haggard breath, pressing her fingertips to the dark smudges under her eyes, and says nothing.
I gather my thoughts as I stare at a point over her shoulder. “That’s what this is, isn’t it? I left, and you can’t see past it. But you have to understand, I was always on the edges here. Because of my family, because of what we are, even being engaged to Tom and with you at my side, I never felt like I quite belonged. I wanted to see the world, Jess. I wanted more than Woodsmoke.”
“And now?”
“Now . . . I’m trying to find my place. I want to see if I can belong, if this is the home I’ve been searching for the whole time. I’m not going to take anything from you. I’m not trying to change anything.”
Jess fidgets for a moment. “You left without a backward glance. You—you say you don’t want to change anything, but you’ve already changed things, Carrie. Your presence changes everything.”
She finally fixes her gaze on me. “All I wanted was a normal life. And I’ve got that.”
My breath catches again in my throat, and my eyes begin to sting. When it comes to Jess, I can’t hide a damn thing. Not even from myself. I forgot that about her, about us. “You don’t want me back here. That’s it, isn’t it? I’m—I’m disrupting your dream. This dream life you built without me.”
“I—”
“We were practically sisters.”
I pause, pulling in a cooling breath, hot hurt sliding up from my chest, the tears already clouding my vision. “Remember that night we cut our palms? Remember how we swore we’d always be us? Never mind him, never mind Tom. We were meant to be forever, me and you. Yes, Tom and I weren’t meant to last forever. He never wanted to leave. That’s what I found out before I left. That’s how I knew for sure it was all wrong between us. He had already agreed to his apprenticeship, and I guess he would have told me after we married. And I’d have been stuck and stifled. But me and you . . .”
I look up at the ceiling, trying to hold myself together. I press my fingertips into my cheekbones, as though I can erase the tears. As though I can close up the fissures reopening inside me. “You were my sister,”
I whisper. “You were my sister, and I’ve come back, and you’re choosing to throw me away.”
“Carrie, you never called, never wrote, not in ten years—”
“I couldn’t, Jess! What would I say? You got together with my ex and started this whole life without me. I didn’t have a place in your orbit anymore.”
I swallow, wrapping my arms around myself. “It’s all I wanted. To come home, to have you back. There, I’ve said it. I know I should have come over sooner, but I . . . I was scared. For good reason apparently. Look at us!”
I sniff again. “I got over Tom years ago. But us? How could I ever get over that?”
“Well, maybe you should have made the effort when you got back nearly two whole months ago instead of—”
“It’s like we can’t even hear each other,”
I say, shaking my head. How did we grow so far apart? “Just go,”
I say, furious at her, at myself, at the tears tracking down my cheeks. Every moment with her flashes between us: the sleepovers and film marathons, the walks to school on the old dirt track, the times we snuck peeks at the book and read the stories aloud to each other. All those moments, so rose-tinted, as though lit up by fairy lights, now lay cracked and broken at our feet. “Go back home. You’ve got everything you ever wanted. Go and enjoy and forget about me and you. But you have to know, I’m not leaving. I’m finishing up what I started here, this renovation, this winter . . . This is my home too.”
I realize, for the first time, that this is true. “I’m sorry it’s creating gossip. I’m sorry the town has so little going on that I’m causing such a stir. Now you know how it is to have the last name Morgan.”
“Carrie . . .”
Jess says, taking a step toward me, her hand reaching out, as though she finally sees it. Sees that I couldn’t have reached out to her. That just being here in this town is like crossing a vast ocean and I just needed her to take the last few steps to meet me. But she retracts her hand and stumbles back to the doorway. Standing there with both hands splayed across her belly, she gives me one final look.
“Go,”
I gasp, covering my face with my hands. I’m not sure I can stand any more arguing. This feels like a breakup, like a knife slipped between the ribs. Why is losing a friend always so much harder than losing a love? Especially when I’ve hoped, for so many years, to return here and find our way back to each other. I realize now how foolish that hope was. When I pull my hands away from my face, she’s gone.
I don’t let myself fall apart, not like I used to. I pace up and down the living room, pulling in breath after aching breath. As I walk, I flex my fingers, forming them into fists, clenching and unclenching my jaw. Even after all these years, even after the miles and miles I’ve put between us, one conversation with Jess rips it all open. Like it’s fresh and pulsing and I’m bleeding all over again. Like I’ll never stop bleeding, never stop grieving the loss of her.
The loss of us.
There’s a tap on the window, and I startle. Matthieu’s face appears, his eyes widening when he sees mine. Then he’s through the door, standing next to me, pulling me into his arms.
I cry like I did on my wedding day. As though the whole world is raining with my tears.
“I came back to tell you something,”
Matthieu says quietly, “to explain, but . . . Carrie, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”
I sniff, pressing my face into his chest, warm and safe. And even with Jess and Tom and everything, it feels so right. So right for his arms to be around me, so right that I don’t register surprise that they’re there. That he’s here. “Nothing. Everything . . . I can’t explain. It all happened so long ago, and she just came over, and I should have had a handle on it, but I didn’t, and . . .”
I gulp and take a steadying breath. “Me and Woodsmoke had a bad breakup a while back, and there was never any closure. Let’s put it that way.”
“Who came over?”
he asks, smoothing his hands over my back.
“Jess,”
I breathe. “My former best friend. I guess—I guess the real person I had the breakup with.”
Matthieu says nothing. He gently pries me away, putting the smallest distance between us so he can stare down at me. He brushes a hand down my face, running a thumb through my tears. I close my eyes, shudders rippling through me like waves. “Oh, Carrie. Loving someone—caring for them and losing them . . . it is a distinct kind of grief. One that’s hard to shake.”
Fresh tears course down my face, and he sweeps them all away. His touch, achingly gentle as he wipes at my cheeks, leaves a faint trail of heat along my skin. I sniff again, leaning into his warmth, and he brings his face down to mine. His mouth moves carefully, hesitantly, as his kisses cover my tears. I keep my eyes closed, focusing on that, on Matthieu, on his scent, all pine and frost and midnight. And the tight knot inside me begins to loosen.
“Matthieu,”
I whisper, bringing my hands up to his face.
“Carrie,”
he says back. And then he brings his mouth to mine.
My heart explodes.
Everything around us, everything else boiling up inside me, fades away, leaving only him, only his mouth, his touch, the warmth of him wrapping around me. It’s as though I’ve been lost in a blizzard with no end and no beginning. And now suddenly I’m no longer cold.
His hands move to my waist, pulling me closer, tracing slow circles with his thumbs along my ribs. The circles move lower, curving down my sides, to the small of my back, and I press my body into his, wanting more.
He comes up for air, his lips slightly parted as he stares at me, transfixed. “I’ve wanted to do that since the moment I first saw you.”
I smile, the ache in my chest easing as I look up at him. Sniffing, I rub away the last of my tears and look at him. With the work nearly done, I don’t want this to end. It feels too much like it could be a beginning.
“Kiss me again,”
I whisper, and he presses his mouth against mine. His arms encircle me, and we give in to this something between us.