Chapter 3
PANDORA
The dress was the first thing I saw when I woke up.
It was hanging over the bathroom door where I'd put it last night. In the gray morning light, it looked like something from a different life. Which it was.
That was a thought I turned away from because it was too early and I hadn't had coffee yet. I wasn't ready to know what I actually felt about that.
I lay there for a minute in the middle of a bed that wasn't mine, in a flannel shirt that wasn't mine—I'd kicked the sweats off sometime in the night—listening to the sounds of someone moving around in the kitchen.
The river was audible through the window.
Birds. The quiet of mountains in the morning, which was its own kind of sound.
My phone had twelve percent battery left. I plugged it in with the charger I'd found on the nightstand—Hayes must have put it there, I hadn't noticed last night—and watched the screen light up with everything I'd been ignoring.
Eleven missed calls. Six voicemails. A cascade of texts from my mother that I scrolled past without reading.
One text from a number I didn't recognize, sent at two in the morning. Sorry, Pandora.
That was all. No explanation. No forwarding address. Just sorry.
I set the phone face-down on the nightstand and went to find the coffee.
Hayes was at the stove. He had eggs going in a cast-iron pan, and the coffee was already made. He looked up when I came in, then looked back at the stove like my being there was the most ordinary thing in the world.
"How do you take it?" he said.
"Black is fine."
He poured a mug and set it on the counter. I climbed onto the barstool and didn't say anything. He didn't say anything either.
It should have been awkward, but it wasn't. He just moved around the kitchen like I'd always been sitting there, like my presence asked nothing of him and he was making no demands of mine.
I found myself watching the easy way he moved—unhurried, comfortable in his own body the way some people just were—and something in my chest unclenched by a degree I hadn't anticipated.
He put eggs in front of me without asking if I was hungry.
I ate them.
Outside, the light was coming up slowly through the trees.
The particular gold of early mountain morning that the city never had.
I'd been to the mountains twice in my life, both times with my parents, both times to places they'd chosen.
I'd never had a morning like this one. Quiet in a way that asked nothing.
My mother would want a plan. She'd have the name of a hotel, a return timeline, a script for what to tell people. I could feel the weight of that waiting for me on the other side of this mug of coffee—all the logistics of dismantling a life—and I kept not reaching for it.
"You don't have to figure anything out today," Hayes said, like he'd read it on my face.
"I told my landlord I was moving out at the end of the month," I said. "For him."
"We won't worry about that today."
I looked at him. He was leaning against the counter across from me with his own coffee, and he wasn't trying to fix anything. He wasn't pulling out a legal pad, wasn't doing the thing people did where they threw solutions at a problem because sitting with it made them uncomfortable.
He just meant it. No worries today.
"I keep waiting to feel worse," I said. "I feel like I should feel worse."
He didn't rush to fill that.
"Dane and I—" I stopped. Started again. "I keep trying to locate what I'm going to miss about him, and I can't find it. What does that say about me?"
"Says you already knew," Hayes said.
I turned the mug in my hands. The ceramic was warm against my palms, and I focused on that.
"I didn't know know. I just—I kept expecting to feel certain, and I never did. I thought that was me. I thought I was the kind of person who didn't get certain."
"About him."
"About anything."
He was quiet for a moment. "You drove three hours in a wedding dress to a mountain cabin at nine o'clock at night to get answers. That's not someone who doesn't get certain."
I hadn't thought about it that way.
The morning stretched out around us, unhurried.
He refilled my coffee without asking. I told him about life in Charlotte in pieces—not a speech, just the way you talked to someone when they weren't pushing you toward a point.
The job I'd taken because Dane thought it made sense for his schedule.
The apartment I'd moved into because it was close to his.
The friends who'd drifted off to other cities, other lives, while I'd stayed in orbit around a man I now understood had never intended to land.
"I kept thinking someday it would feel like mine," I said. "The life. I kept thinking I just needed to get to the next thing and then it would click." I shook my head. "The wedding was the next thing."
"And now there's no next thing."
"No next thing." I looked up. "I know that's supposed to feel like a crisis."
"Does it?"
I thought about it honestly. The dress on the bathroom door. The text at two in the morning. Twelve percent battery and eleven missed calls and a life in Charlotte that had never quite fit.
"It feels like being let out of something," I said. "Which I know sounds terrible."
"Doesn't sound terrible to me."
I laughed, and it surprised me—surprised us both, I thought, from the way his expression shifted. Not a big laugh, just the small kind that escaped before you could decide whether it was appropriate.
"I'm Pandora," I said. "You know the myth?"
"Woman who opened the box."
"I've been blowing up my own life since last night, and everyone's going to want to talk about what I let out." I turned the mug again. "All the chaos, all the damage, all the things that can't be put back."
Hayes was quiet for a moment. Then, "That's not how I read it."
I looked up.
"The things that spilled out—they were already in there. You didn't create them. You just stopped keeping the lid on." He set his mug down. "You know what's left at the bottom of the box."
I did know. Every version of the myth I'd ever read.
"Hope," he said. Like it was simple.
I sat with that for a moment, the word settling into the quiet of the kitchen.
The morning light had gone warmer through the windows, and I thought about a box with all the false things emptied out of it and one thing left at the bottom, patient and uncomplicated.
Was that catastrophe or something closer to its opposite?
Hayes watched me think without interrupting it. That was a thing he did, I was already learning. He gave you room to arrive somewhere on your own.
We ended up on the porch without quite deciding to. I had his flannel and bare feet, and the boards were cool under my soles, and the river was visible through the trees—a silver thread of it catching the light below the slope of the property.
I told him about Dane and how this was supposed to be our wedding night.
Not graphically, just the truth of it. We'd never actually been together that way.
Dane had always had a reason to wait, and I'd thought it was consideration.
I could see now it was just one more way he'd never been real about any of it.
I'd expected it to feel like an embarrassing confession. It didn't.
Hayes looked at the river while I talked, and when I finished, he didn't make it strange. He didn't rush to fill the silence with reassurances, didn't turn it into a question, didn't offer me the kind of careful pity that was really just discomfort wearing a sympathetic face.
He just said, "He didn't deserve to be the first."
Simple as that.
Something moved through me at those words—warm and unsteady, landing somewhere below my sternum and staying there.
There was no pity in his voice. It wasn't even kindness, exactly.
It was just certainty, the same quiet certainty he seemed to bring to everything, and my body responded to it before I'd finished processing what he'd said.
I looked at the tree line and breathed and waited for it to settle, and it did, mostly, except for a low hum of awareness that hadn't been there before.
"I'm not going anywhere," Hayes said. "I want you to know that. I've got this cabin for the rest of the week and nowhere I have to be, and you can have as much time here as you need."
"You don't know me."
"No," he agreed.
"That doesn't bother you?"
He looked at me then, a long, level look, the kind that didn't ask permission and didn't apologize for itself.
"Not even a little," he said.
The river ran below us and the birds were in the trees and the morning was warm on my face.
I understood all at once that I had arrived somewhere.
Not the place Dane had sent me. Not the place I'd thought I was heading when I got in that car last night.
Somewhere else entirely—somewhere I hadn't known to aim for.
I looked at Hayes. He was already looking at me.
I'd spent two years waiting to feel certain about something.
The thought landed and held, and I knew—cleanly, without the usual static—exactly what I wanted to do. Not because I had to. Not because he was there and I was broken and it was convenient. Because I was standing on a porch in the mountains in the early morning light and I was choosing.
I set my coffee mug on the porch railing. Then I closed the distance between us and kissed him.