Chapter 5
PANDORA
The bedroom was dim and cool after the brightness of the porch.
I'd come in for water—that was the plan, water and maybe a minute to breathe—and the phone was right where I'd left it on the nightstand, face-down, charging.
The little light on the side pulsed green. Fully charged now. I'd been out there long enough for it to charge completely.
I picked it up.
The screen lit up, and I stood there and counted. Seventeen missed calls. Twenty-three texts. My mother had called six times, which meant she'd moved past worried and into a place I didn't want to think about.
There were numbers I didn't recognize. There were names I hadn't thought about in months—Dane's college roommate, a woman from his office I'd met twice at work functions, a cousin of his who'd been at the rehearsal dinner and laughed too loud at everything.
His whole world, looking for him through me.
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
My mother's texts came first in the thread. The early ones were practical—where are you, call me, are you safe—and then they got shorter and further apart, the way her messages did when she was trying not to say the thing she actually meant.
The last one had come in forty minutes ago. Just my name. Pandora. Like she was calling me back from somewhere.
I kept scrolling. There were people I'd forgotten existed, people who'd been Dane's first and mine by proximity.
People who hadn't thought to call me in a year but called today because today was interesting.
Because I was a story now. The girl who got left at the altar.
The girl who disappeared into the mountains.
A text from a number I didn't recognize. Hey, this is Krissy—we met at Dane's work thing in March. Are you okay? He's not answering anyone.
Another read, Pandora, this is Dane's mom. Please call me when you get this. We're very worried about you both.
Both. She was worried about us both.
I set the phone face-down on the mattress and pressed my palms flat against my thighs.
The morning was still on my skin. Hayes's hands and the porch railing and the river below and the way the mountains had just held still around the whole of it like it was ordinary. Like women came apart and got put back together out there every day.
I could still feel the warmth of the sun. I could still feel him.
And here was the rest of it, buzzing face-down on the mattress next to me.
I picked it up again and looked at it and tried to locate the version of myself that belonged to those names in my notifications. The girl who'd been engaged and had a plan and a Charlotte life that made sense from the outside.
I couldn't find her. She felt very far away. She felt like someone I'd read about.
That was the problem.
I could feel it taking shape—the bad thought assembling itself word by word. The way bad thoughts always did right before they became unavoidable.
I'd been here less than twenty-four hours.
I'd driven through the night in a wedding dress to a stranger's cabin because a man who hadn't shown up to his own wedding told me to.
I'd walked through a stranger's door, and I'd eaten his eggs and worn his flannel and told him things I hadn't said out loud to anyone, and then I'd kissed him on the porch and—
And it had felt like the realest thing that had ever happened to me.
Which was insane. Which was exactly the kind of thing a broken person thought. Precisely what a woman with no judgment and no spine and a track record of defaulting into whatever was in front of her would feel in this situation, in this cabin, with this man who was steady and certain.
What if he was just another next thing?
What if I was exactly what I was afraid of being—someone who couldn't tell the difference between choosing and falling, between real and convenient, between a man who saw me and a man who happened to be there?
I'd thought Dane was real.
I'd been wrong about Dane.
I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum and breathed. Stared at the wedding dress still hanging over the bathroom door. The morning on the porch tried to hold its ground against the weight of all those notifications, all those names, and I could feel it losing.
The footsteps in the hallway were quiet. Hayes didn't knock, but he stopped in the doorway. I didn't turn around. I could feel him reading the room the way he read everything—without rushing it, without filling it with noise.
"Hey," he said.
"I don't know how to do this," I said to the dress.
He didn't ask what I meant. He came in and sat next to me on the edge of the bed, and he looked at the dress too. He waited. The mattress shifted under his weight, and I was aware of the warmth of him beside me, close but not crowding, and I felt something in my chest stop bracing.
"What if I'm just broken?" I said. "What if I don't know the difference between something real and something that feels good because I need it to?
I picked Dane. I almost married him. My judgment isn't—" I stopped.
Started again. "What if this is the same thing?
What if I'm desperate and I don't know it and you're just the next mistake I can't afford? "
Hayes was quiet for a moment.
"You drove through the night in a wedding dress looking for answers," he said. "Not to get him back. Answers. That's not someone with bad judgment. That's someone who already knew the truth and couldn't let herself say it."
"That's not—"
"You walked into a stranger's house in the dark, and you sized him up. You decided in about forty-five seconds whether I was safe." He said it evenly, no heat to it. "You were right, by the way."
I looked at him then.
"You knew Dane wasn't real," Hayes said. "You knew it for a long time. The only thing you got wrong was thinking you had to be the one to end it." He held my gaze. "That's not broken, Pandora. That's just someone who never had a good enough reason to blow it up herself. Until now."
My eyes burned. I didn't cry.
"I don't know what I'm doing," I said.
"You don't have to." He reached over and took the phone out of my hand without making anything of it and set it on the nightstand face-down again. "You know what you want. That's enough to start with."
He wasn't wrong.
I knew what I wanted. I'd known since the porch. I'd known since he'd looked at me on that railing and said not even a little, like it was the simplest thing in the world.
"I'm staying," I said. Not a question.
Hayes nodded once. "I know."
"The whole week."
"Good."
Outside, the river ran on below the tree line, the same as it had been all morning, the same as it would be all week. The mountains held still around the cabin and the light through the curtains was warm. I reached over and picked up the phone one more time.
I texted my mother, I'm safe. I'll call soon. I promise.
Then I set it back down and left it there.
The notifications would keep. The explanations and the logistics and the long conversations—all of it would keep.
Right now, there was just the river and the light and the quiet, and somewhere on the other side of the bedroom door, a man who had given me room to fall apart without making it mean anything except that I was human.
That felt like enough. More than enough.
That felt like a beginning.