Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Savannah
The firepit at the overlook sits in a shallow bowl of snow, stones blackened from a hundred nights of bad jokes and stories that hurt to tell anywhere else.
Pine boughs hunch under fresh powder, and the Phantom River whispers through the dark like it’s keeping score.
Someone strung cheap café lights branch to branch; they sway in the light wind, tossing puddles of gold across the drifts.
He’s already here.
Axel stands with his back to the flames, jacket unzipped, the heat painting his throat and jaw in amber.
In his hands, a shoebox—nothing special, just edges gone soft and tape that’s been peeled and stuck again too many times.
He doesn’t look at me when I crunch down the shoveled path.
He doesn’t look at anything, really. Just holds the weight like he’s always held it.
“Hey,” I say.
His eyes find mine. One syllable moves between us and sets everything humming.
“Hey,” he answers.
“What is that?” I ask, though I know.
“My insides,” he says, and it’s not a joke.
He crouches and sets the box on the log bench beside the firepit.
The flames lick and settle. My breath fogs out and is gone; his hangs heavier and takes longer to disintegrate.
He pulls off his gloves—callused knuckles, a shallow scar along his index finger I remember putting antibiotic on when we were thirteen—and he rubs his palms once on his thighs like he’s trying to wake them up.
“Sit,” he says.
The bench creaks. Heat wraps my shins; the rest of me stays winter-bright and alert. He slides the box closer to me and steps back as if it might bite.
“Axel.”
He lifts a shoulder without lifting his gaze. “They’re yours.”
The tape gives with that small, obscene sound that makes me think of unpacking at new addresses, of kitchens that don’t yet know your footsteps.
The cardboard flaps open. Inside, the letters are arranged in messy arrangement of years—different envelopes, different pens, some thin, some fat, some stamped and never sent, some never even addressed because he knew he wouldn’t mail them and did it anyway.
I don’t touch at first. Just look. My throat tightens with the pressure of a decade.
“Savannah,” he says, and I hear the fear he’s trying to swallow. “If you want me to—”
“No.” My hand goes in. Paper whispers against paper. I pull the top envelope free. My name is printed in the neat block letters he learned to hide his lefty slant. Savannah Brooks.
The seal is unglued, old adhesive gone to dust. I slide the page out and unfold it.
October 12
I didn’t sleep. The framing crew hammered all morning and I kept thinking it sounded like a heartbeat outside the house. I went to the river and said your name out loud to see if it still felt like a prayer. It did. I’m sorry. I miss you. I don’t know what to do with my hands.
I don’t notice I’m crying until the paper blurs. The wind nudges a spark; it leaps, flares, falls.
“Another?” I ask, voice ragged.
He nods without speaking.
I take a thicker envelope, blue lined like the stationery packs from the pharmacy everyone’s aunt used for holidays. December 24. There’s a smear where his hand dragged through wet ink.
December 24
The tree in town looks wrong without you tipping your chin up to gaze at the star.
I remember when your mother cried when the angel choir forgot the second verse.
Mine burned the rolls and pretended it was intentional because she said “char adds character” and I said that’s not how roll science works and she said shut up and bring me the butter.
I stood under the lights after and thought about the way your hair braided down your back at eleven, like you were a girl who knew she could climb anything.
I’m sorry. I miss you. I wished for you like a kid and I’m not ashamed of it.
Heat breathes against my knees. Cold tugs tears sideways and freezes them at the edges. I set the second letter on my thigh and reach for a third.
He flinches.
“Axel,” I say.
“I know,” he says, but he still flinches.
I choose a small envelope. April 3. The first sentence punches.
I saw our street from the ladder truck and it felt like cheating.
I kept waiting for you to step out of your porch in that red coat with the missing button and tell me I was being dramatic.
I’m sorry. Sometimes I think the only honorable thing is to run into a burn and not come back.
Then I remember your father and I know what honor is and it isn’t that.
I made pancakes. I’m terrible at flipping them.
You’d laugh. Please be somewhere safe. Please be eating.
My hand shakes. I let the paper go and it slides into the lap of the first two, fresh tears staining stationary.
Across the fire, Axel’s jaw locks. He has that look men get when they’re too big for their skin. He shoves his hands into his jacket pockets because if he doesn’t, he’ll do something he swore he wouldn’t—touch me before I ask.
“You don’t have to read more,” he says, rough.
“I do.”
His throat works. He nods without trusting his mouth.
My lungs forget the mechanics and I have to relearn them. In. Out. The fire snaps at a knot and the sound startles a little gasp out of me.
He moves like he’s going to circle the pit. Stops himself. Drops into a crouch instead, elbows on knees, head bowed toward the flames.
“Savannah,” he says, and my name in that voice is a vow and an apology and the sound a man makes when the weight he’s carried presses down instead of forward.
I pick another from deeper in the stack, newer paper, the weight of the last few years. August 17.
I went to the Brooks lot and sat on the stone foundation because I don’t know where else to take the things that won’t shut up.
Someone planted lupines without permission and I didn’t stop them because the mountain wanted color there.
I’m sorry. I miss you. I dreamed you were standing on my porch, hair wet from the river, and you said “Axel, I’m cold,” and I woke up hot and ashamed and still thinking about your mouth.
I’m never sending this. I just needed to put it somewhere that wasn’t my ribs.
The sound I make is nothing I’ve made in years. Not pain. Not relief. Some new shape of both.
He looks up fast. For one second, he reaches across the flames and wipes a tear from my face with his thumb—except he doesn’t. He stops an inch away like he hit glass.
“May I?” he asks, wrecked.
I shouldn’t let him. I should hold the line we drew in the ambulance with clinical gloves and cool words.
“Yes,” I say.
He comes around the pit, slow, like approaching a skittish animal. When he sits, the bench dips toward his weight and my body lists with it. I feel the heat rolling off him, the field he carries, the crackle in the air that always makes my skin sit closer to my bones.
He reaches out. Doesn’t touch my cheek after all. He takes my free hand instead, careful, palm up in his, like he’s memorizing a prayer he’s not sure he’s allowed to say.
I lace our fingers before I can talk myself out of it.
Something steadies with the contact. Not lust. Not at first. This is quieter. The click of two gears finally finding the same teeth.
His thumb moves once over the inside of my wrist. Just once. My pulse leaps into that stroke like it was waiting for it. He feels it. I feel him feel it.
“Keep going,” he says, voice low, like the wind might steal it if he’s careless.
I read the next letter out loud.
January 1
I’m sorry. I miss you. If I can’t have you, I promise to be useful. If I can’t be happy, I’ll be useful.
“Axel,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“Stop apologizing.”
“I’m trying.”
I reach for another. My tears drip on the page and bead there, perfect, ridiculous. I have the urge to apologize to the paper for ruining it.
March 5
I saw you at the grocery store. Not you—you know what I mean.
A girl with your walk. I was in front of the peaches like an idiot and I forgot how to breathe.
Guys at work keep telling me to let it go.
I told them the day a river stops finding the low ground is the day I’ll forget your last name.
I’m sorry I’m a cliché. I miss you. I bought the peaches anyway because they smelled like July and you used to bite them over the sink and laugh when juice ran down your wrist.
I laugh then.
He closes his eyes, relief breaking across his face like dawn. “God,” he says, half a prayer, half a curse.
A gust slides through the trees and brings the high cold of the ridge with it.
All at once I’m aware of the dark pushing closer to our little halo of light, and of his hand warming mine, and of the way the fire paints his profile in gold and shadow.
His lashes throw tiny bars on his cheek.
His mouth is set like he’s keeping himself off a cliff.
“Savannah,” he says, barely above a whisper. “If this hurts you, say the word.”
“It hurts,” I say. I squeeze his fingers until the tendons shift. “But it’s the right hurt.”
He nods without looking away from my face, like he knows this pain—this specific ache of finally touching the thing you’ve been circling.
I draw a deeper letter—the pages are many, the fold soft from being opened and closed a hundred times by hands that never mailed it. May 27. The first line steals whatever air the flames didn’t.
I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you.
I’ll write it until the pen dries, until the paper gives out, until the word stops spinning.
I’m sorry for the roof and the jump and the way the night smelled like ash and rain.
I’m not sorry for being the boy who looked at you and saw a life he wanted.
I miss you. I’m still that boy and it’s humiliating.
A tear breaks and runs into my mouth. Salt and smoke. I swallow it. The fire pops and sends up a burst of sparks that look like tiny planets escaping gravity.