Chapter 49 Heartless
“ A re you sure you don’t just wanna text her or… email or something?”
“No, Mon’s old-fashioned. I’ll just stick the letter under her welcome mat and we can get going.”
Gabe was plainly unconvinced but held his tongue as I stepped out of my packed down car, apology letter in hand. Dropping this letter off was the last thing I had to do before I said goodbye to Chicago and the whirlwind of a life I’d created and destroyed here.
I broke my lease, packed my car full of everything I owned, and just over six months later, was in the exact same spot I arrived in.
Same house. Same car. Same broken-heart.
At least this go around, I was running to somewhere with a purpose for me.
A new life with old friends and familiar surroundings.
I made the decision to leave for New York only four days ago, but already, the relief to be going was unbelievable.
There was nothing left for me here that I hadn’t already poisoned by my poor choices.
In situations like this, it was best to remove the infection rather than waste time trying to find a cure for it.
If you cut out the thing that made everyone sick, everyone could heal.
In this equation, I was cutting myself out of everyone’s life that I loved and hoped it was enough to start the healing.
Which is what brought me to Monica’s. I hadn’t seen her since my ugly truth was found out, and it was clear by the loads of times I’d had to listen to her voicemail that it was on purpose. She didn’t want to see me, and I really couldn’t blame her.
So, the plan was to slip this letter underneath her doormat and then leave her life until when and if she wanted me back in it.
My heart was traced into every word in that letter and a few actual tears, too.
I didn’t expect her to forgive me right after reading it, but I definitely had some foolish hope that she’d be able to feel my heart and the residue of my tears on the pages and that it would remind her how much I loved her.
I turned back around to see Gabe through the window, and he gave me an encouraging thumbs up. Blowing out a curt breath into the air, I nodded and spun back to face the house, quickly slipping the letter beneath the welcoming mat and padded back down the porch to my car.
Just as my toes met the last step, the grind of a door pushing open sounded off behind me.
The surprise of the noise whipped me back around, and the punch of guilt was instantaneous as I laid eyes on her.
It wasn’t her appearance that caused the reaction, even though she looked a little worse for wear compared to normal.
It was her eyes.
They were hollowed in, surrounded by rings of red that went so deep, they looked chiseled in. And the hatred she held in them was still so palpable, the burn of it reached out and touched me even in this below freezing weather.
“I didn’t think you were home,” I offered as an excuse.
Monica didn’t respond, but she didn’t turn to go back inside either. She remained as stiff as the air between us with her arms crossed over her chest, holding her wool sweater in place.
“I was just dropping off a letter and then—” I gestured back to my car awkwardly, nodding mindlessly for no good reason at all.
Monica’s eyes drifted back to my car, undoubtedly wondering why it was packed to the ceiling with my belongings.
“You running away again?” she asked, her voice cold and dry.
“I’m moving back to New York. I got a job offer so…” I glanced down, fiddling with the frayed ends of my scarf. “I think it’s better for everyone if I go back.”
I waited with oxygen cramped in my lungs for Monica’s response.
A reaction of any sort to me moving away.
Eventually, I had to let the breath go, along with the hope that my sister was going to have any response to my leaving other than some much deserved snark.
My shoulders sunk with defeat pushing them down.
“Um…” I stood there like an idiot, twisting my fingers together and pulling on each one until they popped. “I know you don’t want to talk to me, so I wrote it all down in a letter.”
Mon’s stare dropped to the folded up papers sticking out from beneath the mat under her feet.
“It says pretty much everything I want you to know about… everything. You don’t have to read it now or, uh, ever I guess?” An uncomfortable laugh escaped past my lips, ill-timed and bursting with remorse. “But you have it if you’re ever curious.”
Holy hell, this was hard.
Already, there was a tightness winding through my neck the longer I stood there trying to fight my way through an apology I knew she didn’t want. I didn’t have the courage to peer up at her, but I could feel her stare still on me, pushing against the top of my bowed head like nails.
Movement caught my eye as Monica bent over and snatched up my letter.
I dared to peek up just a sliver with shallow breaths cutting in and out of my mouth as I eyed the letter in her hands.
She looked at the front of it, fingered through to count the three pages of my handwriting, and then lifted her eyes to mine.
And then she ripped the thing in half.
Each tear that echoed through the empty streets was so loud it drowned out literally everything else. All I could hear was that paper ripping like it was happening right next to my ear, my words being torn to shreds, and my heart and tears on the pages falling to tatters at Monica’s feet.
Tears crawled up my throat as I rolled my lips together to keep them from quivering.
“Okay,” I whispered, nodding in acceptance.
She didn’t want my useless words. She didn’t want my apology. What she wanted was something I couldn’t give her without a time machine or magic, and we both knew that was as impossible as her forgiveness.
“I’ll go…”
Eyes on the ground, I turned over my shoulder and walked with heavy feet back to my car.
The air was dead around us, murdered by the cold hands of our deceased relationship that wound around its neck and squeezed.
Before I reached my car, the last words I wanted to say to my sister before I went away for however long snuck up my throat.
“Before I go—” Determination pivoted me on my heel back towards my sister. “I just want to say that if there was anything important in that letter, it was me telling you how much I love you.”
At that, Monica let out an absurd scoff that yanked fighting words out of me so fast, even I was shocked I was talking.
“Monica, I do . What I did… I hate myself enough for the both of us, and I don’t expect you to forgive me anytime soon or at all.”
She wasn’t even looking at me anymore, but that didn’t stop me from talking.
“But if there’s anything I’ve learned from all of this, it’s that soulmates do exist. I didn’t believe in them before any of this, but now I have…
emphatic proof that they do. Except, there’s not just one per person.
A person can have lots of different soulmates, and they’re not all strictly romantic either.
Soulmates aren’t confined by the idea of romance.
It’s just two souls that connect on a level that feels significant.
It feels natural and… easy to be with them.
There’s no trying with them. There’s just being. ”
The more I talked, the more emotional I could feel myself getting. My throat was closing up, my eyes misted, and it took everything inside of my mind to roadblock the images of Ethan’s face as I went on about the very thing he opened my eyes to.
“And I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that I didn’t feel that with Ethan because I did and I think how hard we tried to fight it and how tremendously we failed proves it’s real. But Monica you are also my soulmate.”
My voice cracked, and pain bled through. Finally, she lifted her gaze to me and the sheen of tears I saw filling in her eyes broke my barriers down to dust.
“I have known you my entire life, and there is absolutely no one I trust more in the world than you. You are one of my best friends, and I hate knowing that I hurt you,” I sobbed, giving up the losing battle with my emotions.
“And I need you to know that between you and him, you are the one I need in my life. I tried to choose you before but I didn’t try hard enough, but I choose you now and I will continue to prove to you how sorry I am and how much you mean to me.”
Mon’s brows pinched together as she fought tooth and nail to keep her own tears at bay.
“I can survive without being in love, but I can’t survive without you.”
A breeze rushed by, drying the trails of tears down my cheeks to a cold stain. Both she and I stood across from each other in silence. I had said all I wanted to get across in my letter and now was the chance, if any, for Monica to say her piece too.
I waited and I waited and I kept on waiting, feeling the seconds tick years off of my life.
She wasn’t staring at me anymore but back to the ground, to the scattered fragments of my letter as they blew with the breeze around her feet.
She swiped her knuckles over her cheek and let go of a sigh more powerful than any gust of wind.
With that one sigh, she knocked my heart off its feet, sending it tumbling down flights of stairs, screaming only once before being swallowed up whole as Monica showed me her back.
She disappeared inside without so much as another glance, and there I stood, heartless at last.
I’d left one half with Ethan and Monica threw away the other, and I couldn’t be mad at either.
I wanted to keep on crying, but without a heart, I had no tears left to cry.
I should have known at the beginning of this thing that I might end up without a heart to love or be loved. I should have known that it would have been exactly what I deserved.
Jonah, in the end, actually was right.
Someone as wicked as me didn’t deserve anything as spectacular as love.