Chapter 30 #4
My hands trembled as I reached for my phone, the screen blurring through my tears. I dialed the number I hadn’t called in months, not since Christmas, when I’d promised my father I was fine, that I was building the future he’d always wanted for me.
The call connected after a single ring. His voice was the same deep, familiar in a way that made my chest ache. “Edwina?”
For a long moment, I couldn’t speak. Because if I told the truth, I would fall apart, and if I lied, it would finish what was left of me. Finally, the words came, small and hoarse and broken. “Dad… I’m tired. I want to come home.”
There was a pause. Then the sound of his sigh, heavy but not surprised. “We’ll make arrangements,” he said quietly. “Come back, Edwina.”
I ended the call before I could change my mind, before I could beg him to tell me not to, to let me stay, to give me a reason to fight for the man I should have never loved.
My hands still shook as I pulled up Gwen’s chat, then Aster’s.
My tears blurred the words as I typed the same message to them both:
Edwina:
Something urgent came up with my family. I have to go.
I stared at the message for a long time before pressing send, my pulse pounding in my ears. I didn’t tell them the truth, that I wasn’t just leaving the city. I was leaving everything. Them. Him. This life that had become both dream and nightmare. And I wasn’t coming back.
But I couldn’t write that. I couldn’t even think it without breaking apart completely. So I left it unsaid, a half-truth to protect them from the storm that had already swallowed me whole.
My body shook as I set the phone down, my chest hollow, my soul unraveling.
I was leaving Hayden. Leaving the only man who had ever made me feel alive.
The man who had made me believe I could be loved and then shattered me with the truth that maybe I had only ever been a means to an end.
His love, his hate, his revenge, they were all tangled into one unbearable thing, and I had walked straight into it.
And as I curled into myself, sobs tearing through what little strength I had left, one truth cut sharper than the rest.
I loved him. And I would never forgive him for making me walk away.
Hayden
I called her again.
For the third time, then the fourth, my thumb stabbing the screen harder than necessary, the sound of unanswered rings slicing through the silence of my car. Nothing. Straight to voicemail. The fifth time I tried, my voice broke when the line clicked dead.
“Edwina, pick up,” I muttered, my hand raking through my soaked hair, my jaw clenched so tight it ached. “Please, my Flare. Just… pick up.”
No answer.
I texted instead.
Hayden:
Talk to me. Please.
Another.
Hayden:
Where are you?
Then harsher, frantic.
Hayden:
Don’t shut me out like this. Don’t fucking do this.
Still nothing.
By the time I pulled up outside her building, the rain had slowed to a drizzle, a mockery of the storm still tearing through me. I climbed the steps two at a time, my pulse hammering, and slammed my thumb against her doorbell. Once. Twice. Again and again until the sound of it felt like madness.
Silence.
I pressed my forehead against the door, the wood cold against my skin. The apartment beyond was dark, no light seeping through the cracks, no sound of her footsteps, no movement. Nothing. Empty.
My stomach twisted with a dread so sharp it hollowed me out. Something was wrong. I pulled back, swore under my breath, and scrolled through my contacts until I hit the name I needed. The call connected, and Aster’s voice came through, groggy, cautious.
“Professor Stone?”
“It’s Hayden,” I said quickly, my voice rough, uneven. “Is Edwina with you? Do you know where she is?”
A pause followed, the kind that confirmed everything I already feared.
“No,” Aster said, her voice uncertain. “She said something came up with her family, that it was urgent. She’s leaving the city. She told us not to worry.”
But I didn’t believe it. Not for a second.
Because I knew her. I knew the look in her eyes when she tried to push me away. And I knew, with a certainty that tore through me, that she wasn’t coming back.
She was leaving me.
For good.
The phone felt heavy in my hand, heavier with every unanswered call. My chest was tight, my breath sharp, my heart pounding so violently I thought it might crack a rib. The silence on her end wasn’t silence, it was rejection. Finality. A door slammed that I couldn’t pry open.
I raked my hands through my hair, pacing the length of the darkened hallway outside her apartment, my thoughts unraveling, breaking apart into jagged pieces I couldn’t hold onto.
Don’t. Don’t you fucking dare do this, Edwina. Don’t you dare leave me.
I tried again, thumb pressing the screen so hard it hurt. My voice broke against the empty air. “Answer me, damn it. Don’t do this. Don’t leave me like this.”
And then—the line connected.
“Edwina?” My voice came out sharp, frantic.
For a moment, there was only silence, and then I heard her breathe, fragile, trembling on the edge of breaking.
The sound cut straight into me, but what gutted me more was the noise behind her, the faint crackle of an announcement, the rolling of suitcases, the muffled voices calling across a terminal.
The airport.
My pulse roared in my ears. Rage and terror collided until I couldn’t tell them apart. “You’re at the fucking airport?” My voice dropped into a snarl, shaking with fury. “You’re leaving? You’re really going to walk away from me like this?”
On the other end, she said nothing at first, and I could hear it, the way she swallowed, the way her silence became a knife between us. Finally, her voice came soft, broken, so quiet I almost missed it beneath the noise around her.
“I can’t stay, Hayden.”
“Like hell you can’t,” I snapped, my fist slamming against the wall. “After everything, after what you’ve said, after what we’ve done, you think you can just vanish? You think you can erase this? You think you can erase me?”
Her breath quivered, and it sounded as though she was crying, but her voice stayed controlled, each word cutting clean through me. “I can’t live in a lie. You have a fiancée, Hayden. A life that doesn’t include me. Go back to her.”
The sound tore through me, sharp and merciless, cutting into me with the force of shrapnel.
My grip on the phone tightened until my knuckles ached, until I thought the plastic might shatter in my hand.
Go back to her? Back to Alessia? Back to the hollow, suffocating world I had clawed myself free from?
No. She couldn’t mean it. She couldn’t believe it. Not when she had looked at me the way she had. Not when her body had broken beneath mine, not when she had told me she loved me.
But she did believe it. Because her silence was final.
“I want you. Do you hear me, Edwina? I want you. Only you. Don’t you fucking dare walk away.”
There was silence, stretched thin, the longest second of my life.
“Goodbye, Professor.”
The line went dead.
I stood there, the phone still pressed to my ear, her voice echoing through me like a gunshot. For the first time in years, I didn’t know if I would survive what she had just taken from me.
And then I felt it, the wetness. At first, I thought it was the remnants of rain sliding down my face. But the storm had ended. The hallway was dry. No, it wasn’t rain.
It was me.
My vision blurred, my throat tightened, and I realized with a hollow, brutal shock that I was crying. The tears came hot, silent, unstoppable, carving down my face as the phone slipped slowly from my hand. My body shook with the weight of it, with the truth I could no longer fight.
She was gone.
And with her, she had taken every part of me that still believed I could ever be whole.
Edwina
The airport swallowed me whole.
Its noise, its movement, its endless tide of strangers pressed against me until I could barely breathe.
I moved through it like a ghost, my suitcase dragging behind me, my chest hollow, my throat raw from all the words I hadn’t spoken.
Every face blurred, every voice dulled, because the only one I could still hear was his.
Hayden.
His voice clung to me, rough and desperate, breaking apart at the edges.
The sound of him begging me to stay echoed in my head until I couldn’t tell if it was memory or madness.
I could still hear the rasp of his breath, the crack in his tone when he said my name, as if the sound alone might hold me there. And still, I had walked away.
Tears blurred my eyes, spilling unchecked down my cheeks as I pressed forward, head down, ignoring the curious stares that followed.
My body shook, not from cold but from the weight of everything I was leaving behind.
My love for him was still there, burning through the wreckage, alive and merciless, and that was the cruelest truth of all.
I wasn’t leaving because I didn’t love him. I was leaving because I did.
The boarding announcement rang through the terminal, sharp and final.
My chest constricted. My legs moved, heavy and reluctant, dragging me toward the gate as though pulled by some invisible thread I didn’t have the strength to cut.
And then it struck.
The pain came without warning, sharp and brutal, tearing through my abdomen so violently I gasped. My knees buckled, my hand flew to my side, and the air ripped from my lungs in a broken cry. Sweat gathered on my forehead, sliding down my temples, cold against the heat radiating from my skin.
I staggered, clutching at nothing, my vision swimming. The world tilted violently, voices rising in alarm somewhere far away, distant and muffled, as though I were already falling out of it. My suitcase slipped from my hand, crashing against the tile, and then my knees followed, hard and graceless.
I tried to stand. I tried to breathe. I tried to make my body obey me, but everything betrayed me, every nerve and muscle surrendering beneath the weight of exhaustion and pain.
“Hayden…” His name escaped me in a whisper, cracked and trembling, not a word but a plea.
The lights above blurred, halos of white bleeding into gold before dimming to nothing. The last thing I felt was the sting of tears cooling against my cheeks as the darkness closed in.