Fell Again This Fall

Prologue

Two years ago

The floor of the treehouse never made a good bed.

The cold planks, smoothed by years of growing feet, groaned as I stretched against their grain.

I blinked into sunlight that blinded me through the gaps in the roof.

Yet, somehow, that was the best sleep I had had in weeks.

Perhaps it was the exhaustion of yesterday, or maybe all of the nights I’d laid awake crying had finally caught up to me.

Still, I stayed there, on those planks, just a little while longer, ignoring the aching of my joints.

For just a moment, I didn’t remember. Wrapped up in the light, the smell of the last dregs of summer air coming in through the window, I clung to those fleeting moments of rest that had been so rare of late.

Then, like a change in the wind, it all came flooding back.

Granny. Her life’s most precious photos and the letters in that box that lay scattered around me.

Jacob’s arms holding me in the dark, and his lips, and the feeling of finally—

I sat up and called his name, though I already knew from the draught about me that I was alone.

The night before played in my mind, in fragments at first, of dances, of tears, of quiet embraces, of lips too desperate to wait any longer.

Then I remembered it so clearly. I could feel the touch of him on my skin as the exhaustion took us both and I fell asleep in his arms, and he stayed.

He had stayed. I looked for any sign of him out of the window.

The September morning clung to the warmth of the summer, but the leaves and their dying orange tips told the real story.

The farm was yet to stir. Silence fell across the landscape, and Jacob was still nowhere to be seen.

Many times in my life I had questioned whether he was just a dream, but this time I knew that all of it was real, painfully real. He had been here. He had held me, kissed me, loved me. Surely, that meant something. He was no phantom, and it was no dream, so why was it that I was alone?

All the pieces of Granny’s memories that were scattered around the floor quivered against one another in the breeze, hissing in whispered conversation.

I gathered them as carefully as I could, saving the stray sheets from being carried away in the wind.

No matter how hard I tried to coax the lid back onto the shoe box, it wouldn’t sit flat.

The sight of it, fit to burst with photos a plenty, was rather fitting.

Granny’s life was far too full to fit into any box.

Then, from the corner of my eye, I spotted it.

A single sheet of paper, crumpled into a ball, tucked in the shadow of the same chest where we used to leave notes for each other when we were children. Its bright white colour glowed in the early light, so different from the yellowed envelopes of Grandad’s old letters.

My stomach dropped at the sight of it, as though I already knew what weight it held.

I think I knew from the moment I opened my eyes and found him gone.

But still I scrambled to unravel it, because that is the thing about love: in your mind, you know the truth, you know what will come will hurt you, but there’s always that hope that this time it just might be different, that you’ll get your happy ending.

I smoothed the paper out against my knee. Two words in his handwriting – I would know it anywhere, all those cramped joined-up letters with never quite enough space for the apostrophe. Two words, and nothing else.

I’m sorry