Chapter Thirteen #4
I let his hand linger against me, feeling its warmth, remembering the kindness of his touch. “I’ve aged in other ways.”
He lowers his hand, mouth settling into a line. “Why do I get the sense that you’re not staying?”
“I’m not,” I admit. I think about the woman I was with him: numb, a shadow inside me that I couldn’t shake.
It wasn’t his fault. It was the island’s.
Nothing in my life ever made sense after the night I first stepped onto the island.
I witnessed a place that defied all logic.
I stood at the edge of a doorway, into a world of impossibility.
How could I return to the real world after that, and pretend I hadn’t seen Oz?
I tried for most of my life. But now, looking at James, I understand how empty I had been.
I lied to myself, pretending to live an ordinary life, when in truth, I was just waiting for the island to return. To see it again.
To find my way back.
I glance over his shoulder, to the house—more weathered than it was the last time I was here, the constant winds battering the siding, always tearing and ripping.
“It only feels like I’ve been gone a year—” I slide my eyes back to him.
“But it also feels like a lifetime. And the woman I used to be… is long gone.”
“Ellie—” He releases his hold on me. “We’ve waited… I’ve waited”—he corrects himself—“two decades for you to come striding up that beach, and you’re finally back… back home.”
I touch his hand. “I’m not home. Not anymore.”
“People will want to know what happened to you, where you’ve been, what you’ve seen.”
“I can’t stay, James.” I smile. “This isn’t my life anymore. Not my timeline.”
“It could be. You could start again.”
The wind stirs up from the sea, as if calling to me.
He touches my cheek again, and I think how easy it would be to let him lead me up to the house, sink into one of the soft chairs beside the fire while he prepares one of his homecooked meals—pasta with pesto sauce, oyster mushrooms, and sun-dried tomatoes.
He’d bake a red forest cake—my favorite.
With a decaf, poured slowly, with care. I could sleep in my old bed, I could rebuild a life, start again, like he said.
But then another voice drifts up behind me, carried by the wind. “Ellie! We need to go!”
James tilts his neck, squinting down the beach—where he hadn’t noticed a tall man waiting beside a raft, the moonlight casting longways across his strong shoulders. A man who most believe to be a fable.
James’s eyes find me again, and there is a quiet in them, a silence that tells me he understands what it means. “Are you happy?” he asks, the same question I posed to him.
“More than I probably deserve.”
“And he loves you as much as you love him?”
“Yes.”
He makes a strained attempt at a smile, but it settles into something more genuine. A trueness in his eyes. “Good. Then go be with him.”
I squeeze his hand. This man once cared for me; he would have loved me for the rest of my life, if I’d allowed him to. “I might not see you again.”
“I don’t want you to see me again,” he says.
“Not like this. I’ll keep getting older and you’ll stay…
just as you always have.” He exhales, and it breaks my heart—what I have done to him, the worry I have caused, the years that now separate us.
He is here, living in this house, all because I vanished.
“You’re safer out there, anyway. The world isn’t how you remember it, Ellie. It isn’t… good.”
I could ask him what he means, but there’s no time.
And maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe I want to remember the world how it used to be.
We stare at each other, and for the briefest moment, I can even see the youth in him again: the eyes I remember, looking back at me, both of us recalling the past. And I know that I will always love him—just not in the way I love Clay. Not enough to stay.
James bends forward and kisses me on the cheek.
I lay my palm against his face and close my eyes, wanting to remember the feel of him. Just like this.
“Goodbye, James.”
I lower my hand, tears falling from my chin.
“Goodbye, Ellie,” he says, forcing a smile. “I’ll still keep the light on for you.”
I stand for another moment, not knowing how to turn away, but the wind stirs my hair, smelling of the sea, of another life, and I’m reminded of where I belong, and it’s not here on this shore—in front of Nana’s house, with James.
It never was.
I smile at him, then turn and start up the beach.
I leave him behind. The life that always felt wrong.
I pick up my pace, running toward the life I want.
Toward Clay.
He’s already sliding the raft back into the sea, and when I glance out toward the Atlantic, the island is drifting back. Away from shore. We need to hurry before we lose sight of it.
Clay takes my hand, helping me onto the raft, and once seated, he paddles hard across the bay. But I look back, up the shore, where a man I might have once married stands on the porch, the overhead light casting a shadow around his silhouette. He watches as I vanish back into the sea.
“Who was that?” Clay asks.
“James.”