32. Ethan
ETHAN
Salem was on her side, facing me, her head against my chest, her fingers tracing slow, absent patterns along my skin.
My arm was around her, my hand at her back.
The sheets were twisted low around us. Outside, the city had started its slow shift toward morning—deep black giving way at the edges, a few lights blinking off in distant buildings while others stayed on.
I could feel her breathing. Slow and even, her chest rising and falling in the crook of my neck. Her leg was draped over mine, the weight completely present.
I had no interest in moving.
I was also, if I was being honest with myself—which I was apparently doing now, at one in the morning, in a hotel room in Seattle with the city going quiet outside—terrified.
Not of her. Not of this. But of what this meant, and what I was going to do about it once the sun came up and the room stopped being just the two of us.
Her fingers stilled against my chest. “We should find a diner. Somewhere with bad coffee and great pie.”
“I would love that.”
I heard the word leave my mouth before I could do anything about it.
Love.
I stared at the ceiling.
It sat there, unhurried, refusing to be put back where I’d found it.
One month. That was all it had taken. I had spent years carefully managing the distance between myself and anything that felt like this—keeping things loose, keeping them light, keeping the exit visible at all times.
She had walked into a haunted house, and the carefully constructed architecture was gone, like it hadn’t been load-bearing at all.
Gone. I was completely gone.
I had a plan. Settle the estate, sell the house, sell the store, finish what I started.
Go back to the version of my life that had made sense on paper before my grandfather called, and everything rearranged itself around someone else’s need.
I had been holding onto that plan the way you hold onto something in a current—not because you’re sure it’ll save you, but because letting go requires a decision you haven’t made yet.
Salem was the decision.
I exhaled slowly through my nose.
“Great,” Salem said, her voice warm and easy. “Maybe after a short nap.”
I laughed. She smiled against my skin—I could feel it—and settled a little heavier against me.
The room held us both. Neither of us moved. Outside, the city did its thing, unaware that something had happened in this room that I was not going to be able to walk away from. Something I didn’t want to walk away from.
My phone lit up on the nightstand.
Salem reached across me for it the way you reach for someone’s phone when you’re close enough that it doesn’t feel like a boundary. She looked at the screen and went still. “It’s Lucy.”
Something in her voice made me sit up inside myself.
She read it aloud. Flat. Like she was reading the weather. “‘I thought you cared about me. People who care don’t live by omissions. I deserved the truth a long time ago.’”
I took the phone from her hand, read it, and set it back on the nightstand.
Lucy was right—that was the complicated thing. I had let the ambiguity run too long, and I owed her a real conversation, but one in the morning was cruel timing even for her.
Salem slid off the bed, sheet dropping, and she reached for her dress.
“Hey.” I sat up. “What are you doing?”
“I should go.”
“Salem—”
“I just think—” She exhaled slowly through her nose, like she was trying to find something and coming up empty. Her hands trembled at the zipper. “I think this was probably a mistake.”
“A mistake.”
“I don’t mean—” She shook her head. “Maybe Lucy should be the one here. Maybe that makes more sense. That text was…””
I got out of bed. “Hey. Look at me.”
She didn’t.
“Salem.”
She stopped moving, her jaw set. It was like she was using motion to stay ahead of something.
This wasn’t about Lucy.
I knew it. She knew it. Neither of us said so, which was its own kind of answer.
“Lucy texted me,” I said, keeping my voice even. “That’s it. There’s nothing between Lucy and me.”
“I know.”
“Then what are you doing?”
She finally turned. Her expression wasn’t cold—it was overwhelmed. Her eyes were too bright. Everything was held carefully in place. “I just need to go. I need—I don’t know. I just need to go.”
“Because of Lucy.”
“It’s not—yes. I mean no.”
“Which one is it?”
Her chin lifted. “I can’t explain it. I just have to go”
“Salem.”
She looked at me for a long moment, searching for something. “I can’t,” she said finally.
In this moment, I understood something I didn’t want to. I got the feeling she was leaving because all of it was real, and she hadn’t expected it to feel that way. Real things could be taken away.
I knew that feeling. I had been living adjacent to it for years, which was why I knew there was nothing I could say right now that would reach her. You couldn’t talk someone back from a ledge they didn’t know they were standing on.
“Fine,” I said.
She gathered her things from the floor, tucked her clutch under her arm, and walked to the door, stopping with her hand on the handle. I waited—gave her every second of it.
She didn’t turn around.
The door opened.
The door closed.
The room went silent.
I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the nightstand. At the space where she had been just minutes ago, talking about diners and pie like the morning was something we were going to walk into together.
I had said fine when I had a hundred better words sitting right there, and knowing that was the loneliest part.
I looked at the dark sky, watching a perfect night go from my reality to a memory.