34. Ethan
ETHAN
She was gone.
I stood in the middle of the room with the sheet wrapped around my waist and let the quiet settle before I did anything about it.
I moved to get dressed—shirt from the floor, pants from the chair—and that’s when I noticed. My jacket was gone. She must have taken it in the rush.
I was going to let her have it. She could keep it as long as she needed it. That felt like the right call and also like the saddest possible version of giving someone something.
I finished getting dressed and picked up my phone.
Lucy’s text was still there.
Lucy:
I really thought you cared about me. People who care don’t live by omissions. I deserved the truth a long time ago.
I read it again. Slowly this time.
The omissions part was where it got complicated.
The honest answer was that I hadn’t been lying to Lucy. Not exactly. She had known the plan. Everyone had. Sell the house, finish the degree, leave. I had been clear about that from the beginning.
What I hadn’t been clear about was the part where I had started to mean it less.
That was the omission. Salem changed things. Lucy, who was not stupid, who had been paying very close attention, had watched me take Salem Turner up to a hotel room at the end of a gala and drawn her own conclusions. Her likely accurate conclusions.
She wasn’t wrong about what she’d seen.
She was wrong about what it meant about her.
Lucy and I had never been what she thought we were.
I had been honest about that too—or I had tried to be, in the careful, managed, say-enough-without-saying-everything way I had handled most things for two years.
I had never promised her anything. I had never let it get far enough to promise.
She had stayed in the orbit of that anyway, close enough to maintain hope, and I had let her do it because addressing it directly felt unkind and distance felt like a cleaner solution.
Distance was not a cleaner solution. I was beginning to understand that.
I owed her a real conversation. I locked the screen. Not tonight. This was not the time for that conversation, and I wasn’t going to have it standing in a hotel room in Seattle.
But soon.
I took the elevator to the parking garage. My truck sat among rows of other cars, other people’s evenings parked and finished. I got in and pulled out into empty Seattle streets. The drive back was long enough to think and short enough that I couldn’t avoid it.
I had said fine.
That was the thing I kept coming back to. She had been standing there, holding herself together with both hands, looking at me with everything she couldn’t say written plainly across her face. I had looked back at her and said fine. One word. The most dishonest thing I’d said in months.
I knew why she left. It wasn’t Lucy. It was the same thing I’d been doing—keeping things at a distance because real things could be lost, and it was easier to manage the distance than to survive the losing.
The second she reached for her dress, I recognized it.
I watched it happen like watching something happen behind glass, close enough to touch.
Because I knew you couldn’t talk someone back from that ledge.
I knew it. I recognized it in me.
The city thinned out behind me. The highway opened up.
This is why I don’t belong in Gray Harbor.
That was the thought I had been keeping ready for two years—the one that made everything make sense, that made the plan feel rational and the distance feel justified.
Gray Harbor was temporary. The store was temporary.
Everything here was a holding pattern until I got back to the life I had left behind in Seattle.
I had been thinking it for years, and it had always made sense before.
It didn’t make sense right now.
Right now, I was driving home to a house I had spent the better part of a year fixing. A garden I kept alive through seasons because my grandmother had loved it, and I couldn’t bring myself to let it go. A hardware store where I knew where everything was.
The town came into view—quiet in the early gray, streets empty, the harbor peeking out from between the buildings. The quality of the light there was something I had never found anywhere else and had spent two years treating like a coincidence.
I parked in front of the house and sat in my truck.
My plan was still in place. Sell the house. Finish the degree. Go back to the version of my life that had made sense on paper before any of this started. I had called Maya. I had a walkthrough scheduled.
Then I spent a month standing next to Salem Turner at charity events, face painting tables, and in a haunted house hallway, and somewhere in the middle of it all, I started behaving like a man with no intention of going anywhere.
That was the thing I couldn’t reconcile.
Not the feeling. I could name the feeling. The feeling was sitting right there, obvious and inconvenient and entirely too large for this hour in a truck outside my house, that I did love. The feeling wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that my behavior had outrun my plan, and I had only just noticed.
I went inside and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark. Around me, the house was quiet. All I could think of was Salem in my jacket on that balcony with the city behind her, looking at me like I was somewhere safe to be.
I thought about three bags of ranunculus that weren’t going to bloom until spring.
This is why I don’t belong in Gray Harbor.
I tried the thought again, deliberately this time, the way you press on a bruise to see if it still hurts. It didn’t fit the way it used to, and I was unsure of what to do with that, but I knew two things.
Salem needed time to find whatever she was running from. I couldn’t reach her until she’d found it herself.
And Lucy needed a real conversation. The kind I had been avoiding for years.
I had been polite about things that deserved plain words. That was ending.