Chapter 41 #4
Sabrina listened. Not just with her ears, but with her whole body: eyes locked on mine, knuckles white on the coffee mug, as if she could absorb the poison by sheer force of will.
Shane kept to the background, but I could feel him tuning in from behind the newspaper, the way he always did when something real might happen.
“So, what now?” Sabrina said, when I finally ran out of words. “Do you feel lighter? Or just…hollow?”
I shrugged. “I thought it would fix something. Or at least help me move on. But, I don’t know.
I feel like I’m still in the middle of it all.
Like it’s not done with me yet. I do feel less angry with my mom though, especially after reading her letter.
There’s a little more closure. It still hurts though. ”
She reached across, squeezing my hand. “I’m sorry. I’m sure in time the wound will heal, even if it still feels so raw right now. But, I’m glad you could find some kind of closure.”
I nodded, not able to find the right words to respond with, especially when my throat was becoming tight again.
We sat there for a while, the smell of coffee and detergent mingling in the air, until Shane cleared his throat with deliberate volume.
“Sabrina,” he said, and his tone made her flinch slightly.
She shot him a look.
“You need to tell her,” he continued while shooting me a look that expressed pity and sadness.
“Tell me what?’ I didn’t like the tone of his voice. It was the kind that people use when they are about to say something terrible, something that will break you.
Sabrina sighed, long and conflicted. She looked at me with a new kind of sadness in her eyes.
She took my hands. “Amelia. I am so sorry. Caiden is gone. He got back last night and passed out for a bit. But by dawn this morning, he took all that he had from the basement and was out the door. He told us not to wait for him to come back.”
The shock was so cold, and it scoured all the air from my lungs. I looked at Sabrina, at the way her mouth worked open and closed, hating every syllable she was forced to say.
I looked at Shane, who wouldn’t look at me at all. I looked at the mug in my hands, the ring of coffee trembling in its cage, and tried to remember how to speak.
“What do you mean he’s gone?” My voice was a stranger’s, flat and far away.
“He just…left.” Sabrina’s hands fluttered helplessly, her wedding band catching the overhead light. “He barely said bye. I thought maybe he was just blowing off steam or needed time, but—” Her face crumpled, and she pressed her lips together. “I’m so sorry, Amelia. He emptied the room.”
“No,” I said, and it wasn’t a protest so much as a statement of universal law. “He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t just leave. Not like this.”
For a sick second I thought it was a trick. Maybe Caiden just needed a few days alone, or maybe he was already halfway back, stalking out his own return like a wolf in the dark.
But the way Shane wouldn’t meet my eyes, the way Sabrina carried that guilt, told me everything. He was gone.
It was too familiar. The aftermath of loss, the hollowing out, the quicksand that always followed.
I knew how Caiden operated. He was an expert in preemptive abandonment, in leaving before he could be left. It was the only thing in this world he was truly good at.
I slid off the stool and nearly toppled, legs numb. “I need to see,” I said, and I don’t know if it made sense, but Sabrina just nodded and let me pass.
The hallway spun as I walked it. My hands dragged the paint of the stairwell, bracing me for the plummet.
I took the steps two at a time, lightheaded, and at the bottom, I turned left, into the unfinished room that had been his.
There was nothing.
Not nothing, just nothing of him. The mattress was stripped bare, the pile of blankets gone, the battered duffel with the faded Velcro patches nowhere in sight. The closet door gaped open, empty wire hangers creaking in slow arcs.
Every piece of Caiden was gone.
It was a magic trick, a vanishing act. I crossed the room, half-expecting to find something of his, but the only graffiti was the shallow impression of his body in the foam mattress, already fading.
I stood over it, breathing hard, until my legs buckled and I sat down hard on the mattress. A fly buzzed in slow circles overhead, the only thing alive in the world.
He’d done it again. Left before I could. Maybe he thought it was mercy. Maybe he just couldn’t stand the slow rot of growing roots, the hard ache of wanting something you knew you’d only poison if you held it too long.
The grief was not a thing with edges or shape. It was a sickening, tidal undertow, so strong and sudden it pulled my insides straight through the hollow of my ribs.
I didn’t cry at first. I sat there, staring at the gouged-up carpet and the blank, white walls, the loops of cheap extension cord still tacked in lazy curves along the baseboards.
I waited for the world to start again, but all it did was buzz, a mosquito’s whine in my skull, telling me over and over: you should have known.
It was only when I reached down, running my palm over the dead spot in the foam where he’d slept for weeks, that it hit me, the violence of it.
The idiocy, to think this time would be different. It was as if every old wound in my chest had been pierced at once, each scar torn open so the old pain could bleed fresh.
The sob came out of nowhere, a loud, childish wail that spilled into the empty room and echoed back at me with perfect, pitiless clarity. I heard myself howling, heard my own voice break on the rocks, but I couldn’t stop.
I folded forward, arms gripping my shins, forehead pressed to my knees, shaking so hard my teeth clacked. I rocked, back and forth, back and forth, like I was trying to soothe a child, and maybe that’s what I was.
A child. A fool. He’d left because that was what he did. Because he was built for it.
I cried because Caiden, for all his violence and all his tenderness, was the only person who ever saw the real me and didn’t look away.
He’d made me laugh, made me want, made me believe in a future that wasn’t just a repeat of every previous disaster.
And then he’d vanished, like always, taking my last good hope with him.
I had finally accepted him as a potential lover, not as an enemy. Everything he had done was erased that night in the motel, as if he had been awakened as a fresh, new person in my eyes.
I buried my face in my arms, tried to inhale dust and dead skin and let it choke out the memory of his hands on me, his mouth pressed so tight to mine I could almost believe the rest of the world wasn’t a threat.
But every time I blinked, I saw him. The look on his face when he came, wild and hungry, like he’d found something worth breaking for and was terrified of how badly he wanted it. The way he’d kissed me at my door, soft as a bruise, and then left without turning back.
The pain was rooted in some pre-language part of me that still wanted to claw and bite and maybe, god forbid, be held. I screamed into the mattress, a long, strangled sound that didn’t ease the pressure in my chest.
I rocked and howled until the well of my body ran dry, and then I just sat there, numb and ruined, staring at the peeling paint above the baseboards.
He’d left me with nothing but the echo of him.
I wondered if he’d cried when his mother left, or if he’d just packed up the grief and moved it to a place in his chest nothing could touch. Maybe that was what he wanted for me: to harden, to not need anybody so badly it rattled your bones when they went.
I hated him. I hated myself more.
I hated the world for making all of this possible, for letting us delude ourselves into thinking that broken people could be made whole through proximity alone.
I loved him, too, in a hot, searing flash that made me want to claw my own chest open and excise the part that wouldn’t let go.
I rocked and howled and hated and loved in equal measure until my body had nothing left but the tremble, the cold sweat, the stunned silence that comes after a tornado has torn a path through your childhood home.
I didn’t realize that Sabrina had sat next to me until I felt a tender hand on my shoulder. She was rubbing my back in a way that a mother would comfort her heartbroken daughter.
“I’m so sorry, Amelia. Let it out. Let it all out, honey.”
I wailed louder. “It—It hurts. So bad. I thought he felt the same way. I thought things were different now. I thought all the bad between us had melted into dust. But he left. He left me.”
She let me cry, she let me scream, she let me work out this pain.
When I finally came down, she set an envelope next to me.
“He left this for you. I think you should read it. It might help.” She gave me another sorrowful look, and walked back up the basement steps.
A letter.
He wrote a fucking letter?
Everything that had happened between us came down to a letter and a vanishing act. As if our newfound connection never mattered to him.
I considered ripping it up. I considered leaving it there and running back up those steps. I considered calling him and telling him to say the words to me face-to-face.
Unfortunately, I was too weak to do any of those things.
Once the tears had dried and my hands weren’t shaking so badly, I opened the envelope and stared at his handwriting.
It was a grimy sheet of notebook paper, spiral shreds clinging to the edge.
The handwriting was what stopped me: fast, angry, still war-wounded from all those years of turning words into weapons. It was barely legible in some places, but the violence of it meant he’d written it all at once, hot and scared.
Amelia,
I’m sorry. I’m a coward. I’m sorry to do this by letter. I’d do it in person if I thought I could get the words out without fucking it all up.
That night in the motel made me realize something. I realized that I love you.