Chapter 63 Cody
Six weeks.
I have never been so fucking mad for this length of time.
I'm not built for patience. I don't wait for things — I get them.
I have always gone and gotten them. That's the only way I know how to operate and six weeks of not operating has been eating me alive from the inside out in a way that the rink didn't, in a way that waking up in a hospital bed with the perfect memory of how I got there didn’t, in a way that sitting across from my father and accounting for every decision I've made in the last two years didn't.
None of that touches this.
This has been torture. I have to watch from a distance and call it respect.
I'm not good at respect.
I'm not going to pretend I stayed away completely.
I drove past Elm Hall eleven times. Not every day — I showed some restraint; I set limits; I told myself twice a week is not the same as every day.
I held to that for the first three weeks, then it became three times a week, and then four.
I never got out of the car. I just drove past and looked at her window and drove home, telling myself that was enough.
It was never enough.
I texted her.
A lot.
The first text I sent was the night of the hospital.
Something simple — I need you to know I'm sorry.
I watched it send. I watched it sit on delivered for approximately forty seconds before the delivered notification disappeared, and I understood what that meant.
I sat in my car and stared at my phone for a long time.
She blocked me.
I sent seventeen more texts from a new number over the following two weeks.
Not unhinged texts — I want to be clear about that, I was not sending unhinged texts, I was sending the texts that needed to be said.
She blocked every single one of them. Some of them were long.
Some of them were one line. One of them, I spent four hours writing, deleted, rewrote, and sent at two in the morning, and I will never know if she read it.
Week three, I drove to her parents' house.
I don't know what I was thinking or expecting. I drove there on a Wednesday afternoon and sat in front of the house for twenty minutes, working up the courage to get out of the car.
Her father came out before I made the decision.
He walked down the driveway and stood at my window until I rolled it down.
"She doesn't want to see you," he said.
I looked at the house, not believing it.
"Cody." His voice was not unkind; just final. "Go home."
I went home.
I sat in my father's kitchen, and I felt the crushing weight of being turned away from a door by a man whose daughter I love more than fucking anything. And I thought about every decision that led to that driveway. I stayed in my father's kitchen for six hours, not moving.
Then I went to her café when she started picking up shifts again.
I didn't go inside. I sat in the parking lot across the street, and I watched her through the window.
She was behind the counter in her apron.
Her hair pulled back, and she was laughing at something the girl beside her said.
Seeing her smile hit me in the chest like a punch because I hadn't seen her smile in so long.
She's fine, I told myself.
She's healing, I told myself.
She doesn't need you, I told myself.
I drove home, picked up my phone, and stared at her contact for a long time.
I gave her the six weeks.
I gave her every single one of them, and they cost me more than anything.
Now she's in my lake house.
The decision not to talk to her, not give her a choice — that was a unanimous decision. All three of us. We voted that she doesn't get to walk away from all of us with no solution. She doesn't get to send us out the door and call that an ending.
That's not an ending.
That's not how this ends.
She stays until she chooses.
A few weeks ago, Theo found me outside of her dorm.
I was in my car at the end of the lot doing the thing I'd been doing three times a week — sitting in the dark looking at her window, telling myself it was enough, knowing it wasn't — when his car pulled up beside mine.
He got out and knocked on my window like we were two normal people in a normal parking lot and not two men who had been trying to destroy each other for the better part of a year.
I rolled it down.
He looked at me for a moment.
"She hates you," he said. Like he knew it was a fact. Like he'd been carrying that fact around and had decided tonight was the night to hand it to me directly.
"She hates me, too," he admitted.
I looked at him.
He looked back and said nothing else for a moment.
"What do you want, Theo?"
He looked at Adela's window. "Same thing you want."
Something moved through me. Not anger — I was too hollowed out for anger by that point, seeing the love of your life suffering in a hospital bed doesn't leave much room for anger.
"She's not going to forgive either of us," I said.
"Not yet," he said, looking at her window for a long moment. "I think she's lying in that room right now trying to convince herself she's done with all of it and failing."
I thought about the café. Her smile through the window. The way it hit me in the chest from across a parking lot.
"Beckett," I said, but it wasn’t a question.
"He's in."
I looked at him. "In what?"
"He's been in since the beginning," Theo said.
I sat with that, watching him closely. And then I realized that this asshole was out here because he’s been watching her too. I don’t know why I didn’t bother to see if I was the only one.
Then it hits me that the three men who had been circling the same girl from different directions had arrived at the same point.
The war between them and me felt very far away in that moment.
Not forgotten — I don't forget things, I'm not built for forgetting things — but irrelevant in the way things become irrelevant when something larger has swallowed them whole.
We had put each other in hospital beds and stolen from each other and lied to each other and run an operation together and destroyed it together.
None of that — none of it — was larger than the fact that we had both lost the same girl to our own stupidity and were sitting in a parking lot at midnight because neither of us could stay away.
"She gets to choose," I said.
He looked at me.
"She doesn't get to walk away with no solution," I said. "But she gets to choose. That's the condition."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Agreed," he said. "She already knows everything."
"Then she chooses with full knowledge." I looked at him. "No more lying. No more managing what she knows. Everything is on the table, and she decides what she does with it."
Theo looked at Adela's window one more time.
"Agreed," he said again.
He got back in his car.
I sat in the lot for another hour.
I thought about it for two years. About an innocent girl in a blue dress two years ago, and how she packed a suitcase just for me. She did that for me. And I fucked it all up.
I thought about Theo and his chances. And Beckett’s.
What are mine?
I had her and fucked it all up.
I started my car and went home.
I waited three more weeks.
Now she's in my lake house.
I give her the night.
That's not nothing for me. Giving her anything — time, space, silence, restraint of staying on the other side of a locked door when every instinct I have is telling me to go back in there — is not nothing.
I didn’t sleep. I just stared at the camera footage of her in the lake house.
The light in the bedroom stayed on all night.
She didn't sleep either.
I open the door slowly at seven.
I stand in the doorway of the tiny lake house that my father built when I was nine years old, and I look at her.
She's sitting at the kitchen table in the same clothes she was wearing last night. Her hair is down. Her hands are wrapped around a mug she must have found in the cabinet — she made herself coffee, that's the first thing I notice.
She looks up when I come in.
Her eyes are tired, but they’re not red. She hasn’t cried, which is good.
She looks at me, and I stare back.
Holy shit, I’ve missed her.
I love her so fucking much.
I go to the kitchen and find the pan.
She watches me while I cook.
I don't say anything. I make eggs the way she likes them — she went through a phase sophomore year of telling me exactly how she liked her eggs every single morning until it became the kind of information that lives in you permanently, the kind you don't have to try to remember — and I put toast in.
I find the butter, and I do all of it without speaking because I don't have words yet.
I'm working up to words.
I put the plate of food in front of her.
She looks at it for a moment, blinking.
Then she picks up the fork and eats.
I sit across from her with my own coffee. I made myself a plate so that I could eat with her.
The ache in my chest slowly subsides in the silence between us. I no longer feel the liquid rage, the dreadful longing, or possessiveness. What I feel when I look up at her is just –– love.
Plain, devastating, and completely without an agenda.
I love her and want to be near her. I miss her.
She puts the fork down when she's finished, and then she leans back in her chair.
"You kidnapped me, Cody."
I look at her, setting down my fork.
"What is this? What are you doing?"
I look at her across the kitchen table. A piece of me wants to remain quiet, but I shouldn’t. I should talk to her. This morning, I was given the green light. They agreed that I could talk to her first. After all, this all started because of me and my dumb fuck decisions.
"I'm trying something different," I say.
She looks at me for a long moment. "You don't do different," she says.