Chapter 53 SAGE
SAGE
One Month Later
When life falls apart, it’s rarely just one choice that destroys it. It’s never as simple as a single wrong turn or a single mistake.
No. It’s a tangled mess. A collection of small decisions and sharp words, split-second reactions, and silent omissions. Sometimes they’re yours. Sometimes they’re someone else’s.
And sometimes… it’s both.
A chain reaction spiraling out of control, gathering momentum until it crashes into you, and you’re left breathless in the aftermath. Staring at the wreckage. Holding out your hands like maybe, just maybe, you can piece it back together.
But you can’t.
You can only stand there, hollow and shaking, as the dust settles around you.
And when it does—you don’t just see the destruction.
You feel it. You feel it in every crack that splintered your foundation.
Every tremor of betrayal that knocked you off balance. Every whisper of regret that seeps into your bones and makes a home there, as if it had always belonged.
You can’t scream it away. You can’t cry it out. You just live with it.
Every second. Every breath. Until you forget what it was like to exist without it.
But life is made up of those choices. And choices are never clean.
Each one takes you down a different road but none of which lead to peace.
Some are lined with fire. Some are carved from silence. But all of them come with their own form of suffering.
And when it’s time to choose…
The only question left is—What’s worth the pain?
That’s what Reich once told me during one of our many long-winded conversations.
“In the end, it’s not about avoiding pain. It’s about choosing the kind you can live with.”
I never really understood what he meant. Not until the day he left.
I remember it—clearer than anything else. The day I shattered.
I’ve tried to recall other things since then.
The warmth of his hand in mine. The sound of his voice, low and certain, whispering promises into my hair as we lay tangled in the dark. The way he smiled when he thought I wasn’t looking.
But those memories were faded now.
As if my mind is trying to protect me from remembering too much.
As if it’s easier to hold on to the ruin than to what was beautiful before it broke.
But that day? The day I lost him?
It’s carved into me like a scar I trace with trembling fingers, over and over, hoping one day it’ll stop hurting.
It never does.
I had only stepped out for a moment. Just long enough to grab a few things from my apartment. Just a moment.
I told myself he’d still be there when I got back. That he’d be waiting. That we still had time.
I was wrong.
When I returned, the life we were going to build—the fragile little world we’d created from ash and ruin—was gone.
Erased.
Every trace of him, vanished like smoke through my fingers.
All gone.
As if he had never been there. As if we had been nothing. As if I had dreamed it all.
And maybe I could have believed that.
Maybe I would have.
If not for the single folded note left behind. Sitting on the bed we shared like a parting gift I never asked for.
One word scrawled across the front in his uneven handwriting:
Wildflower.
I stared at it for what felt like hours before my hands stopped shaking enough to open it.
Inside, his message was short. Cryptic. Just like him.
One day, when I am someone else, I’ll find you.
-Reich
I read it again. And again.
Until the ink blurred and my vision swam with tears I refused to shed.
What did that even mean? When he’s someone else?
I didn’t want someone else. I wanted him. Exactly as he was.
Dangerous. Flawed. Damaged.
But him.
I needed the man who held me close in the dead of night and whispered that I was the only thing that made him feel alive.
The man who stood between me and the darkness without hesitation.
Who never asked me to be anyone other than exactly who I was.
I needed him to stay.
He had promised he wouldn’t leave. He had promised he’d find a way. That we’d figure it out—together. That the ENA wouldn’t win. That he’d make it out.
But maybe those were just words too.
Maybe he only said them because he thought I needed to hear them.
Because I wouldn’t stop begging him to stay.
And maybe—maybe that’s all I was to him, just another job to complete.
Another obligation. Another broken girl who couldn’t save herself.
But I didn’t believe that.
No matter how much easier it would have been. Because if that were true, he wouldn’t have left that note. He wouldn’t have called me wildflower. He wouldn’t have promised to find me again.
And he sure as hell wouldn’t have looked at me the way he did that last night— like I was his salvation and his home.
He once warned me not to take things that didn’t belong to me but I think I stole something from him anyway.
Something he wasn’t ready to give.
Maybe I stole his peace. Maybe I stole his future.
Maybe that’s why now— he’s only a memory.
Faded, distant.
A name I whisper when I can’t sleep.
A ghost I reach for in the dark, even though I know he’s not there.
But I still kept that note.
Tucked in the pages of The Scarlet Pimpernel, the book he told me was his favorite.
I read it sometimes, when the nights get too long and the silence screams louder than I can bear.
I trace the letters he scrawled across the paper.
And I wait.
Because maybe, one day, when he’s someone else— he really will find me.
And maybe, just maybe, I’ll still be waiting.