Chapter 3
Three
RHEA
I wake to sunlight streaming through unfamiliar curtains, and for a moment, I forget where I am.
The silence is what reminds me. There’s no traffic, no neighbors, and no Gray's restless movements beside me in bed. It’s just the gentle whisper of wind through Georgia pines and the distant call of morning birds.
Twenty-nine today.
The thought settles in my chest like a stone.
Twenty-nine years old, and I'm spending my birthday alone in a rented cabin, two weeks and hundreds of miles away from everything I used to call home.
Part of me wants to pull the covers over my head and pretend today is just another day, but the stubbornness inside me refuses to let this milestone pass unmarked.
I force myself out of bed and into the shower, letting the hot water wash away the dreams that always feature him.
Even here, even after everything, Gray haunts my sleep with memories of better times - his laugh, his hands in my hair, the way he used to sing me awake with ridiculous made-up songs on lazy Sunday mornings.
Don't go there, Rhea. Not today.
After coffee and toast, I stand at the kitchen window overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I make myself a promise. Today will be about me and proving to myself that I can celebrate alone. I need to learn that my happiness doesn't depend on someone else's sobriety, presence, or love.
The drive to the general store takes fifteen minutes down winding mountain roads that have a way of shaking loose whatever thoughts you're carrying.
The store itself is exactly what you'd expect in a town with more churches than stoplights, with its weathered wooden floors, hand-lettered signs, and a bell that chimes when you push through the screen door.
Wandering the narrow aisles like I have all the time in the world, which I suppose I do now, I look through the offerings for my birthday dinner.
There’s no schedule to keep, no one to check in with, and no emergencies to manage.
The freedom should feel liberating, but instead it feels like floating in space with nothing to anchor me.
I find a single strawberry cupcake with pink frosting in the bakery section.
It's nothing special, probably made yesterday in a home kitchen and delivered this morning, but it's perfect in its simplicity.
As I reach for it, memories of birthdays from my childhood surface, and I remember how my mother would let me pick out any cake I wanted from the grocery store bakery— simple pleasures that felt like the whole world.
When Mom was sober, she was a good, thoughtful, caring parent, often filling our lives with crafts and impromptu baking classes.
Today, I feel her absence more than ever.
She’s been gone twelve years, since right after my seventeenth birthday.
Mom had demons from her childhood. I was never old enough to ask the right questions to understand what those were.
I learned to take care of myself early in life, also figuring out how to cover for my mom when life got to be too much for her.
She liked to lock herself in her room while I was at school and fade away until the heroin wore off and she returned to earth.
Some years were worse than others, where her drug use was concerned.
She’d go missing for days or weeks on end.
One time a neighbor called family and children services because I was left alone when I was twelve.
After that, she learned to sit in her room and shoot up.
Venturing out with other addicts often ended up badly for her, and social services got involved when she didn’t return home for days at a time.
She’d also come home beaten nearly to death, and I suspected from multiple baths I gave her that she’d been sexually assaulted on more than one occasion.
Mom was all I’ve ever had, though, at least until my senior year in high school, when she lost the fight with her addiction.
Panic attacks began to plague me more frequently after she passed, when I was placed in a group home where I didn’t feel safe in the company of others.
Feeling the weight of my recent orphaning, I clashed with the house parents and the other children in the home, mainly because I needed more privacy than they could give me.
It takes a while to grow accustomed to sharing space with other foster children who have experienced their own traumatic pasts.
It’d only ever been me and Mom, so I never worried about people touching my things or sleeping in the same room.
Adjusting to living with so many people took longer than I or the system had patience for.
I’ve practically been on my own since I was a small child, learning quickly to make things work so that I could stay with my mom.
Being thrust into a group home with a thousand rules and no privacy amped up my already anxious nature.
I lived on the edge of fear for seventeen years, waiting to come home from school one day and find my mom overdosed with a needle sticking out of her arm.
Not having my mom, freedom, home, or privacy drove me over the edge a few days after my eighteenth birthday.
Without having a spot to land, I signed myself out of foster care at the group home and walked off campus with not a dime to my name or a high school diploma under my belt.
My mom had no family, having lived inside a group home for half of her life after her parents died in a car accident. Wilson, a guy I met exactly once, is supposedly my father. I have no clue how to reach him, and why bother at this juncture in my life?
I had mom, that was enough for me. She was kind with a great deal of compassion for broken people, but it was more than she had for herself.
Mom was graceful, affectionate, and generous.
I saw her give someone the literal shirt off her back to help cover her after the woman had been exposed against her will.
I miss my mom really hard on my birthday since it was the last happy memory I have of her before she passed.
Returning to the present, I grab a pack of birthday candles from the shelf nearby. The cashier, a woman with kind brown eyes and silver hair, smiles as she rings up my purchases.
"Whose birthday?" She smiles as if a stranger’s special day is enough to make her happy.
"Mine." I’m surprised by how easy the admission comes.
"Well, happy birthday, honey. Hope it's a good one."
As she rings up my items, I notice a mason jar full of cash, intended for a local shelter that specializes in vocational, drug, and rehabilitation programs. I slip a fifty-dollar bill inside and take a brochure from a stack lying beside the glass jar – a guide with local resources for those struggling with addiction and the loved ones who support them.
Realizing I may need support after living with my mom and Gray’s addictions, I slide the pamphlet into my purse and pay for my groceries.
Back at the cabin, I settle onto the front porch with the literature, offering resources from Al-Anon meetings to free counseling programs for those without healthcare.
Turning over to the back paper, there are a few helpful reminders from Alcoholics Anonymous Principles, but below it are the "Three C's" of Al-Anon (I didn't Cause it, I can't Cure it, and I can't Control it) I spent years trying to control Gray’s choices, but I didn’t cause his pain, and I sure can’t do the work for him.
Feeling like a godsend I might need later for strength, I tuck the brochure into my purse.
Next, I grab the romance novel I picked up in town yesterday at Ink & Embers Bookstore.
The porch swing creaks gently as I shift to curl up with my legs tucked under me, the book propped against my knees.
The view is breathtaking with rolling mountains that stretch to the horizon in every shade of green and blue, and clouds casting moving shadows across the valleys below.
The book is exactly what I need. It’s light, funny, and full of people who find their happy endings despite seemingly impossible odds.
I lose myself in someone else's love story, and in problems that can be solved with witty banter and perfectly timed confessions.
Hours pass without me noticing. The sun moves across the sky, painting the mountains in different hues of light, and for a few precious hours, I exist only in this moment, in this story, and in this small pocket of peace I've carved out for myself.
When my stomach finally reminds me it's dinnertime, I reluctantly close the book and head inside. I assemble what I generously call a charcuterie board, featuring crackers, cheese, grapes, and a few slices of the expensive salami I splurged on yesterday. It’s nothing fancy, but exactly what I need.
I eat on the porch as the sun begins its descent behind the mountains, the sky changing into watercolors of pink and gold. The silence isn't oppressive here the way it was in our house after Gray would pass out. This silence is clean, full of possibility, rather than disappointment.
After washing my single plate and putting it away, I retrieve the cupcake from the refrigerator. It looks even smaller out of its plastic container, sitting alone on the kitchen counter like a metaphor for my entire life right now. I carefully peel away the clear wrap.
The single candle stands straight in the center of the pink frosting, waiting. I remember seeing matches in one of the kitchen drawers on my first day here, and I find them exactly where I thought they'd be. The match strikes on the third try, the flame bright in the growing darkness of the cabin.
I light the candle and immediately feel ridiculous. Here I am, a grown woman, about to make a wish on a gas station cupcake in a rented cabin where I'm hiding from my life. The absurdity of it hits me all at once, and I laugh for the first time in weeks.
But as the small flame dances in front of me, casting moving shadows on the kitchen wall, the laughter fades into a more complicated emotion. Because, despite the pain, anger, and the absolute certainty that I made the right choice, I want to make a wish.
The memories slam into me.
At twenty-seven, Gray surprised me with a weekend in New York, Broadway shows, expensive dinners, and a hotel room overlooking Central Park.
The way he watched my face instead of the stage during "Hamilton," like my joy was more entertaining than a Tony Award-winning musical.
He gave me a delicate silver necklace. "Because you're the music in my life, sweet Rhea," he'd whispered against my ear as he fastened the clasp.
At twenty-eight, the surprise party he threw at our house was perfect because he'd been paying attention for months.
Gray had my favorite flowers, wine, and people.
He pulled me aside halfway through the evening, drunk on happiness, to tell me he'd never seen me look so beautiful.
The cake he had specially made was a three-layer chocolate mix with a salted caramel filling, because I'd mentioned liking it once in passing.
"I love you so much it scares me sometimes," he'd said, and I'd believed him completely.
Those birthdays felt like proof that I was the most important thing in his world. Every gift, every surprise, and every moment of his undivided attention felt like validation that I was worth the effort, love, and worth choosing every day.
Now I understand that those celebrations weren't just about me.
They were about him, too. It was a way to prove to himself that he could be the man he wanted to be and the partner I deserved.
They were beautiful, extravagant attempts to balance the scales, to make up for all the times the bottle won.
The tears come without warning, hot and fast down my cheeks.
I try to stop them, try to summon the strength that got me here and helped me pack my bags to walk away from everything I'd built with him.
But the grief is bigger than my strength tonight, and bigger than the mountain peace I've been hiding in.
I miss him. God, I miss him so much it feels like dying.
I miss his terrible jokes, his perfect voice, and the way he'd dance with me in the kitchen while dinner cooked.
I miss how safe I felt in his arms when he was sober, and how he'd trace patterns on my back until I fell asleep.
I miss being the person he turned to when the nightmares came, being needed, wanted, and essential to his happiness.
But more than missing him, I'm mourning the version of us that could have been, and the couple we were in those brief, shining moments when sobriety stuck and love felt like enough. The future we planned during his good stretches gnaws at my heart. Marriage, maybe children, and growing old together were in the cards, and now, all of it’s gone.
Before the tears can turn into the ugly sob, building in my chest, I close my eyes and make my wish.
It’s not for myself. I've learned that wishing for another person to change is just another form of heartbreak.
Instead, I wish for Gray to find peace with the demons that haunt him.
I wish for him to forgive the seven-year-old boy who couldn't save his mother.
I wish for him to learn to love himself enough to choose life, choose healing, and choose anything other than the bottom of a bottle.
I blow out the candle, and the sudden darkness feels complete.
I don't bother turning on the lights as I make my way to the bedroom. I brush my teeth by the glow of my phone, change into the oversized t-shirt I've been sleeping in, which is one of my own, not one of his that I was tempted to steal. Then I crawl under the covers.
That's when I let myself break.
I cry for the woman I was with him, the one who believed love could conquer anything.
I cry for the home we pieced together, now empty and echoing with ghosts.
I cry for his pain, for the trauma that shaped him into someone who couldn't choose me over his addiction.
I cry for the children we'll never have, for the anniversaries we'll never celebrate, and for all the ordinary moments that make up a life together.
Most of all, I cry because leaving was the right thing to do, but sometimes doing the right thing feels like punishment.
The mountains keep their vigils outside my window, ancient and patient and unmoved by human heartbreak. In their shadow, I grieve what was and what could have been, until exhaustion finally claims me and pulls me under into dreamless sleep.
Tomorrow I'll wake up and choose to keep going, keep healing, keep building whatever comes next. But tonight, on my twenty-ninth birthday, I let myself mourn the love that wasn't enough to save us both.