The Ones We Remember (The Ones #3)
Prologue
Four Years Ago
Colin
18 Years Old
“Carter.” The choking sound that left Colin’s mouth was followed by a heavy intake of air that failed to help him breathe.
“Colin? Where are you?” Carter’s voice sounded panicked through the phone speaker. It had been a great enough feat for Colin to find and hit his brother’s name on his favorite list to call him, so holding a conversation was going to be a problem, especially because he now realized he couldn’t ask Carter the questions burning in his head. If he could see or think clearly, Colin would have pulled up a map or ordered a rideshare, but logic was not his strong suit at the moment when he could barely breathe.
Sniffing and wiping a hand down his tear-streaked face did not further compose him. New tears sprang up in place of the ones he had smeared across his cheeks. “I’m on a bench,” Colin croaked.
“On a bench where?” Carter’s voice felt even more distant now as Colin’s heart rate spiked again. It had been doing that for ages. He would start to come down from his soul-crushing dysphoria only for his brain to replay the last twenty-four hours and send him spiraling into another fit of uncontrollable emotion.
“I don’t know,” Colin got out. It felt like an admittance of guilt or stupidity. He was never one prone to stupidity, but it was as if the last day were an alternate dimension he had been propelled into. A dimension where he had been the stupid one for years. Since birth. Since the moment he’d had a cognizant thought in his head and didn’t realize that everything was fundamentally incorrect or altered in some way.
“Are you okay?” Carter was usually one for a quick joke or a sarcastic comment that would have to be explained to Colin after the fact, but, for once, the tone in his voice was unmistakably one of fear. All of Colin’s siblings were quick to assume the worst because that was the hallmark of their experiences. A statistical bell curve would show that they had deviated from a normal amount of tragedy the day they lost both their parents. In the case study that was Colin, he had now lost four people: two to a freak accident, one to distance and words, and one more—himself—to no longer caring.
The sweaty shirt sticking to Colin’s skin felt like a vise suctioning against his worn body. He had been walking for what felt like both an eternity and no time at all. The concept of time was a mere nuisance to him when he would spend the rest of his days without meaningful companionship. He knew Archwood like the back of his hand, but he had been out walking for so long that he might be in a different city now.
“We broke up.” The words soured in his mouth and cracked appropriately on the word ‘broke.’ Someone had fed him poison. No, more likely, he had fed himself poison. Even lying flat on his back with his legs dangling over the side of the bench hadn’t helped. He thought that he should maybe just lie down for a bit, and the swooping feelings in his head and chest would cease so he could think straight enough to do what he wanted to.
“What happened? You’re scaring me.” Carter sounded frantic on the other line, and Colin almost wanted to laugh at the irony of Scarlett saying those exact same words earlier.
“I did it. I did the right thing, I think.” His chest heaved. “But it doesn’t feel very good.”
“I—fuck, I can’t help you if I don’t know where you’re at.” Carter sounded almost shrill now. “Why did you break up with her? You didn’t tell me anything was wrong. What the hell happened?”
“Everything and nothing,” Colin said, blinking up at the spinning sky that was starting to splash with deep pinks and oranges. It wasn’t as beautiful as one of Scarlett’s watercolor paintings, though, nor the sunset over the lookout. Not now, with his perpetual tunnel vision hued with dull grays. The last few months had been in vivid color, hints of blue sadness masterfully painted over with joyous yellows, deep, lustful reds, and warm, comforting pinks. He had been looking at that painting upside down and backward the whole time, and when he finally flipped it over, he’d taken a torch to the center of it, turning everything to dust.
“Colin is on the phone!” Carter yelled before a murmured conversation was whispered through the speaker, incoherent to Colin’s ears. The deep tenor of the other voice had to be his uncle Walker, but Colin was still breathing too hard to hear much of anything other than the thrumming heartbeat in his skull. It was as though he had ripped his beating heart straight from his chest and held it up to his head to listen to the life dwindle away.
“Where are you?” Walker came on the phone. “Can you see anything?”
Most everything was blurry. “Trees,” Colin replied simply.
“No shit, we live in Oregon,” Walker huffed. “We’ve been calling you nonstop for three hours. They just found your car at Scarlett’s. We thought you were fucking dead somewhere, Colin!” Walker was angry, and Colin knew he should say something to ease his uncle’s worry and anxiety, but he didn’t care about anything or anyone at that moment. And maybe that was his fatal flaw—he lacked empathy. His therapist had suggested that his emotional empathy was well intact, but he could feel the lack of emotion he had now like an object he could grasp, a numbness that took over as his tears dried against his tacky skin. Three hours . That was how long it had been since he had wrecked everything.
I might as well be dead , Colin thought for what felt like the hundredth time that day. He knew for a fact that his death would hurt people, though, and the reason he had blown up his life was to avoid more harm, so caring too much seemed to be his problem. If he cared less, he could continue hurting people without thinking twice about it. So he grasped onto the numbness, his vision still hazy and his breathing erratic at best. “Sorry.”
“I called Roscoe a while ago,” Walker explained. “He’s out looking for you, and now that I know you aren’t coming home anytime soon, I’m leaving everyone with Talia and coming to find you.” The sound of keys jingled on the other end of the line, and Colin thought that maybe the warped auditory issues he had been having since he left Scarlett’s house might be fading, but he was still barely processing a word Walker said. It was all meaningless to him.
“Roscoe,” Colin repeated, finally placing the name. It should matter to him that Walker’s best friend was out looking for him, no doubt in his police cruiser, but it didn’t. The flashing lights would be all the more disorienting when he was eventually found.
“You’re scaring me,” Walker breathed into the phone. There it was again. The same phrase everyone had been using with him today. Colin hadn’t thought of himself as very frightening, but maybe he should after Scarlett, Carter, and Walker had all said it. He half-expected the trees to start whispering the same thing. “You’re breathing really hard. Are you injured?” Walker asked.
“No,” Colin replied. His heart was permanently damaged, but he had enough common sense left to know that his family would want to know about broken bones or car accidents like the one his late parents had been in. “I broke up with her.”
“I heard.” Walker’s tone dropped and leveled. “That’s why you’re not okay.” It was said more as a statement instead of a question, and Colin bobbed his head without responding. Walker would know better than anyone how Colin felt about Scarlett because he and his uncle had both fallen in love at the same time. The major difference, however, was that Walker got to keep Talia. In the end, Colin wouldn’t have a happy ending, and he didn’t care to talk it out with someone who’d had to deal with him out of obligation and familial duties to begin with.
The only person he wanted to talk to was Scarlett, and he had made sure he could never go back to her. He made sure she hated him. Nothing between them could be water under the bridge because there was no bridge. He had set it on fire and watched her sob and beg for him not to do it. It had never been harder to turn around and leave her standing rigid amongst the half-packed boxes strewn about her bedroom. A life he could have had if he weren’t himself. If he were normal.
The room Colin had spent countless hours in, losing himself in vibrant copper hair, smooth, freckled skin, and soft, full lips was forever tainted by today. Would it be like that for her, too? Would she remember him broken with a cold demeanor in the same room they had shared ‘I love you’s in and pressed hands of intention into each other’s skin? Would she dream of him? Or would she replay how he had left her in tears and made her cry more than the one time?
“It’ll be okay,” Walker soothed, bringing Colin out of his thoughts enough to realize he was crying again. Not just crying, but audibly sobbing. “We’ll find you, I promise.”
But Walker was wrong. Colin would never be found again. And there was a large part of him that didn’t want to be found. A part that wished he would fade away into the night like a mist to be forgotten because Scarlett had found him once, body and soul, and he had purposely destroyed that simply because he knew she wouldn’t do it herself. She was too kind to ever call this what it was: an experiment that had failed epically, because while she would forever be the right person for him, he would never be the one for her .
And so, she would remember him that way: wrong person, right time .