Chapter 6 Elena
The highway stretched out ahead of me, empty and dark.
Three hours to Millbrook. Three hours of nothing but white lines and my own thoughts. I cranked the heat up even though I wasn't cold, gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles went white, and drove.
My phone sat dark on the passenger seat. I'd turned it off somewhere around the first red light, when the buzzing wouldn't stop. Matt. Matt. Matt. Probably Angela too by now, panicking, wondering what I'd told him, what he'd told me, whether their little house of cards had finally collapsed.
It had.
I thought about the last time we'd been together. Really together. Five nights ago, maybe six. The way he'd touched me, slow and tender. The way he'd brushed my hair back from my face and looked at me like I was the only thing in the world that mattered.
"I love you," he'd whispered. "I love you so much."
And I'd believed him. I'd believed every word, never knowing he’d already been with her by then.
Had he touched her the same way? Whispered the same things in her ear while she arched against him on the exam table? Had he told her he loved her too, or was that reserved for me? The wife at home, the consolation prize, the woman he came back to after he was done?
The questions came and went. I let them pass through me like weather.
I turned up the radio, some country station bleeding in and out of static. I let the noise fill the car so I didn't have to sit in silence with the memory of his hands, his mouth, and the way he'd talked about baby names and nursery colors while he was fucking someone else.
The same hands. The same mouth. The same lies.
Mile markers smeared into one another. An hour behind me, two still ahead.
Somewhere along the way, the road blurred into a kind of numb tunnel, and then—finally—the sign for Millbrook appeared in my headlights.
Green and white, reflective letters catching the beam.
Population 4,200. Same as it had been when I left for college.
Same as it had been when Matt and I used to park out by the reservoir and talk about all the places we'd go, all the things we'd do once we got out of this town.
We’d been seventeen, sprawled on a blanket in the bed of his dad’s truck, the kind of night where the stars were so bright you could see the Milky Way if you stared long enough.
"I'm gonna marry you someday," he'd said. Not a question. Just a fact, like the sky was blue and the grass was green and Matt loved me.
I'd laughed, told him he was crazy. But I'd believed him then too.
Funny how that worked. Believing him.
I passed the old drive-in, shut down since we were kids. The gas station where he'd bought me flowers for prom—gas station flowers, because he'd forgotten until the last minute and everywhere else was closed. I'd loved them anyway. Loved him anyway.
Then, the diner where we'd carved our initials into the booth. The field where he'd first kissed me, sophomore year, both of us shaking and awkward and sure we'd invented something no one else had ever felt.
Millbrook held all of it. Every version of us, every promise he'd made and broken.
But Matt wasn’t here anymore. He was back in the city, probably pacing our kitchen or calling Angela, maybe already at her place while the two of them figured out what to do now that everything had blown up in their faces.
Maybe fucking her again. Why wouldn’t he? There was nothing left to lose now.
I turned off the main road onto the gravel drive, the familiar crunch under my tires carrying me toward the house as the old oak tree came into view, its branches stretching over the yard.
The porch light was dark at nearly 3 AM, and the swing my father built for my mother rocked gently in the wind.
I killed the engine and sat there for a moment in the dark, listening to the tick of the cooling motor. The silence of the countryside. No sirens, no traffic, no neighbors. Just crickets and the faint rustle of wind through the fields.
I got out of the car.
The front door opened before I reached the porch steps.
My father stood in the doorway, shotgun in hand, white beard catching the moonlight.
He looked older than I remembered, bone-tired in a way that went beyond the hour.
But his eyes were sharp as ever, scanning the darkness behind me before settling on my face.
"Dad," I said. "It's me."
He lowered the gun. Squinted at me.
"Ellie?" His voice was rough with sleep. "What the hell are you doing here at three in the—"
He stopped.
I don’t know what he saw. I thought I was still holding it together, still ice and steady and walking out of that kitchen in my mind like I hadn’t shattered on the way here.
But something in my face must have cracked. Something he could read the way he'd always been able to read me, even when I was twelve years old and trying to be brave for a dying horse.
"Ellie-bug," he said quietly. A name from when I was small, when scraped knees and bad dreams were the biggest things I had to survive..
That was what broke me.
Not Matt's excuses. Not Angela's tears. Not the video or the texts or the lies.
My father, standing in his doorway in his old bathrobe, calling me by a name no one had used in twenty years.
The sob came up from somewhere deep—guttural, animal, the sound of something tearing loose. My knees buckled, and I would have hit the porch steps if he hadn't caught me, the shotgun clattering to the ground as his arms came around me.
"I've got you," he said. "I've got you, sweetheart."
I buried my face in his chest and cried like I hadn't cried since I was twelve years old, kneeling in the dirt beside a dying mare.
Cried for the marriage I'd thought I had.
The future I'd thought was coming. The man I'd loved since I was fifteen years old who'd looked me in the eye and lied and lied and lied.
My father held me through all of it. He didn't ask questions. He didn't say a word. He just held me, steady and solid, while I finally fell apart.