Chapter 41
AVA - WE GROW OLD TOGETHER
I didn’t cry.
Not when I left the station.
Not when I passed the coffee shop where he used to wait for me.
Not when I got home and saw the hoodie I stole from him draped over the back of the kitchen chair.
I didn’t cry.
I couldn’t.
Instead, I cleaned.
I scrubbed the counters until my knuckles went raw. I bleached the sink. I folded laundry that wasn’t even mine. I reorganized the spice rack and threw out three expired jars of cumin like they were responsible for the ache in my ribs.
Because I needed control.
Because everything else felt like it was slipping through my hands again.
Because Harlan fucking Gray, this man who said he loved me, had turned on me like every other disappointment dressed as stability.
Three weeks ago, he made coffee and kissed my shoulder like it meant something.
And tonight he looked me in the eye and chose silence.
Chose distance.
Then blamed the version of me I’ve spent my whole damn life trying not to become.
Jaded. Bitter. Angry.
He said I was always looking for the cracks.
What he didn’t understand was I had to.
Because when you’ve spent enough time inside broken things, you learn to recognize them before they collapse again.
Remi knocked once and came in without waiting for an answer. She always did that when she knew I was unravelling, walking into the middle of the mess without flinching.
She took one look at me, sitting on the floor with a half-drunk glass of wine and a trash bag full of takeout containers I didn’t remember us ordering, and said, “You know, you don’t have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Pretend he didn’t gut you.”
“I’m not pretending,” I said. “I’m compartmentalizing.”
She sank onto the floor beside me. “That sounds healthy.”
“It’s fine,” I muttered. “I’m fine.”
She grabbed the bottle that sat beside my glass and took a sip, looking around. “You just sanitized the light switches with a vengeance usually reserved for exorcisms.”
I looked down at my wine. It wasn’t funny. But it kind of was.
“I let him in,” I whispered. “I fucking let him in, Remi. I told him everything. Things I’ve never said out loud. And he, he just threw it all back like it was a weapon he’d been waiting to use.”
Remi didn’t flinch. She just nodded, like she understood in a way few people ever could.
“I’m so mad at myself,” I said. “I swore I wouldn’t fall for anyone like that again. I knew better.”
“Of course you did,” she said gently. “But knowing better doesn’t mean we stop hoping, dreaming and trying.”
My phone buzzed on the counter. I didn’t have to check to know who it was.
“I’m not answering,” I said.
“Good.”
I looked at her. “Good?”
She shrugged. “You don’t have to forgive him. But you do have to survive him.”
That cracked something open. Not enough to cry.
But enough to sting. Remi leaned back against the cabinets and let her head thunk against the wood, taking another sip straight from the bottle.
“We’re still young, Ava. We’ve still got time.
Maybe there’s a needle in this haystack of emotional illiteracy masquerading as men. ”
I snorted. “Remi...”
She held up a hand. “No, listen. The dream? Getting married, having babies, building a life with a man who doesn’t break you? Maybe that’s not ours.”
“Wow, this pep talk is so uplifting. Keep going, Carter.”
“I’m serious,” she said, nudging my leg with her foot.
“Maybe we grow old together. Just us. We buy a house on a piece of property with big windows and trees that don’t get cut down.
We adopt kids, teenagers, maybe... the ones no one else takes in.
And we raise them into the kind of men and women the world needs more of. ”
I blinked at her, waiting for the punch line that didn't come.
“You’re serious.”
“I’m dead serious. We can be each other’s forever. You’re already stuck with me.”
I tried to smirk. “I’m not into you that way, Rem.”
She made a face. “Obviously. But wouldn’t it be easier if we were?”
“Yes,” I said. “God, yes.”
She sighed dramatically. “Fine. Then we’ll just have to find men we can climb like trees when the need arises for consensual, mutually beneficial orgasms... and then send them packing.”
I laughed, an ugly, broken sound that caught me off guard. "Or we never let them know where we live, we go to their place and fuck them and then leave them..."
She grinned, triumphant. “Exactly. Because the only men allowed on our property are the boys we raise into them.”
There was silence between us after that. But it was warm. Whole.
The kind of silence I didn’t have to earn or apologize for.
Eventually, I stood and stared at my reflection in the microwave door.
Tired. Worn down. But still here.
He said I was jaded.
Maybe I am.
But maybe jaded is just another word for awake.
And if that’s true...
I’ll never close my eyes again.
I didn’t plan it.
But then I saw his hoodie again.
The one I stole the first night I stayed over, when I passed out on his couch and he covered me with it. Since then, we had joked that we needed a custody arrangement for the hoodie.
My fingers brushed the worn cuff, and something inside me cracked.
Before I could think better of it, I grabbed a box from the hall closet and set it on the table.
And then I started pulling pieces of him out of my home like splinters.
The picture of the three of us from Christmas.
His spare toothbrush.
The book he’d left on my nightstand, the one he promised I’d “love, if I ever actually gave myself five minutes to breathe.”
The sweatpants he wore on lazy Sundays when he cooked breakfast barefoot.
The pen he always carried but somehow kept leaving here.
The key he left on my counter, that I hadn't gotten the nerve to use for his place, and now never would.
Every piece was a thread tied to the dream I’d let myself believe in. A future where mornings meant coffee made too strong, and evenings meant him, sprawled on my couch, arguing about whether we could call his overly dry, pan-seared chicken ‘actual cooking’.
A future where I got to be soft. Where I wasn’t always holding my breath, waiting for the ground to give way beneath me.
I blinked hard and shoved another item into the box.
The ache in my chest spread until it hurt to breathe.
I wasn’t ready to hate him.
But I couldn’t stand the way his ghost clung to every corner of this place.
I was halfway through stacking his things when I found a note sticking out.
Harlan’s handwriting.
I couldn't read it.
I folded it carefully, once, twice, three times, until it disappeared into my palm and threw it in the box.
By the time I was done, the box was heavier than it looked. It felt like I’d packed pieces of myself along with his things.
I stood there for a long time, staring at it, my throat tight.
I couldn’t see him. Not yet. Not with this hollow ache still raw and open.
“Remi,” I called, voice rough.
She appeared in the doorway, brows drawn. “Yeah?”
“Can you…” I gestured toward the box without looking at it. “Can you drop this at the station for me?”
Her gaze softened. “You sure?”
I nodded. “I can’t...” My voice cracked, and I forced it steady. “I can’t deal with seeing him. Not yet.”
Remi crossed the room, didn’t say a word, just rested a hand on my shoulder for a beat before she pulled me into a hug.
I stared at the box like it had personally offended me, trying to hold back the tears.
For the first time since leaving the station, I felt it settle in my bones:
Whatever I thought we were building…
It was gone.