Delaney James was wearing Chanel the night her husband told her he didn't love her anymore.
In an instant, her picture-perfect Manhattan life-complete with a brownstone on the Upper East Side, a blossoming career as a fashion journalist, and a devas...
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Rain pelts against my window relentlessly, the kind that turns the sky almost black and bends the dogwoods in the front yard until it looks like they might give under the strain. It's the kind of morning that should make me want to stay in bed, to pull the covers over my head and let the day pass without asking anything of me.
Instead, I lie there staring at the ceiling, my thoughts looping back to last night in a way that doesn't seem to want to stop, each piece catching on the next without ever fully lining up.
The drive home – silent in a way that felt wrong after everything that came before it. The way he kept his eyes on the road, jaw set, like whatever had shifted at the bonfire hadn't smoothed back into place. And then at my door, the complete opposite – his hands on my face, firm and sure, that kiss pressed to my forehead like it carried something heavier than a simple goodbye before he stepped back and left without another word.
I don't understand.
We were good. Things between us were the kind of easy that shouldn't exist between two people who haven't spoken in years, the kind that slips in before you can question it. The bonfire, the way he looked at me, the sparkler, his hand holding mine the way it used to, like none of it had changed.
And then, suddenly, it had.
I turn onto my side, dragging the blanket tighter around me, but it does nothing to quiet the restless edge under my skin.
I should be thinking about New York – finding a place to live, a job, getting back to the life I built there that's been sitting untouched while I've been here, waiting for me to step back into it like nothing's different.
But instead, I'm here, caught up on behavior I can't explain and a goodbye that didn't feel like one, turning it over and over like if I find the right angle, it'll make sense.
Seven weeks ago, the idea of being in South Grove filled me with a completely different kind of dread. I didn't want to run into anyone, didn't want to be seen, didn't want to explain myself to a place that still held too many versions of me I wasn't ready to face – especially not to him.
Now, that's not what this is.
Now, I don't feel like a stranger here, and that realization lands in a way I don't know what to do with, because leaving should feel simple. I've done it before. Packed up, moved on, built something new somewhere else.
But this doesn't feel like something I can just walk away from this time.
Not my parents, not Jo and Hannah, who barely knows me but already reaches for me like I've always been a part of her life. Not Mr. McKinnie, who is sick and may or may not have much time left. And not Greyson, who I spent a decade convincing myself hated me, carrying it around like something fixed and unchangeable, only to come back and realize I was wrong.
And now I don't know what to do with that either.
Because whatever exists between us – it isn't gone. It never has been.
