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Kintsugi: joining with gold.
RAFE: I need you to wait for me. You're it for me. You're my fucking heart.
TABITHA: Rafe...—
RAFE: You're my fucking heart.
♰
𝖂hen Tabitha woke up, it was as a fly in a spiderweb of tubes, smothered in this mycelium of white, fresh linen and her mother's overbearing love—Maren's holding her so tight, it's like she wanted to reach marrow and never leave. (Mother must miss it, Tabitha thought, the embryonic days—when Tabitha was all hers, untouched, safe from it all: within her).
If her touch didn't, her words reached bone, and that's all really mattered. Her voice, thready with guttural desperation, trembling, telling her only daughter that if she didn't fix herself, she was going to end up like her brother. Tabitha was no longer a fly in a web, she was a girl of fourteen, bruised knees, and a worried, bleeding mouth at the altar of Kildare Chapel, delivering a eulogy about the first person she had ever known to a church full of people with crocodile tears, damp handkerchiefs, and pity wounds. Her mother's begging her, her brother's gone and—if you don't fix yourself, you'll end up like Daniel.
No one ever tells you how difficult it is moving on, probably because the suffering was unfathomable, and not everything feels like something else.
Tabitha returned hollow, tender-hearted—she will flinch at everything now, like some bathing, fawnlike creature—and Outer Banks hadn't changed at all. It's like it had been holding its breath, waiting for her to come back. The teeth of it try to take a bite of her sweet flesh, but there's not enough left to satiate. It's fine, though. It'll take from others. Tabitha's not the only tortured girl in Kildare, and she left plenty of friends just like her for it to swallow up whole.
It won't be her. Her mother's lost enough.
She knew how many people she'd be fucking over when she left for the Seasons. But she had to be selfish to be selfless, that's another thing Maren told her. It was mauling her—the hungry island, her grief, unwinding white lines, Rafe. It's whatever. They would've killed each other, anyway. When Tabitha left, she thought he might leave it all behind—callowly, she told herself that they were the worst of it, and with her gone, Rafe might get better too. What they had was shameless, brutal, and all kinds of wrong. Obsessive, almost. Being an addict in love with another addict was a bit like being in a lamb on the killing-floor of an abattoir, and Tabitha wasn't going to let her mother lose another kid all because Rafe Cameron depended on her. She left him, her friends, that whole lifestyle, behind—and salted the fucking earth behind her.
