And then everything was still.
I stared at the spot where he’d been standing, my chest tight and hollow all at once, as if someone had just rung me out like an old dishrag and left me to dry on the pantry floor.
Slowly, as if my limbs no longer belonged to me, I slid down the wall.
My back hit the wood paneling with a thud. My legs folded against my chest. My hands curled into fists I couldn’t unclench.
I don’t know how long I sat there.
Minutes.
Maybe years.
The cookies I’d helped Violet prep earlier were probably done by now, perfectly golden on the cooling rack, sweet little lies in paper wrappers.
Guests would be milling around the lodge for the afternoon.
My mom would be humming in the kitchen.
Millie would be somewhere not-so-sneakily plotting someone’s romantic fate in the woods.
And me?
I was sitting on a pantry floor, reeling from a question I never should’ve had to ask.
Are you married?
It had come out in a panic. A sharp, blurted thing. But it had been sitting in my chest for days now, buried beneath his clipped responses, the ghost of that phone call, the way he pulled back just when I started leaning in.
I hadn’t wanted it to be true.
Hell, maybe itwasn’ttrue.
Maybe it was something else entirely. Some old wound. Some part of him too broken or ashamed to say out loud.
But if itwasn’ttrue, why hadn’t he said so?
Why had heleft?
And why had I let him so far under my skin that the silence he left behind hurt more than any answer ever could?
A summer fling.
That’s all this was ever going to be.
And I was the idiot who tried to turn it into a fairytale.
Because it felt like one, didn’t it?
The surprise guest. The reluctant grump. The firelight kisses, awkward banter, and near-death encounter with an angry beaver. It had all the pieces of a fairytale.
But real life?
Real life didn’t come with guaranteed happy endings.
Real life came with questions left hanging in the air, and the ache of wanting more from someone who couldn’t give it.
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes.
