“This isn’t done.”
“I want you to leave my parents’ house. Now. I’ll arrange to get my things from the apartment. I’ll have someone with me. You don’t need to be there. We’re done. That’s final. If you come back here or contact me in any way I haven’t invited, I will give a very clear account of this conversation to whoever needs to hear it.”
He stares at me, looking for an angle or a lever that hasn’t been tried. There isn’t one. He knows it, so he picks up his jacket from the back of the chair and looks at me one last time with that assessing look.
I look back.
I don’t adjust.
I stand in my parents’ kitchen in my new clothes, meet his eyes, and wait.
Then he just… walks away.
I blow out a shaky breath as the front door closes, and I hear his car go.
The cloth is still on the table, damp and slightly pink at the center. The chair is at an angle where he pushed it back. The light through the window is going amber.
I don’t know what I feel. That’s the honest answer. It’s too many things at once. Relief. Grief. The hollow that follows something you’ve been building toward for so long.
I think about Griffin. I think about his hands on my face.Don’t let him do it to you. Baby, you promised me.
I want his arms. I want to be held by Griffin Hayes, press my face into his neck, and let the hollow fill with something warm.
“Piper.”
My head snaps up to see Mom in the doorway wearing her good blue cardigan. She’s looking at me with that knowing look. Her eyes are bright, and I can see the full weight of the mother-knowledge she’s been holding.
I break. I don’t choose it. It just happens. I press my hands to my face, and the sound that comes out of me is so raw that I feel like I’m bleeding out.
She crosses the kitchen, and when her arms come around me, I fold into her the way I did when I was small. She just holds me like she used to and doesn’t say a word.
I feel more people. Arms from behind—that’s Madison. Then something warm on my other side—that’s Rowan. Dad’s hand is on the top of my head.
I break fully. I cry for the dress that wasn’t mine, and the music that went quiet, and the years of slowly disappearing. I cry for the two weeks of coming back and the man who just left for the last time. I cry for all the things I didn’t say when I should have.
I cry because it’s over. I cry because it’s only now, in my family’s arms, that I understand how much I needed it to be.
Forty-Nine
Griffin
I’ve been home for three hours.
Three hours of nothing. I showered, I shaved, and I stood in the kitchen long enough to drink two full glasses of water. I tried to sit on the couch. I tried to lie down. I paced the hallway until the floorboards probably regretted meeting me.
None of it helped. I can’t settle because I can’t stop hearing the echo of that front door closing behind Piper when she went inside to face him.
I don’t know how long she was in there, but it was long enough for me to replay every second of the trip. Every morning she blinked awake like she wasn’t used to being allowed to rest. Every time she laughed with her whole body like she was surprised joy still existed. Every quiet moment where she’d look at the horizon with a face that said she didn’t know where she belonged.
And now? I’m home. She’s home. But it doesn’t feel like anything is settled. Something sits under my ribs like a clenched fist.
I know she needed to do that alone. She needed to end things on her terms. But fuck, it’s hard not knowing.
I know she’s at her parents’. I know Noah, Madison, and Rowan are there. I know Ezra is, categorically, not there anymore, because Noah texted me two words after the bar:He’s gone.I exhaled for the first time in three hours, but I still need to know she’s okay. Not the family version of okay. I need her version.
When the doorbell finally rings, it startles me more than it should. I expect Noah or Rowan, anyone calling to tell me how it went. But when I open the door, it’s Piper.
She’s still in the clothes from the trip—the linen shirt, the shorts, the earrings from Mira Cove. Her face is bare, and her eyes are the specific red of someone who has cried a lot, stopped, and then started again. She’s got Gerald tucked under her arm.
