CHAPTER 10
BELLA
I woke up alone. The lamp was off. The light filtering in through the window told me it wasn’t quite dawn. The apartment felt even more quiet than normal without Jace in the bed next to me.
I lay still for a long minute and listened to the building.
He wasn't downstairs. The barn was the kind of structure where I could hear him moving in it through the floorboards. The horses were settled. No boots, no cinch buckles, no kettle. Just the small sounds of the building waking up around me without him in it.
I'd known he would go. We hadn't talked about it, but we hadn't needed to. Rory had been at her friend’s house and Jace was the kind of father who would be in the house when his daughter came through the door, no exceptions. He'd left after I’d fallen asleep. That was the version of leaving I could understand. It was the version he could give without having to negotiate with me about it.
It still felt different in the morning than it had felt the night before.
I sat up and pulled the comforter around my shoulders and looked at the empty side of the bed.
Last night had been the most vulnerable I’d been with anyone in almost a decade. I’d asked for everything. He’d given it. He’d told me he was shaking because it had been four years and because he wanted to memorize how I looked. I’d believed him. I still believed him. That wasn't the problem.
The problem was the empty side of the bed in the grey morning light.
I knew this feeling. I'd had this feeling in a hundred apartments and rentals and motel rooms in a dozen states for fifteen years. The feeling of waking up in a space that had been temporarily mine and realizing that part of the trip was over. The part where I packed up was the next thing.
I had been waking up to this feeling my entire adult life. It was practically a reflex.
The reflex didn’t care that this time was different. The reflex didn’t give a shit that the man left because he had a fifteen-year-old daughter coming home and a Father's Day to run, not because he didn't want to wake up next to me. The reflex just identified the pattern: empty room, grey light, used bed.
I got up.
I pulled on jeans and a t-shirt because I couldn't make decisions in a comforter. I made coffee on the two-burner because I couldn't make decisions without coffee. I stood at the window with the mug warming my hands and looked out at the paddock and tried to talk myself out of what I already knew I was going to do.
It didn't work.
Half an hour later, I pulled the larger duffel out from under the bed.
The smaller one was already half-packed. I'd never really unpacked it. I'd lived in this apartment for weeks and the smaller bag had been sitting open on the chair by the window the entire time, ready to go, like the rest of me. That was the version of myself I was waking up to this morning. The one who had never actually moved in.
I told myself I wasn't leaving. I was getting ready just in case. The way I always was.
I folded a flannel and set it in the bag.
This was the right call. I'd said what I said to Jace yesterday because it was true. He couldn't keep drawing me into the center of his family and then building a wall down the middle of it. Rory had already started to depend on me. I'd seen it in the way she angled her body toward me when she showed me shots, the way she'd started saving questions for later, assuming there'd be a later with me in it.
I knew what it felt like to be the thing someone left. I wasn't going to do that to a fifteen-year-old who already had one parent who couldn't stay in the frame.
I folded the second flannel before I'd decided whether I actually believed what I was doing.
Flannel. Charger cables. Spare memory cards sorted by size.
I was reaching for my second camera bag when the stairs creaked.
Rory stopped in the doorway. She had her phone in her hand, but she wasn't looking at it. She was looking at the open bag on the bed.
"You're leaving because of me," she said.
"No." I set the bag down. "Come in."
She didn't move.
"Rory. Come in."
