I nodded, not able to find the right words to respond with, especially when my throat was becoming tight again.
We sat there for a while, the smell of coffee and detergent mingling in the air, until Shane cleared his throat with deliberate volume.
“Sabrina,” he said, and his tone made her flinch slightly.
She shot him a look.
“You need to tell her,” he continued while shooting me a look that expressed pity and sadness.
“Tell me what?’ I didn’t like the tone of his voice. It was the kind that people use when they are about to say something terrible, something that will break you.
Sabrina sighed, long and conflicted. She looked at me with a new kind of sadness in her eyes. She took my hands. “Amelia. I am so sorry. Caiden is gone. He got back last night and passed out for a bit. But by dawn this morning, he took all that he had from the basement and was out the door. He told us not to wait for him to come back.”
The shock was so cold, and it scoured all the air from my lungs. I looked at Sabrina, at the way her mouth worked open and closed, hating every syllable she was forced to say.
I looked at Shane, who wouldn’t look at me at all. I looked at the mug in my hands, the ring of coffee trembling in its cage, and tried to remember how to speak.
“What do you mean he’s gone?” My voice was a stranger’s, flat and far away.
“He just…left.” Sabrina’s hands fluttered helplessly, her wedding band catching the overhead light. “He barely said bye. I thought maybe he was just blowing off steam or needed time, but—” Her face crumpled, and she pressed her lips together. “I’m so sorry, Amelia. He emptied the room.”
“No,” I said, and it wasn’t a protest so much as a statement of universal law. “He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t just leave. Not like this.”
For a sick second I thought it was a trick. Maybe Caiden just needed a few days alone, or maybe he was already halfway back, stalking out his own return like a wolf in the dark.
But the way Shane wouldn’t meet my eyes, the way Sabrina carried that guilt, told me everything. He was gone.
It was too familiar. The aftermath of loss, the hollowing out, the quicksand that always followed.
I knew how Caiden operated. He was an expert in preemptive abandonment, in leaving before he could be left. It was the only thing in this world he was truly good at.
I slid off the stool and nearly toppled, legs numb. “I need to see,” I said, and I don’t know if it made sense, but Sabrina just nodded and let me pass.
The hallway spun as I walked it. My hands dragged the paint of the stairwell, bracing me for the plummet.
I took the steps two at a time, lightheaded, and at the bottom, I turned left, into the unfinished room that had been his.
There was nothing.
Not nothing, just nothing of him. The mattress was stripped bare, the pile of blankets gone, the battered duffel with the faded Velcro patches nowhere in sight. The closet door gaped open, empty wire hangers creaking in slow arcs.
Every piece of Caiden was gone.
It was a magic trick, a vanishing act. I crossed the room, half-expecting to find something of his, but the only graffiti was the shallow impression of his body in the foam mattress, already fading.
I stood over it, breathing hard, until my legs buckled and I sat down hard on the mattress. A fly buzzed in slow circles overhead, the only thing alive in the world.
He’d done it again. Left before I could. Maybe he thought it was mercy. Maybe he just couldn’t stand the slow rot of growing roots, the hard ache of wanting something you knew you’d only poison if you held it too long.
The grief was not a thing with edges or shape. It was a sickening, tidal undertow, so strong and sudden it pulled my insides straight through the hollow of my ribs.
I didn’t cry at first. I sat there, staring at the gouged-up carpet and the blank, white walls, the loops of cheap extension cord still tacked in lazy curves along the baseboards.
I waited for the world to start again, but all it did was buzz, a mosquito’s whine in my skull, telling me over and over: you should have known.
It was only when I reached down, running my palm over the dead spot in the foam where he’d slept for weeks, that it hit me, the violence of it.
The idiocy, to think this time would be different. It was as if every old wound in my chest had been pierced at once, each scar torn open so the old pain could bleed fresh.
