Page 65 of Broken Cedar

I tell myself I’m only going for a week. It’s easier than admitting I packed the suitcase like someone who wasn’t planning to come back. One week to stand on the porch at sunset with Colt’s shoulder against mine and begin building the life I’ve spent eight years pretending I didn’t want.

I open my phone and type out a quick email to my boss.

Subject: Urgent Leave Request

Hi Steven,

I need to take some personal time, effective immediately. Family situation that requires my attention. I’ve cc’d Sophie on all the Davidson files—she knows the project inside and out and can handle anything urgent until I’m back.

I’ll check email when I can. Thanks for your understanding.

Best,

Hallie

I read it back, then delete the word “understanding” and replace it with “flexibility” because understanding sounds like I’m asking permission and flexibility sounds like I’m stating a fact. I hit send before I can delete the whole thing and start over.

I let out a slow breath. A minute later my phone rings. I stare at Steven’s name lighting up the screen. Of course he called. If one of his senior project managers disappeared without warning, I’d call too.

My thumb hovers over Accept. I could answer. I could explain. I could tell him I’ll only be gone a few days and tell him not to worry. Instead I watch it ring. Once. Twice. Three times. Eventually it stops. A moment later my inbox pings with his reply.

I don’t open it. I sit on the edge of the bed and wait for my heartbeat to settle. It doesn’t. It keeps pounding against my ribs. Only…it feels different. Not the panicked arrhythmia of someone running away. The steady, purposeful rhythm of someone moving toward something. Toward someone.

For years I’d thought fear and excitement felt the same because I’d only ever experienced them while leaving. I’d never realised they also existed on the journey home.

After a minute or two, I stand and zip my suitcase. I grab my purse, my phone, and my keys. Do a final sweep of the apartment—lights off, windows closed, dead plants still dead because I am nothing if not consistent in my neglect.

The apartment looks exactly as it did two weeks ago. The only thing that’s changed is me. I lock the door and don’t look back.

Chapter Nineteen

Ipoint the rental car west. The airport slips away behind me one freeway exit at a time. Office towers become apartment blocks. Apartment blocks become warehouses. Warehouses give way to industrial estates, then paddocks stitched together with wire fences and weathered timber posts. The traffic thins until I’m sharing the highway with cattle trucks and caravans, the skyline shrinking in the rear-view mirror until it disappears altogether. I watch it go. I don’t feel the thing I expected to feel, which is grief. I feel something closer to the relief of finally setting down a bag you’ve been carrying so long you stopped noticing it was heavy.

For the first hour, I keep waiting for panic. It doesn’t come. I know what it feels like. The tightening. The voice that has spent eight years narrating my life like a performance review—keep moving, keep building, keep proving. I wait for it the way you wait for a check engine light you know is coming. Instead there’s only the low hum of the tyres and the white lines and, underneath all of it, something embarrassingly close to excitement.

I roll the window down a few inches. The air smells different already, cleaner somehow. I laugh quietly to myself. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Maybe I’m already romanticising the whole thing. The thought sobers me.

What if that’s exactly what I’m doing? What if I’ve confused homesickness with love?

I tighten my grip on the steering wheel. No. I know the difference. Don’t I?

The questions circle for miles, following me through little towns whose names I’ve forgotten and stretches of highway where the only company is the occasional road train rumbling past in the opposite direction.

By the second hour I’ve moved on from the existential questions to the more immediate—and arguably more terrifying—problem of what I’m actually going to say when I get there. I run through it the way I used to run through client presentations. Mentally. Out loud. In the voice I use when I’m trying to sound more confident than I am.

“Hey.”

Too casual. Like I just ran into him at the grocery store.

“I came back.”

Dramatic. Also obvious, given that I will be physically standing in front of him.

“I’ve been an idiot.”

True. Accurate. Probably not the opening line.

“I’m in love with you and I think I always have been and I’m sorry it took me the better part of a decade to stop being terrified of that.”