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LETTIE
“It’sa little like deja vu, don’t you think?” I asked him as we stirred the ingredients for the icing. The donuts were rising, and Tuck had put on some music quietly in the background. “I mean, a little less flour and a few more wrinkles, but deja vu nonetheless.”
Except last time, there hadn’t been a gaping hole in the past we’d needed to talk about. I felt like I was going to internally combust, and yet I didn’t want to bring it up. I didn’t want to hash out all the details of that summer and the whys and the hows and the fight that would inevitably follow.
I had sealed that part of myself shut, and I didn’t necessarilywantto rip the seam. I knew it was only a matter of time, though. There were threads pulling loose, and I was going to come unraveled. Tuck was in town now for the foreseeable future, and I didn’t know how long I could keep bumping into him without demanding answers for why he did what he did.
He looked up from the bowl. “Yeah, it is.” He stopped stirring for a moment. “I don’t see any wrinkles on you though. You still look just as beautiful to me as you did when you were seventeen.” He halted and his voice quieted. “Probably even more.”
I felt heat creep up my neck and to my cheeks, blushing them. “You don’t look so bad yourself. I like the scruff, and I’m a fan of the tattoos.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I repeated. “I like that you seem to be the same too. Like, even though you have all these new markings, you’re still the same guy I knew back then.”
A smirk formed on his lips before his face fell, his eyes darting back to the bowl. The air grew thick around us, and I knew he must have been thinking about the exact thing that I was. That summer together in Aveline. Spending our days together swimming and baking and holed up in Avonlea reading together and learning about each other. Falling in love. Those summer nights under the stars.
And then that last night, when everything had gone up in flames.
I wiped my hands on my apron and wondered if my next few words were going to ruin any chance of Tuck and me forming a new friendship, or whatever it was I was feeling, but I couldn’t keep looking at him, watching his arms flex with each stir and wishing I could touch him. I felt every emotion that had been stuffed to the depths of my soul resurface, and in an instant, I was seventeen again. My eyes filled with tears that I couldn’t force down, and I let them fall freely. I let him see just a fraction of the wreckage that had been my life for years. He didn’t know. He couldn’t have known what it meant to me for him to leave, and he couldn’t have known the secret I had been harboring for twelve years. The weight of it surrounding me.
Then I asked him.
Point blank.
The question I had been saving for him.
“Tuck, why’d you do it? Why’d you leave me?”
“My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.”
?L.M. MONTGOMERY, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES
FIFTY-EIGHT
SEPTEMBER 2005
LETTIE
Avery stoppedme when we got inside, whipping me around by my arm. Her face was contorted in anger, and she was breathing heavily from trying to keep up with me.
“How could you do this?” she demanded.
My head was throbbing, my face covered in snot and tears, and the last thing I wanted to do was listen to Avery scold me like I was a child who had acted out.
“Avery, please. I need to be alone. Just let me be alone for a minute,” I pleaded with her.
“No!” she yelled back, blocking me from the stairs that would lead me back to the dressing room. The dressing room where I wanted to bury my face in the pillow of the velvet couch and cry for days or months or even years. “You are being ridiculous! Who even is that guy? Was he some charity case you took pity on? Violet, you are better than him, and you just dragged Theo around like he was nothing? I don’t even think I know you anymore.”
I laughed maniacally and wiped my cheeks with fury. “No, Avery, you don’t. You know nothing about me. None of you do!” I shouted as my mother came in through the side door. “You don’t know me at all. I want to be a veterinarian, did you guys know that? I don’t want to marry some stupid boy just because he’s rich or because he has a good family name. I want to be with Tuck because he is good and kind and he loves me! He loves me and I love him and I belong with him. I don’t belong with any of you!”
“Quiet your tongue, Violet,” my mother replied, looking around.
After I had poured my heart out, divulged my deepest truths, she stood there, her hand to her chest, and she told me to be quiet.
“I love him. Does that mean nothing to you?” I replied, more quietly now.
“You’re a child. You don’t even know what love is.”
