Page 126 of Abyss

And that’s when I lay out the rest of my plan.

Little do I know then that I’ll never get to see it through.

Chapter Thirty-Five

KAVI

One Month Later

From: Kavi

To: Nathan

Date: September 18 1:22 AM

Subject: When you’re in a Slump . . .

There are times I wonder where life would have taken us if you were still alive.

Would you have been living out your bachelor days or would you have found someone to share every passing moment?

Would we still talk every day or would we have let the arms of time and distance separate us?

Would I have been calling you on a night where I couldn’t sleep because all I needed was my best friend to tell me it would getbetter?

Because no matter how much I want it to, it isn’t getting better. This ache in my bones, this void inside my chest. Is this what everyone talks about when they say everything is fixable but a broken heart?

Because there’s a black hole where my heart used to be. And now there’s only a vortex of grief, of perpetual night.

I keep living out the summer in my head, replaying it as if it were the only movie on every channel, and somehow hoping for a different ending, knowing full-well there’s only one.

The funny part about this whole situation is that I can’t even yell and scream at Hudson for lying to me. Because he never lied. He never misrepresented where he stood. That was all me, playing out a fairy tale in my head.

But he did rob me, Nathan.

He stole something I can’t quite put into words—an indescribable something I’ll never get back. Whether I have a right to mourn the loss of him or not, I do have a right to mourn that.

Another piece of me that’s gone forever.

xoxo

Special K

“You okay, Kavi? You’ve been gazing out those windows all morning.”

I blink out of my stupor, dropping my fingers from my cherry earrings I was fiddling with, and look toward the voice of Amanda Hitchens, my supervisor at the children’s hospital I now work for. “Just admiring the pristine blue skies. It’s as if the heavens are pretending they didn’t have an all-out melt-down last night with the torrential downpour we had.”

Amanda follows my gaze through the window. “Surprisingly, summer rain is pretty rare in Portland. Maybe it’s a sign of something unexpected on the horizon. Nature has a way of signaling shifts in the air, don’t you think?”

She shuffles inside, looking over the shoulders of some patients—kids who have the misfortune of being at the hospital for extended times—as they put together their ‘feelings collage’ using newspaper and magazine clippings, while I contemplate her words.

Shifts in the air . . .

That’s putting it mildly when I consider all the shifts over the past month. From living in a tiny studio nearby to learning a new city to finding my footing at a new job, there’s been a lot of shifts and changes.

Not to mention learning to live with a broken heart . . .

“Why don’t you go grab your favorite coffee from that café across the street, and I’ll watch the kids for a few minutes?” Amanda regards me with concerned eyes from behind her glasses, perhaps noting my frown. “You look like you could use the walk outside.”

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