Page 2 of Almost Home
“I guess they’ve been thinking about moving for a few months now, and now that—” She pulled in a breath but pushed through. “So we’re moving. Mom, Eddie, and I are leaving this week.”
Cymbals crashed in the back of my mind, and none of her words made sense. Her mom, sister, and her… “Leaving?Moving?”
“I know it’s sudden. I—I’m sorry.” She squeezed my hand, then pulled hers out of my grasp.
“What—what is this?” I could hardly speak, hardly see.
What about finishing school together? College together? The baby was… We wouldn’t have this baby. He or she wouldn’t wear the little outfit we’d bought a few weeks ago that Mom had tucked away when she’d found me staring at it. We wouldn’t have to learn about car seats and the right kind of diapers. But we could still be together, build something else together.
I searched her face, but she wouldn’t look at me. Tears tracked one after another down her cheeks.
“I’m sorry. I just—I can’t.”
And then, she pushed open the door and jogged to her car. Started it. Sped off. I stayed trapped in the cab, in this moment, full of disbelief and a fragile, vulnerable feeling like I’d walked over the just-frozen ice of a November lake.
Her taillights disappeared around the corner, and I shifted into drive, unable to let her go like this. She had drowned so far under the grief that she couldn’t see a way out. Her parents were moving; she didn’t have to. We’d make it through this. We’d had a plan before—we’d go to college, I’d get into ROTC, and we’d marry at graduation and she’d come with me. We’d stay together, never to be parted.
This? Just a bump in the road. A horrible, heartbreaking bump, but we could manage it. We would.
At the bottom of the canyon, she pulled into the parking area that served carpoolers and a few of the trailheads. She must’ve seen me behind her. I jumped out into the empty lot, and she did, too, car still running.
I grabbed her arms, holding her just lightly enough she could get away with the slightest move. I didn’t want to trap her or hurt her any more than all of this had, but I couldn’t pretend she was making sense or that I understood.
“You leave this week. So… what do we do?”
Her eyes had grown redder now, her skin splotchy from crying hard the last few minutes. She really shouldn’t have been driving at all.
“I can’t do this, Wilder. I’m sorry.”
She wouldn’t look at me. Still. I shook her a little, just to make her give me her eyes. “Sarah, what is this?”
“I’m leaving and… this is our goodbye.”
The words punched into my gut, and my hands fell away from her. A fissure ran along my sternum, severing something vital when it reached my ribs. I said the only word I could summon. “No.”
“It’s not your choice,” she bit out.
“It’s not only yours!”
She couldn’t do this. This wasn’t her. This was the grief talking and showed just how wrong this all was. Every damn second of all this was wrong!
Her eyes, more blue than ever, speared into me without mercy.
“I’m sorry. I really am. But I have to go, and I—” Her voice broke. She pressed a shaking hand to her mouth like it’d hold in the emotion, the destruction she was causing. When she pulled her hand away, I felt the shift in her.
Like she’d stepped back from the moment and extracted herself. She wasn’t my Sarah, slogging through the brutality of having lost something so unimaginably precious. She wasn’t the woman I’d loved since the time I’d known her and fallen for the minute I knew how to do that, too.
This wasn’t the girl who’d shared everything with me and coaxed me into sharing as much of myself as I knew how to.
This was someone else—some mercenary version of her, only willing to take her goodbye and run. My confused, battered heart could hardly beat through the realization that she meant this. She meant every word about leaving, and she had no intention of trying to figure out another way to be together.
“I have to go. It’s—it’s for the best. Anything we had planned—” She hauled in a breath against that break. “It’s gone now. You’re off the hook.” She crushed her folded arms against her chest, bowing over them, but met my eyes one last time. “I hope you have a really beautiful life, Wilder.”
And then, she was gone, leaving me to stare after her and wonder how everything I’d wanted had crumbled to dust in a matter of days. The life I’d imagined with her—becoming more of ourselves together as we grew up, building a family together, growing old together… She’d thrown it all away with those cruel words. Like anything would be beautiful again without her. Withoutus.
That thin ice cracked and I went under.
She wouldn’t see me after that—refused to answer when I called. I overhead Mom and Wyatt talking in low tones about how Mom had called Sarah’s parents and asked them to let us speak, but they’d insisted Sarah couldn’t come to the phone, that we’d already said our goodbyes.
