Page 25 of The Woodsmoke Women's Book of Spells
“Do you need me to apologize for leaving? Is that it?” I look at him sadly. Not for the first time, I wonder what it would have been like if I hadn’t run that day, if I hadn’t left, if I’d become Thomas Gray’s wife instead of Jess’s. The old scars on my heart are still there, still present, and yet, looking at him now, the way his face has slumped ever so slightly over the past decade, the unkempt hair, the pattern of crow’s feet around his eyes, I knowfor sure we wouldn’t have worked. I didn’t belong with him then, and I don’t belong with him now. I thought that if I married him, the whole town would accept me for who I am. But at the last minute I realized that wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t marry someone, tie myself to someone forever, just to appease the small town I grew up in. You can’t fit yourself into a box that wasn’t built for you.
He rubs his hand over his jaw, the prickly stubble making a scratching sound. I remember when he grew his first beard. I remember his first shave. I remember so many things, so many details, and it seems strange that they belong to me. It seems strange thatheever belonged to me.
“How long.”
“How long?” I frown at him.
“Until you leave again. Until you’re gone. Surely you won’t stay.”
A flash of anger so lightning-quick my fingers tremble forces me to pull in a breath. “Are you asking me how long I’m staying inmyhometown? Like it’s your right to be here but not mine?”
He works his jaw, as though he’s chewing on his words. “For Christ’s sake, Carrie, just tell me.”
“As long as I like,” I say, crossing my arms. “Why does it matter?”
“Carrie.” He sighs, deflating further. “You agreed to marry me, then you ran. On our wedding day. In front of everyone, the whole town. All our families, our friends. You never looked back. Never—never sent me a message. Never wrote. I had to beg your mum to tell me you were all right. And yes, I see now that we wouldn’t have worked. I do. We were too young, we both got caught up in it, and it was a thing that should have run its course. But weren’t we friends? Did it... did it not deserve at least a postcard? Or a text message?”
“This wasn’t the place for me back then,” I murmur, pushing down my guilt. Pushing down everything but the residual bitterness that lingers like the tea leaves in Cora’s teapot. Bitterness about feeling that I didn’t belong in Woodsmoke. That Tom had no intention, as it turned out, of leaving Woodsmoke with me, as we had planned. I wanted to be accepted by Woodsmoke, but that didn’t mean I wanted to stay. Not back then anyway. “I always intended to leave and travel.”
I pull in another breath, feeling once again that constricting dress across my ribs, how it felt that day to put it on, remembering how I stared at myself in the full-length mirror in my bedroom. I looked too skinny, and my mum placed her hands on my shoulders, as if to stop me from floating away. I remember what she whispered:You don’t have to do this. You know that, right? Your whole life is ahead of you, Carrie. I know you think you’re doing the right thing by going through with this, but you’re only eighteen.
Our eyes met in the mirror, and I think she knew as well. The secret that I hid, under all that white and tulle. The secret that my heart wasn’t here, wasn’t with him, that it wanted to wander very far away. And Tom had decided, quietly, without telling me, that he wouldn’t leave Woodsmoke. Once we were married, once we were tied to each other... I’d have to stay too.
I repeated my mum’s words in my head all the way to the church. I felt the kisses on my cheeks, the bouquet thrust into my fingers. The eyes on me, so many eyes that I flinched. Did they all know too that if I married Tom I wouldn’t be leaving Woodsmoke? My shoulders began to shake under the veil, and all I could hear was a constant, tinny whine. As soon as my feet carried me all the way to the altar, they’d see me.Reallysee me. Tom would pull back my veil and find all that pretty makeup smeared down my face. The eye shadow, the mascara, the layers of foundation plastered on my skin.
I wondered if he’d say,Sorry, I’m not leaving. Or if he’d deny what I’d heard, tell me it wasn’t true, that we could still go traveling together and see the world. Deny that he had secured a full-time apprentice job as an electrician, that his mum and dad had put down a deposit on a house for us. Or if he’d finally tell me the truth at the front of that pretty old church, giving everyone a good look at how afraid I was, how trapped. How not right for each other we were. How much I wanted to bolt. How Thomas Gray, my childhood sweetheart, the boy I had so publicly given my entire being to... didn’t love the real me. He wanted a version of me that didn’t exist. A version that would marry at eighteen, stay in our hometown forever, and be perfectly content with those firmly built boundaries around my existence.
Something snapped inside me that day. I picked up my dress, wrapped those layers of tulle in my fists, turned to my dad, and looked into his sad, hooded eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I gasped. “I can’t.”
He blinked at me, surprise flaring briefly on his face before he covered it up. Then he nodded in that slow way of his. He knew that I’d always felt like I didn’t quite belong in Woodsmoke. And he was the one who had told me, hesitantly, calmly, that Tom had a job and a house all lined up. “Go to Cora’s. I’ll hold them all off.”
I cried then, real wailing tears and sobs that caught in my throat as my dad pulled back my veil, kissed my forehead, and told me quietly, “You’re free. Run.”
I ran to Cora’s without looking back. She didn’t believe in church weddings and never attended them, not even family ones. So I knew she’d be there, getting ready for the reception, for the big party we had planned for afterward in the orchard of Mum and Dad’s back garden. With the wind tugging at the pins in my hair, I discarded the bouquet in some hedge along the way. I tookthe back ways, the narrow lanes between the fields, the old ways Cora had taught me. When I got to her house, she pulled all the pins from my hair and listened to my heart. She cried softly when my dad showed up to drive me away from Woodsmoke.
That was ten years ago. That’s what everyone remembers. They remember only whatIdid, how I fled. How I stood Thomas Gray up at the altar and broke the poor boy’s heart. How the big party never happened, the bunting and the tablecloths were packed away, and the wedding feast was boxed up in Tupperware, then eventually thrown out.
“I’m not here to rake up the past,” he says, more softly than before. Like he’s rewinding his memory too, working his way back to the days before the wedding. Maybe even the years before that. The years when it was him and me, Tom and Carrie. The years when Jess was my best friend, as close as a sister.
“Then why are you here?”
“I—” he swallows. “I need you to stay away, from me, from Elodie, and from Jess. Do whatever you need to do, then go. I can’t... I can’t have you upsetting them. Not that I think you’d do it intentionally, but—”
“Elodie, she’s the girl I saw with you in town? Your daughter?”
“Yes.”
I sniff, staring out at the endless cold. The frost inside the car, the frost that’s built up between us is icing up my veins. It used to be the three of us. But now the two of them have shut the door, and I’m very much on the outside. “Understood.”
“You were never meant to come back, you know that? We didn’t think we’d ever hear from you again. You broke Jess’s heart, leaving like you did. She’s spent ten years getting over it.”
My breath hitches, and I shrink inside at the thought of Jess upset, the thought of her sad at my leaving. But when I ran, it wasnever to get away from her. I just needed to be free. “You talk as if I’m your ghost.”
He sighs, reaching for the car door. “It sure feels like you are, Carrie. It sure feels that way.”
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I didn’t want this life with you.”
