Page 67 of Ember Meadow
“I didn’t see you after the Fourth of July because I had to go take care of something. But I’m back now, and I’d really like to see you now,” he says, voice so low I can barely hear him over the rain.
“I can’t do this.” A tear rolls down my cheek, and all I can think is I’m grateful for the rain to blend it in.
“What?” he says, eyes crinkled with confusion.
“I don’t really know you, Miles. You don’t really know me, either. There’s a reason I don’t do this. It’s too complicated. My entire life is already complicated enough,” I breathe.
He crosses his arms, “Of course you know me.”
“I didn’t know you were married until today.”
Miles freezes in his place. He definitely wasn’t expecting me to know that. My heart sinks at the confirmation he was hiding it from me.
“Who told you that?” he says, voice rough.
I sigh, “It doesn’t matter who told me.Youdidn’t. It should have been you. I’ve told you all about my shitty family, living with my aunt, my dating past for God’s sake. And you left out a huge, important detail about yourself. Were you ever going to tell me?”
“Of course I was going to tell you. I just– it’s not really something I like to relive,” he says carefully. “I haven’t talked about it.”
“Ever?” I ask.
Miles sighs, running a hand down his face. “Look, can we go inside? It’s not safe out here. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
I nod as his hand comes instinctively to my lower back to lead me inside the cabin. I’m not sure he even realizes he’s doing it. His touch is warm, as always, against my rain-soaked clothes.
We kick our mud-covered boots off outside, and I take off my raincoat once I get in the door. I use the inside as a makeshift towel to ring out my hair a bit. I’ve never been in a downpour that has instantly soaked me before today, like we were in a movie. Under a hose for dramatic effect. Not even the rain in town was as heavy as it was out by the cabin.
I follow Miles to the fireplace, where a small fire bursts to life. We both jump back slightly at the flames.
“Did you start a fire?” I ask.
Miles turns to me wide-eyed. “No I didn’t. Did your crew install a starter or something?”
“No,” I reply. “We didn’t touch the fireplace. It’s the one part of the cabin that didn’t need any updating.”
I’ve never seen an actual fire in it before. It’s gorgeous, casting a soft glow throughout the entire room. Yellow and orange flames flicker under the chimney, warming the room.
Miles grunts, shaking his head at the fireplace. “This cabin is so weird. I’ll see if I can fix that.”
He stops at the hearth, sitting on the edge of the rock in front of the fire. I sit on the other side, just a few feet separating us. But it feels like miles.
At first, I’m not sure if he’s going to talk at all. He sits with his elbows on his knees, staring at a spot on the floor. A dozen emotions pass through his eyes, although I’m sure he thinks I can’t see them. He clears his throat a few times. I’m about to say something just to break the silence when he starts.
“Alex and I met when we were kids. We started dating when we were seventeen years old. My family knew her family. We went to school together. After high school, she stayed in Jackson Hole, and so did I. I thought it was meant to be. We didn’t really fight. We argued sometimes, but we were so alike that we got along pretty well most of the time. I proposed to her when we were twenty-one, and we were married by twenty-two. Everyone expected that of us. The whole town knew us as a couple. I thought that was how it was supposed to be. You find someone you can love easily. She was easy to love.”
He swallows, looking up into my eyes for the first time since he started speaking. My heart cracks when tears form in his eyes. The gold specs glow in the firelight.
“We were married for four years. Everything was going pretty well. Now that I have spent time looking back and decoding everything, I can see there were signs that we weren’t happy. Like I said, we never fought. We didn’t care enough to. She was gone a lot, beyond normal things like having friends or work. She’d be gone for weekends at a time and I’d only get a text when she was on her way back.
“I tried so hard. My parents even tried. They gave us this cabin. I don’t think you know that. We were going to fix it up together, her and I, and live in it. Start a family. But she was never around, and when she was, there was always something stopping her from wanting to start on it. Then one day, I woke up and she was–” Miles’s voice cracks on a word.
I wait, not making a sound, as he takes a deep breath. Afraid that if I say something I’ll scare him back into his shell.
“She was gone. She didn’t even pack her things. She just left, in the middle of the night, I guess,” he laughs dryly. “It all sounds so ridiculous when I say it outloud. I never thought I’d be divorced. But I guess no one does. Anyway, she sent me the divorce papers in the mail six months later and it was final a couple weeks after the year mark of her leaving. I haven’t seen her since. I guess I’ve begun to hate this cabin somewhere along the way. Everything it represented. All of my plans, crushed. Until you came along to bring it back to life.”
My heart sinks. “I’m sorry, Miles, I had no idea.” I shift towards him enough to be able to put my hand on his knee. Static electricity zaps us at the contact, probably from wearing my socks on the plastic film covering the floors from construction dust.
“I should have told you. I just haven’t really told anyone. My parents know, and Parker knows because he was there with me through it all. But we don’t really discuss it. I can’t stomach the pity looks from anyone who knows she left,” he says softly. His gaze shifts to the fire, the flames reflecting in his eyes.
