Chapter 5

The farm came into view the way old memories do — gradually, then all at once, the way a photograph develops in a darkroom, edges sharpening before you're ready for what's in the frame. Killian slowed the car long before he needed to, as if some part of him wanted to delay arriving at a place he'd spent four years pretending didn't exist.

Be here, he thought, the words circling in his head like something caught in a current it couldn't escape. I know I haven't been a great person. I know exactly what I am. But please, please be here.

"Hey." Steven's voice cut through, gentle for once. "What happened? Let's go inside."

Killian blinked, the present tense returning to him slowly, like a held breath finally let out. He nodded once and stepped out of the car.

The gate hadn't been opened in years, and it showed — rust climbing the hinges like something patient and unbothered by time, weeds reclaiming the path with the quiet confidence of things that know no one is coming to stop them. Nobody had set foot here since the day Killian and June had stopped speaking, since the day this place became a wound neither of them had the courage to press on again.

Inside, everything sat exactly where it had been left, untouched, as though the house itself had been holding its breath for four years, waiting for someone to come back and exhale. Dust lay over the furniture like a soft grey blanket pulled over something sleeping. The clock on the wall had stopped at some hour neither of them remembered, frozen the way time freezes in places people abandon mid-sentence.

They moved through the rooms one by one — the kitchen, the small library, the porch where June used to sit with her knees pulled up and a book balanced on them — searching for anything, a note, a sign, some proof that she'd been here, that some part of her had come back to this place the way Killian's heart had never really left it. Each room offered nothing but its own stillness, and with every door they opened and found empty, Killian felt something in his chest pull tighter, like a rope being wound around itself with nowhere left to go.

Only one room remained. Killian's.

Steven moved toward it out of habit, but Killian stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, quiet but final. "I'll go."

He stepped inside alone, and for a moment just stood at the threshold, the way a man stands at the edge of cold water before deciding whether he's brave enough to go in. The room was exactly as he'd left it — same sheets, same window left slightly open as if waiting for him to close it, same silence sitting undisturbed in every corner. No sign of her. No sign that she'd ever come looking.

Disappointment settled into him heavier than anything had all day, and beneath it, something sharper began to surface. Fear. Real fear, the kind that doesn't announce itself but simply moves in and starts rearranging the furniture of your mind. If she hadn't come here, where had she gone? And was there anywhere left for him to look?

"I'll be five minutes," he told Steven outside, voice steadier than he felt. "Go ahead and get in the car. I just need to grab a few things."

Steven nodded and left him to it.

Killian moved through the room slowly, gathering what little remained of her into a small cardboard box like a man collecting pieces of something already broken — her old scarf, still faintly smelling of something he couldn't name anymore. The handmade cards she used to leave on his pillow, half-jokes and half-confessions disguised as jokes. The books she'd read in secret, when no one else was around to see her slow down enough to need rest.

He knelt to reach beneath the bed for one last book and lost his footing slightly on the rug, and that small, clumsy stumble was enough to shift it, to pull one corner free and reveal what had been hidden beneath it all along.

A letter. Folded twice, edges soft with age, tucked away like something meant to be found only by accident — or only when someone was finally ready.

Killian set the box down without thinking. He picked up the letter instead, and the moment his fingers closed around it, something in him went completely still. Not the stillness of calm. The stillness of a man who has just felt the ground move and is waiting, frozen, to find out if it will move again.

He unfolded it carefully, the paper soft from however many times she must have folded and unfolded it before deciding whether to leave it at all.

Killian,

You were right.

Not just about Justin. About something else too. About me never really letting you in, even when you tried. You always knew I was holding something back. You never asked, never pushed, just let me keep that distance and stayed anyway. I used to think that meant you didn't care enough to ask. Now I think it meant the opposite — you cared enough to wait.

I should have told you so much before now. It's been a week since I last saw you, and I keep sitting with this silence like it's something I'm allowed to keep. I don't think I am. Not anymore.

What I never told you was everything underneath it — underneath Justin, underneath all of it. I won't write all of it down. Some of it isn't fully mine to give away, even on paper, even now, alone in this room. But I think you deserve to know this much.

There was a party, years ago, before you ever knew me. I remember it in pieces, the way you remember dreams you're not sure actually happened. Music too loud to think over. A drink someone handed me that I didn't finish, or maybe did — I still don't know. Laughter from another room, bright and far away, like it belonged to a different night entirely than the one I was having. And then there's a gap, a stretch of time I still can't fully account for, no matter how many times I've tried to walk back through it in my head.

What I remember next is Justin. Telling everyone he'd take me home, that I'd had too much, that he'd make sure I got back safe. People nodded like it was the most natural thing in the world — of course Justin would take care of her, that's just who he is. I remember being grateful, even, in whatever fog I was in. I remember thinking I was lucky someone cared enough to look after me.

I don't remember much of the way there. I remember waking up after, in a room that didn't feel like mine, in a body that didn't feel like mine either, with the party still going somewhere far behind us, as if nothing in the world had happened at all.

It took me a long time to even find the words for what had happened that night. Longer still to stop believing I'd somehow asked for it, invited it, deserved it. And when I finally did find the courage to name it, the name attached to it was the same person everyone had thanked for getting me home safe. Justin. The same Justin I went on to call mine for years afterward. The same Justin I let stay.

I think that's the part I'm most ashamed of. Not what happened to me that night — I know now that was never mine to carry. What I'm ashamed of is everything after. Letting him convince me, slowly, patiently, that what he'd done made me his to keep, instead of something he should have spent the rest of his life answering for.

Some people don't fall in love with you. They fall in love with how easy you are to keep.

That's what staying with him felt like. The least I owed him, when it was never something I owed anyone at all.

I never told you, Killian, because I couldn't bear the thought of you looking at me and seeing exactly what I already saw in the mirror — someone already hollowed out, already spent.

You can't love someone back to life. You can only sit with them until they remember how to breathe on their own.

That's what you did for me, without ever knowing it, without me ever explaining why I needed it so badly.

This past week, I found something out. About Justin. I still don't fully understand it, but it unravels everything I thought I knew — about him, about why I stayed as long as I did, about more than I have the courage to write down right now. I wanted to do this properly, but I can hear someone at the—

The handwriting broke off there. The final words ran together, the ink smudged and hurried, the pen dragging unevenly across the page like she'd been startled mid-sentence and never had the chance to come back to it.

Killian sat with the letter in his hands for a long time, the room around him gone perfectly silent, perfectly still, the way the world goes still right before it changes for good.