Page 239 of Sage Haven

Epilogue Two

Three Years Later

Something pulls at me—anache, silent yet relentless. It presses beneath my skin like a splinter I can’t reach, whispering in a voice I can’t silence.

I made a mistake.

With her.

And no matter how many miles I put between us, it follows me.

I can’t outrun it.

I can’t outrun her.

Her shadow haunts every space I thought I’d reclaimed.

I see her in the empty chair across from mine. I feel her in the silence of my bunker, the kind that burns raw because it’s missing the sound of her laughter, the soft cadence of her breathing at night.

She lingers in the cold sheets on my bed, in the echoes of songs that once meant nothing until they meant everything.

And now, they mean loss.

When I close my eyes, I don’t find peace.

I findher.

Her touch. Her voice.

The way her fingers once laced through mine like they belonged there and maybe they did.

I told myself leaving was the right choice.

That if I let her go, she’d be safe.

And if I repeated it enough times, I’d start to believe it.

But the truth is, I only half-saved her.

The other half of her?

The part I carried with me?

I broke that.

And the burden of that choice is a weight I can’t shed.

It crushes onto my ribs when I breathe. It carves at my sanity when I think too long. It makes me question if I ever really knew what I was fighting for or if I lost sight of it the moment I walked away from the only thing in this world that was ever truly mine.

Maybe our story wasn’t supposed to end. Maybe this ache is the proof of something unfinished or maybe it’s just another cruel game, a reminder that fate doesn’t give second chances to men like me.

But when the world is quiet, and I let myself remember…I still wish I could go back.

Back to that first night.

When everything was new, and the wreckage hadn’t begun. When her smile was unguarded, and I hadn’t yet ruined her trust. When there was still a version of me that could’ve deserved her.

I wish I could rewrite it all, but I can’t and so I live in the hollow of what could have been and the ghost of what was.