Page 16

TWELVE

Heartbreak should kill you.

But it doesn’t. It keeps its victims alive, tortures them until there’s nothing left but a hollow cavity beneath the ribs.

Is this how everyone else feels when they fall for a Goode? Is this the torment Archer and I—but mostly Archer—have been inflicting on others?

I wake to the scent of toast burning and the sound of Archer cursing in the kitchen.

I drag myself from under the comforting weight of the blankets, pull on a sweater and shorts, and pad down the hall—still feeling tangled up in Oak’s arms, in his betrayal. In the stilled way he looked at me as I backed away to the front door. And fled.

“Morning,” Archer says gently—his tone changed from last night.

The kitchen table is set with two glasses of orange juice, a plate of french toast—burned at the edges—and a mason jar of fresh maple syrup. “You made breakfast?” I can’t remember my brother ever making a meal for us.

He lifts a shoulder, setting two forks on the table. “We didn’t do anything for our birthday.”

I slide into one of the chairs, waiting for my brother to reveal his true intention—certain this is all some prank—but I fork a piece of french toast. “Where’d you get all this?”

“It was a gift,” he says with a wink. Of course it was. Some lovesick girl probably gathered a dozen eggs from her family’s chickens, then baked a loaf of bread, leaving it all on our front porch for Archer Goode.

But I don’t argue—maybe a meal will fill the hole left inside me where my crumpled heart once lived.

Archer sinks into the opposite chair, his mouth sloped. “I understand why you did it,” he says, voice earnest. “Why you tried to cut down the tulips.” He looks to the front window, a softness in his expression that wasn’t there last night. “We’ve always known that love is a slippery thing in our family. You have to be careful, Lark.”

A slippery thing , as if it were as minor as a stubbed toe, a sliver in the finger. As if it weren’t a whole broken heart—a vital organ.

I press my tongue against my teeth, trying to keep the hurt from breaking against my eyelids. “It’s over now,” I say. “I won’t see him again.”

I don’t tell him about Oak’s father, about the photo of our mother beside a sailboat. Because maybe it doesn’t matter who she left with, only that she’s gone, abandoned us, and she’s likely never coming back.

My brother reaches out and touches my hand on the table, squeezing, and I feel several stray tears leak down my cheeks.

“We’re strong,” he says. “We have to be.”

Right now I don’t feel strong. Right now I’m certain I’ll never be free of the scent of Oak on my skin.

“I know what it’s like….” Archer releases my hand, eyes dipping to the plate in front of him. “Last summer, I…” He pauses, tapping his foot against the floor, looking uncomfortable. “It was Stella Lu, she bumped into me outside of Lone Pine Coffee—actually no, that’s not right. I bumped into her.” He stops tapping his foot, a smile catching at the edge of his mouth. “I saw her walking by outside, and something struck me—she just seemed… I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “We’ve gone to school with her since we were kids, but I saw her that day and I just wanted to talk to her, really talk to her. I walked her home, and when she smiled at me, it was like switching on an overhead light. Like I had been in the dark for years, fumbling around, and then suddenly she was there, a flashlight in a basement.” His eyes find the window, and he smiles out at the morning sunlight. “We spent every day together for nearly a month.”

I think back to last summer, and I remember seeing Archer with Stella a handful of times but didn’t think much of it—it seemed like every other temporary fling my brother finds himself in, brief and over all too soon. But the way he’s describing it now, it was something else entirely.

“We went camping one weekend, took her dad’s truck, drove all the way up to Jackjaw Lake. It was warm, and we slept under the stars. I was careful, kept my distance as much as I could, because I knew… I felt myself…” His voice breaks, and he looks away.

“You were falling in love with her.”

He nods, still staring through the window. “It was different with her, I felt different. She made me want to be someone who… I don’t know. Who was just better, I guess. I know that sounds dumb.”

I shake my head. “It’s not dumb.”

He nods to himself, then settles back into the chair. “That night… I kissed her and I felt it happen. I felt my chest almost widen, like I was becoming something else. More awake somehow. I felt…” My brother’s eyes start to water. “I fell in love with her. And I thought it would be okay; I thought she would still love me when tulip season ended.” He scrapes a hand across his eyes. “But that night, I didn’t know it, but the tulips wilted in the garden, and when the sun rose, she was already packing her things outside the tent. She woke up, looked at me, and felt nothing. She probably couldn’t even remember why she liked me in the first place.”

I feel a tightness in my chest, knowing all too well how this story ends.

His shoulders drop. “After that night it hurt too much to see her. That empty look in her eyes—like we’d never spent all that time together. Like it meant nothing to her. I was a mistake she made, nothing more.”

I realize suddenly that this is why he skips school, why he hates going to class. It’s because of her. The one he dared to fall in love with. “You never told me any of this,” I say. “You never even mentioned her. I just assumed she was…” I catch myself. “I’m sorry, Archer. I’m sorry I didn’t see how heartbroken you were.”

My brother is silent for a long time, and I feel my own heart twist inside my chest, knowing that he held this in and never said a thing. The creek rushes beneath the floorboards, carving away the soil, generations of pain and loss buried in the walls of this house. Fate inescapable.

“No,” he says, drawing in a deep breath. “It’s okay. I sure as shit won’t let myself feel that way again. I keep my heart stuffed down deep. I let them love me, but never the other way around.” I watch my brother’s face change, the hardness settle behind his eyes. “Safer this way.”

I want to tell him he’s wrong… but I’m beginning to wonder if this is the only way. Better never to love at all than to feel the pain of losing it an instant later. This is the way of Goodes—nothing lasts, love is deep and dizzying for everyone around us, yet we don’t get to feel a thing.

And I allowed myself to feel something I never should have.

I push myself up from the table, my appetite gone.

Archer gives me a quiet look, like he understands what I’m feeling more than I know. “It won’t always hurt this bad,” he offers. “But I’m not gonna lie, for a while it’s going to hurt like hell.”

I look to the back window, at the garden, where the remaining tulips bend in the wind, tall and swaying. Unnatural. We’ll never be free of this place, I think. Even if I leave Cutwater, will the curse follow me? Will love always be a lie?

Even if I travel far away from this town, where no one has heard the Goode name, where the rumors and lore cannot find me, it may not be enough to rid the scent of pollen from my flesh.

How far will be far enough?

I shiver, the cold finding its way back in.

I start toward my room, needing the silence and the dark beneath my blankets… when there’s a knock at the front door.

My eyes flash to Archer, but his cut to the shotgun leaning against the wall.

I’m certain Oak is not standing on our front porch, but it could be someone desperate for a tulip, someone drunk on the feeling of love. I watch my brother stand, then move to the front door and open it slowly.

The morning wind slides through the open doorway, but Archer is motionless.

I ease toward him, trying to peer past his shoulder—trying to see who it is.

But Archer’s eyes fall to the ground, blinking, before he bends down to pick something up.

He turns, and in his hands he holds a newspaper.

The Cutwater Gazette .

“Why is there a newspaper on our front porch?” My voice is mostly air.

Archer doesn’t answer, and I move closer to read the headline, the room starting to spin out of focus.

CUTWATER HIGH STUDENTS AFFLICTED WITH

UNEXPLAINED HYSTERIA

I skim the article quickly, my eyes catching on several words—sentences that feel like sharpened thorns scraping across my bones.

Locals blame longtime residents known as the Goode family…

Tulip farm may be the cause of the unusual phenomenon.

Symptoms are abnormal… including delusions of love.

I step away from Archer—I don’t want to read any more.

“They’re calling it a modern-day tulip mania,” he says, glancing up from the article.

“They’re not wrong.” I sink back into the chair, facing my uneaten plate of toast. “Who do you think left it?”

Archer folds the paper in half, then drops it onto the kitchen table. “Mrs. Thierry was at the end of our driveway when I opened the door.”

We are silent, staring down at the newspaper—we’ve spent our whole lives shrouded by whispers and rumors about our family, but this is the first time our name has been printed in the local newspaper.

“It’s a shit newspaper anyway,” Archer says.

It might be a tiny newspaper for a tiny town, but it’s still the Goode family name stamped in black ink on the front page, for all to see.

The air leaves my lungs, and I lift my eyes to my brother. “We’ll get them back.”

He frowns. “What?”

“We’ll get them back,” I repeat. “All of them. We’ll find the stolen tulips and we’ll stop whatever’s happening.”

He sinks into his chair, tilting his head. “How?”

“Bait and switch.”

My brother and I walk to town, taking the alleyways, keeping out of sight.

Mrs. Thierry said that we were “stirring up things” we shouldn’t by letting others possess a tulip. Stolen or not.

I intend to fix that.

We reach Aubrie’s Flower Shop, on Second Street, and we gather all the ordinary tulips arranged in glass vases, then ask the shopgirl for any others she has in the back. She eyes us, wary, watchful, but I tell her that they’re a gift for a sick relative, and she nods, like she has no intention of questioning our motive. She just wants us out of her shop as quickly as possible.

Archer pays for the blooms with money I never knew he had, and by the time we’ve left the shop, we have a good five dozen tulips balanced in our arms.

Leaving town, we keep to the shadows, making sure we aren’t seen, then hurry up Swamp Wells Road.

Archer drags out the rusted red wheelbarrow from the side of the house and parks it at the end of our driveway. The tire is flat, it hardly rolls, but we fill the wheelbarrow with the purchased tulips. Then I use a piece of cardboard from the shed and hastily write out a sign:

TRADE IN YOUR OLD TULIP FOR A FRESH ONE.

NO COST.

“Do you think they’ll really do it?” I ask, unsure if anyone will believe our lie.

Archer sinks into one of the two lawn chairs that he carried down from the porch. “I guess we’ll find out,” he says with a wink. He’s confident. And I hope he’s right.

Because this feels like redemption.

If we can find all the stolen tulips, if we can recover the flowers that should never have left the garden, maybe it will set something right. Like turning back the clock, to before Clementine and her friends snuck into the garden, stuffing their pockets full of tulips. Back before Oak left a book on my windowsill.

Maybe if we can undo what’s happened, it will right all the wrongs.

It’ll repair this wound beneath my ribs.

We sit like this for an hour, Archer flipping the guitar pick through his fingers while he tells me stories about the time he got locked inside the library up in Favorville with a girl named Shelly Shellington. He tells me about the time he fell into the rosebush outside Layla Black’s bedroom window, and how he was picking thorns from his backside for two days after. We laugh, and I almost forget why every part of me hurts.

“Thank you,” I tell him. “For helping me with this.” I nod to the flowers. “Even if it doesn’t work.” My brother—who has always felt like a passing shadow I happen to share a cursed home with—now won’t leave my side. And I think: maybe this is the only way to survive—with those who understand what it feels like to be crushed by love.

A few cars pass on the road, slowing down to read our sign, but always they keep going. “They don’t trust us,” I say. “Maybe because anyone who tried to get close to the house in the last couple of weeks was met with a shotgun.” I give my brother a teasing look. “They probably think this is a trick.”

Archer shrugs. “Maybe. But they’re also desperate.”

Only a minute later he’s proved right.

A blue SUV pulls off onto the side of the road, and Cole Campbell jumps out, something held in his closed fist. He doesn’t say a word, but when he reaches us, he opens his palm, revealing a flattened, dead tulip. “Can I get a new one?” His mouth is tensed, a look of fever in his eyes.

“Help yourself,” Archer replies, and Cole quickly drops the lifeless tulip to the dirt, then yanks a new one from the wheelbarrow. He scurries away to his car as if he’s afraid we’ll change our minds and ask for the tulip back.

Cole has just pulled back onto the road when another car veers off into the driveway, slamming on its brakes. Olive Montagu gets out of the white Honda, nearly tripping over her leather sandals to reach us. She drops three flattened tulips into my lap, her eyes wide and wild and red at the edges like she’s been crying. “You swear it won’t cost me anything?”

“Not a penny,” Archer answers, but I stare up at her, thinking of the night at the quarry when she came after me, begging for a tulip. I think about Oak witnessing the madness in her eyes as we sped away in the truck.

But now she only eyes me briefly before swiping three tulips from the wheelbarrow, then making her way back to her Honda.

Within minutes the end of our driveway is crowded with cars left running while our classmates dispose of their old, wrecked tulips, then greedily grab new ones.

Word has gotten out, and now they’ve all come to replenish their supply of tulip-induced love.

What they don’t seem to notice, what none of them point out, is that the new tulips look nothing like the Goode tulips. The wheelbarrow is filled with an assortment of bright sunshine-yellow, pale pink, brazen red, and even a few stark-white blooms.

They are clearly not Goode tulips. But maybe it’s the desperation they feel, the greed—they want to believe these are the real thing. And what do they really know of Goode tulips? They’ve never seen the crop behind our house until this summer. Maybe the blooms in the wheelbarrow are a different variety, a slightly different color, sure, but a Goode tulip nonetheless. Because if the Goode twins are handing them over, they must be real.

It’s only Lulu Yen—when she stands in front of us, holding out a few worthless, torn tulip petals, asking if she can still get a new tulip—who frowns down at us and asks, “Why are you doing this? Giving them away?”

“Figured we should get rid of them,” Archer says with a shrug. “No use keeping them to ourselves.”

She hands over the petals, then takes a bright pink tulip from the wheelbarrow. “You could sell these, you know, make a lot of money.”

For a moment Archer blinks at the tulip in her hand, like he’s considering it, then clears his throat. “We’re just spreading the love,” he answers stupidly, as if we’re giving away friendship bracelets at a summer fair.

Lulu nods, clasping the fresh tulip in her fingers, before striding away.

After another hour the crowd starts to thin, the last of the stolen tulips having made their way back to us, until we’re left with a few dozen dead and dried Goode tulips.

Our classmates don’t realize they’ve just swapped genuine, curse-laced tulips for useless ones.

The delirium they felt, the lovesickness, will not return.

They will feel nothing.

Archer steers the wheelbarrow back to the house, while I gather the old, dead Goode tulips from the dirt.

I thought I would feel different, knowing we’ve retrieved the stolen flowers—we’ve taken back what should never have been stolen.

But I feel hollowed out.

Maybe we’ve stopped the madness from spreading. We’ve prevented things from getting any worse. But I haven’t remedied the source of my own pain.

Maybe this was never a story about a curse, about stolen tulips and mismatched love.

It was always something else.

Something simpler.

A tiny love story.

A lost love story.

And a summer I can’t get back.

Four days evaporate behind me.

Locals no longer come to the house, begging for tulips. They got a free tulip. And although they must have figured out it is the wrong kind, a flower that contains no magic—a flower that can’t bring them desire or affection—no one has marched up to our house complaining of such things.

Maybe now they can begin fitting their broken hearts back together—the lovesick and feverish dusting themselves off, a little rattled, a little hungover after a summer of delirium. But it wasn’t their fault. It was a sickness, a poison, that plagued a handful of Cutwater High students—a wickedness that most would rather not speak of.

A summer when they loved the wrong person. When they felt a wild, unnatural euphoria whenever they held a rare, blood-streaked tulip between their fingertips.

But they all know what it really was….

The Goode family.

And with renewed fear, they will keep their distance, they will whisper our names in Lone Pine Coffee and on back porches, they will cross the street when Archer or I draw near.

We are to blame for what happened this summer.

I watch the garden, wishing the tulips would finally decay back into the soil. Maybe then I would feel like I could leave. Like the summer was truly over. Like there was nothing worth staying for.

No flicker of hope. No last chances.

But the tulips remain—even as the sun blazes over Cutwater, the afternoon heat turning the swampy soil to dry, cracked mud. Even when the creek below the house fades to only a trickle.

The tulips are defiant, refusing to die.

Footsteps on the front porch.

It’s well after dark, and I’m seated on the living room floor, working on a sketch of Mrs. Thierry—shading in the deep creases around her eyes, her dog, Peebles, standing at her side, nose to the air—losing myself in the drawing, as if I’m shading over the memory of him .

Oak was a lesson. A lie. I learned the hard way, the worst way, just like Mom warned. What we had was only the start of something. Those first fragile moments together—the almost, the could have been but never was. The promise of something. And maybe that’s what makes it so hard—not knowing what it might have become.

Eventually I’ll forget.

But the sudden scrape and shuffle of footsteps sends a dreadful spike of hope straight through me.

Archer shoots me a look, and he reaches for the shotgun in one swift motion as he moves for the door. He pulls back the curtain on the front window, peering outside.

“Who is it?” I ask, imagining a boy, tall and shadowed on the front porch, eyes shaped by sadness, a thousand promises on his lips. A boy who could crack me open again.

But my brother doesn’t answer. Instead he lets the curtain fall back into place, and he yanks open the door, letting in a cool evening wind.

Peering past my brother, I see the half outline of a boy.

But it’s not Oak. It’s Randy Ashspring—a junior—his light brown hair shaved close, his brown eyes all soft and pleading. He’s tall, taller than Archer, and he stands with arms crossed, legs set wide on the front porch, like he’s ready for a fight. I think he’s going to ask for a tulip, beg for one, but instead he says, “She thinks she loves you….” He stares down at Archer, and I understand at once why he’s here. He’s not the first angry boyfriend or girlfriend to get the courage to confront Archer directly. “She broke up with me, and she thinks she’s going to run away with you.”

I see Archer’s shoulders relax; he’s heard this so many times before, it’s lost all its meaning. “Who?” he asks, sounding disinterested.

“Gabby Pines,” Randy replies, his voice pitched, offended that Archer wouldn’t already know this.

My brother blows out a long, tired breath—like he’s finally growing weary of his own games, of the love he encourages, then must try to fend off. “Give it a month, man,” he says, reaching forward and patting Randy on the shoulder. “Soon enough she’ll lose interest in me and go back to you.”

I see Randy’s mouth gape open, about to say something else, but Archer closes the door in his face. My brother turns, shaking his head, and I can’t help but smirk. Randy looked so dumbfounded—maybe he thought he’d have to fight Archer for Gabby’s love, or maybe he was ready to drop to his knees and plead with Archer to leave Gabby alone. He didn’t realize that Archer couldn’t care less about most of the people who fall for him. And when the tulips finally sink back into the soil, the attraction that others feel for Archer will fade. He’ll still be a Goode—he’ll still be a touch more irresistible than anyone else in this town—but the charm will be diluted enough that someone like Gabby will likely go back to her boyfriend. The one she’s meant to love.

I sink onto the couch as Archer starts for the kitchen, when there’s another sound outside—a car this time, coming up the driveway. Archer frowns, flashes me a look, before turning back. “Who the hell…?” he says, pulling open the front door.

I push up from the couch to get a better look.

And I see what he does: an old white Chevy truck kicking up dust as it roars toward the house, then lurches to a stop near the creek.

My throat dries up.

My heart stops beating.

Dad… is home.

I watch, unblinking, as our father ambles stiffly out of the truck, his face sunburned, looking tired—like he’s been driving all night—and when he peers up at the house, I feel my lungs cease to draw in air.

Archer and I watch as our father steps over the swollen creek and climbs the stairs. His brown hair is windblown and uncombed, and the sleeves of his green flannel shirt are rolled up to his elbows, revealing skin that’s dark and weathered from working long hours on a fishing boat off the Pacific coast. He reaches the front door, shoulders dropping as he exhales.

“I saw the article,” he says, raising an eyebrow at us. “One of the guys I work with found it online, showed it to me, remembered that I used to live in Cutwater.”

He tips his eyes at us, waiting for a response, but both Archer and I are mute, standing side by side as if we were ten years old again and had been caught sneaking Mom’s peanut butter cookies from the cupboard in the middle of the night.

“Start talking,” he says.

Archer tells him everything. Every last detail about the stolen flowers and how we traded the real Goode tulips for fake ones.

Dad is quiet, eyes heavy—he seems exhausted. But finally he rubs his hands across his sun-scorched neck, then walks into the kitchen for a glass of water. He looks like he’s been at sea for some time, his back always bent to haul in the nets, seawater in his hair, the salty air in his lungs.

“It’s late,” he says finally, staring down at the floor. “And I’m tired.”

Archer gladly retreats to his room, but I stay, watching Dad walk out onto the back porch, where he stands at the railing, breathing in the muggy summer air. I follow him out and lean against one of the rotted wood posts that hold up the roof. It’s a strange thing, seeing my dad here, in this house that he tries so hard to avoid. He used to visit once a year, near our birthday. But since Mom left, he’s been coming more often. He worries about us, I suppose, but not enough to stay. Not enough to save us from this house. This life.

He wants out just as bad as I do. And he makes sure to stay away more than he’s here.

“Looks like they got quite a few of them,” he comments, nodding to the headless stalks.

“I may have cut down a couple as well,” I admit.

He nods, like he understands—like he’s considered destroying the garden a time or two himself.

I clear my throat, looking up at the man who feels more like a stranger each time I see him. “We could sell it,” I say, an idea I’ve considered over the years. A way out. “This whole place. Then we’d be rid of it.”

The garden did this to us, broke us all apart, sent us scattering. He was a victim of this house—of the woman he loved one summer with a Goode last name.

A woman he was tricked into loving, because of the tulips.

But if we sold the house, the land, we could walk away—all of us.

His eyes sag, and he draws in a long inhale. “It can be hard to separate the difference between right and wrong. Between fate and free will.” He stares out at the rows of perfect blooms, the flowers that have ruined all of us. “I don’t know what this garden is, why those tulips have a way of wrecking everything, but I know that this home belongs to you and Archer. And it needs to stay that way.”

I want to tell him that he’s wrong; I want to remind him of how Mom let him fall in love with her even though she knew it all would end when tulip season was over. But mentioning Mom hurts me as much as it hurts him, so I keep my mouth shut.

“I’m sorry…,” he starts to say. “I’m sorry I’m not here more. I’m sorry for leaving—it’s just too hard for me to…” His eyes begin to water.

“It’s not your fault,” I tell him.

He winces at hearing these words, like the fault can no longer be pinpointed, not exactly. When I think of Oak, I feel the same way. It’s his fault he lied, kept the truth about his father from me. But it’s my family— my mom —that broke his. It’s the Goode tulips that caused everything that happened between us.

In the end it all leads back to me… and this garden.

Love is a malediction in this family: a plague that tightens around the heart.

He was merely swept up in it, just like Dad.

Neither of them can be to blame for how it all started.

And this is why our father stays away—this is why it hurts so bad when he walks through that front door, when he sees Archer and me. We are the ghosts of his past. Of a time when he had no control over who he fell in love with.

And this is the point: free will . The right to choose who we love, to trust our hearts to know the difference between what’s real and what’s not.

This garden takes that away.

“I hate these flowers,” I say under my breath.

Dad is quiet, thinking, while the wind briefly sways through the garden, a frog croaks from the muddy creek, and the stars reveal themselves behind a thin sheet of clouds. “You can’t blame the tulips for everything.” He looks at me, and I feel wrung out, a husk left to wither in the sun. “You might not like who you are…,” he says gently. “Or the life you were born into, but there are always things to be learned from your past… from your mistakes.” I swallow down the tears, and it feels like he can see the crumpled remains of my heart, even if he doesn’t know how it got that way. “And I hope you make a lot of them in your life. I know I have.”

Tears break over my eyelids, and Dad pulls me into a hug, folding his broad arms around me. I can’t remember the last time my father hugged me, and I worry my legs will collapse—I worry all the torments inside me will crack apart at once. “It’s the only way you’ll become who you’re meant to be,” he says, his own chest rattling with emotion. “Don’t be afraid of who you are, Lark.” He releases me but keeps his hands against my shoulders, holding me up. “Not all Goodes are bad.”

I wipe at the tears dripping from my chin. “Can I come with you?” I plead, my voice tiny, a little girl again, all my strength gone.

He breathes, his eyebrows angled down like he’s considering it. But when his gaze lifts, I know what he’s going to say. “Sorry, buttercup. I got a job up north, in Alaska, for a few months, not a good place for you.” He releases my shoulders, and I teeter. He reaches into his back pocket, pulls out his wallet, and extracts all the cash inside. A few hundred dollars, I’d guess. “I always thought you’d leave as soon as you graduated.”

“Me too,” I answer.

He holds out the wad of cash to me. “You deserve to see what life is like beyond this place, then decide for yourself where you belong.”

I hesitate, staring down at the money.

“But I should warn you, the world isn’t any easier beyond the borders of Cutwater. Life is hard no matter where you put down roots.”

I nod, and he pushes the wadded bills into my hand. But when I look up, the softness in his eyes has changed. Gone rigid. He looks on the verge of tipping over a cliff, like a shadow has crept over him again, the memories of his own past getting too heavy to hold up. This house is a reminder of what he’s been trying so hard to forget. A feeling he’ll never get back. And I think he’s been running from this town, and us, taking jobs farther and farther away, in hopes that eventually the past will rework itself, and it will be like we never existed at all.

“I leave in the morning,” he adds, offering up a tight smile. “I just wanted to check on you, make sure you hadn’t burned the place down, before I headed up north.” His gaze sways out over the tulips, eyebrow lifted.

The light is gone from his eyes, but he touches my cheek, and I sense that this is goodbye. He’ll likely be gone before sunup tomorrow.

The longer he’s here, the more pained he looks.

I doubt he’ll sleep; he’ll toss and turn in the bed he once shared with a woman he thought he loved. Until he didn’t. And in the early dawn hours I’ll hear the sound of his truck rumbling down the drive.

He’ll escape this place, leave it in his rearview mirror.

And I don’t blame him.

I stay on the back porch, watching the tulips bend and twist in the breeze, stirred up by a wall of evening clouds. I think about all the tragedy that’s burdened this family.

And I know I will never allow myself to get close to someone again. Like I did with Oak.

I sink into one of the rocking chairs, knees pulled up, head resting back. I listen to Forsaken Creek rushing beneath the floorboards, spilling out into the garden. I watch the dark rain clouds push away to the east and the sky become still and starry.

I search for something.

A way to heal this emptiness that was cracked wide inside me. I look for reparation. But it’s not out there in the garden, under this somber summer sky.

It lives somewhere else.