Page 17

THIRTEEN

I can’t wait any longer.

I won’t be the girl who lets just one more day pass, one more month, one more year. Just another girl who forgets to leave Cutwater. And ends up like everyone else in this town. Bitter and regretful, still dreaming of the life they might have had if only they’d mustered the courage to leave.

The next morning, after Dad is long gone, I stuff the contents of my life back into my suitcase.

I scan my closet, to be sure I haven’t missed anything… when I find it.

I tried to forget, push it away from my mind, but the copy of Peter and Wendy rests beneath an old, moth-eaten sweater. I sink onto the edge of the bed and open the cover, finding the sketch of Oak tucked inside.

My eyes pinch closed, and I consider just crushing the portrait in my fist and throwing it away—destroying everything that’s left of him. But instead I run my thumb down the curves of his face, suffocating on each detail: the way he stares up from the paper, his eyes dangerous and full of sorrow. Unforgettable. Unforgivable. In them I see all the words never said between us.

All the days I’ll never get back.

I fold the sketch of Oak, creasing the paper across the pencil lines of his face, folding it into halves again and again until I hold a tiny square of paper in my palm. Tears soak the paper. My heartache held within its folded edges. I slide it into the pages of the book, hiding it away. Promising myself I’ll never look at it again.

Archer walks by my doorway, peers inside, sees the suitcase. “You’re really doing it?”

I nod.

“Okay,” he says, like he knows it’s real this time. “When?”

“There’s a train at ten p.m. Last one of the night.” In the dark I will leave Cutwater behind, and when the sun begins to rise, the Pacific will stretch out to greet me.

“I’m proud of you.” He exhales, pulling the guitar pick from his pocket, tapping it with his thumb. “Make sure you say goodbye before you go.”

“I will,” I promise.

Standing alone in my room, I know what I need to do.

I retrieve my notebook, the stub of a pencil, and leave the house.

At the end of the driveway, I stop and stare up at the house that I have hated for so long. I open my notebook and press the pencil to a blank page. I sketch the sunken walls, the roof with its sagging eaves, the windows that look like eyes weeping from the moisture always clinging to the glass.

I draw its likeness in my notebook, among all the faces I’ve sketched over the years. The faces of people I’ve been too afraid to ever really know. My notebook is filled with memories, of ghosts, of my past. Filled with a town called Cutwater.

This is what I will take with me.

So I never have to return.

“You running away?” a voice croaks from behind me. I turn, and Mrs. Thierry is standing a few paces away—she must be out for her morning walk, her dog, Peebles, sniffing at the tall wildflowers growing up beside our mailbox.

I snap my notebook closed so she won’t see the sketch.

“The only reason to draw that house”—she nods up at the Goode family home—“is if you plan on leaving it behind.”

I don’t answer her.

She laughs from the back of her throat, like she already knows the answer. “Locals claim they’re leaving Cutwater all the time.” She raises a coarse eyebrow at me. “But they don’t mean it. They always come back.”

Peebles makes his way toward me, huffing at my shoes before he looks away, disinterested.

“I’m not coming back.”

Her eyebrows pull up into her forehead, and her hand trembles against the leash as Peebles tries to tug her forward. “What about that boy of yours, the one named after a tree?”

My knees nearly give out—maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that she knows about Oak. Mrs. Thierry knows nearly everything that happens in this town. Stolen kisses and secret lovers. Girls who run away and promise never to return.

“He’s not my boy,” I reply.

Mrs. Thierry cackles, drawing her thin lips against her coffee-stained teeth. “?’Course he is. He walks by your house nearly every evening, slows at the end of your driveway, then keeps going. Even a fool can see the broken heart inside that boy’s chest.”

What about my broken heart? I want to scream. What about the sharp edges left behind, the scraps rattling around beneath my ribs? Can she see that? See the blood spilling from my wounds?

“That boy is walking around looking for something he’s lost,” she adds, raising an eyebrow at me.

I glance up the road, toward the county line—in the direction of a home belonging to a boy with sad green eyes and too many lies on his tongue.

Mrs. Thierry watches me like she’s calculating something, trying to see all my damaged insides. “It’s good you’re leaving—it’s time,” she says. And I wonder if she’s ever tried to leave Cutwater, if she’s longed for a different life. “I fell in love with a Goode once,” she says, nodding slowly. “Your great-uncle, Albert Goode. And still… when I look at that house”—she nods behind me—“my heart feels bruised in places that refuse to heal. Your family has never been any good at love. You manage to ruin it for yourselves and everyone around you. Nothing to be done for it.”

I sway a little on my feet. I never knew about Mrs. Thierry and my great-uncle Albert, who I have no memory of. But maybe this is why she wobbles past our house each day, looking like a woman who has been wronged by our family. She made the ill-fated mistake of falling in love with a Goode.

“I’m sorry,” I say, because it’s all I can offer. “I’m sorry my family has taken so much from so many people.” It’s taken everything from me, I think.

Lips pulled in, she squints at me. “Your family is cursed deeper than the soil that grows those wretched flowers—they’re cursed down to the bone.” She tips her eyes closer to me. “Get yourself as far away from this house, this town, as you can.” She turns toward the horizon, the morning sun edging higher through the trees. “You know…” Mrs. Thierry looks back toward the Goode family home. “Locals used to toss coins and tokens into that creek that runs below your house. They feared it, but they also believed it held magic from long ago. That it granted wishes.” She makes a low grumble in the back of her throat. “It was an unlucky happenstance when your ancestor Fern Goode bought this swampy plot of land and built his house over that creek.” She grunts again, nodding toward the line of water meandering toward the house. “Yes, unlucky indeed. But some people are drawn toward bad luck—it calls to them, a hand reaching out for their throat. And your family has paid the price ever since.”

The weight of my whole life sinks into my stomach, and I peer up at the house where I was born. We have been jinxed by love: we chase it, run from it, wish we’d never known it at all. We are tangled up in it—and it always leaves us wounded and alone.

Makes us bitter. Makes us monsters.

But it has tormented this town, too. Those who’ve had the bad luck to call Cutwater home. It has taken pieces of their hearts, ripped from their chests and never given back. Mrs. Thierry has suffered; she is a woman with memories of a man who took her heart but never loved her in return.

And I see her now—I see the sadness held at the edge of her frown. I see what we have done to her.

The tulips. The Goodes. This creek and the swamp.

All of it is to blame.

“You say people always come back to Cutwater after they leave,” I say through my teeth, turning back toward the house. “But not me. When I leave, I’m leaving for good.”

“Curses and folktales are for the Old World, not for this one,” Grandma Georgie used to say when she was still alive, her eyes shimmering like a campfire in the dark. I remember very few things about her: the jingle of her cheap chandelier earrings, the burst of her laugh like a bubble popping in the air, and how she didn’t believe the tulips granted us any enchantment—no unusual attraction, no charm that made us irresistible.

“If there was any magic in those tulips when Fern Goode brought them over the Atlantic, it’s long gone by now.”

She was a skeptic. She thought our family was foolish to tell such stories now, to talk about the tulips as if they had any power over us. And yet Grandma Georgie found herself entangled in more passionate romps and romances than Archer.

She was known to seduce even the hardiest of men in this town, the ones who seemed so sure-footed that no woman could ever pull them astray. But Grandma Georgie was a rarity, a woman who cared not for the consequences of infidelity—she lived with her heart held out in front of her for all to see. A woman who ran toward love with her arms wide open, bellowing with laughter the whole way.

I envy her—even if she was a little mad, a little too far off center to know what was good for her.

But as I stand at my bedroom window, watching the last of the sunset streak pink and golden over the garden, thinking of only one thing— one person —I no longer know what’s true or right or good.

Goode.

I should feel relief, knowing that my freedom is so close. But instead I feel only regret… for everything I’ve left unsaid.

If I could go back. All the way to the beginning. I’d tell myself not to fall for him, so recklessly, wildly. I’d tell myself he is no one at all. Not worth staying for, not worth sketching, not worth remembering.

I’d tell myself these lies.

To save myself from this pain.

I close my suitcase and drag it out into the living room, placing it beside the front door.

Thunder tumbles across the sky in the distance, a storm that may reach us or pass us by. I scan the house, taking in the details one last time—old, sagging couch, wood coffee table with candle wax burned into the surface, a rug that should have been tossed out long ago—when Archer appears from the hall. We stare at each other, both of us unsure what to say, but then he crosses the room and wraps his arms around me. I can’t remember the last time my brother and I hugged, and the tears leak from my eyes to his shoulder. He smells like the tulips—a scent that is born into our blood.

“I’ll call you when I get there,” I say, pulling back from him. “Let you know where I’m staying.”

He wipes at his eyes, and I can see he’s trying to hold back the emotion rising to the surface. “It’s hard to imagine what tomorrow will feel like, when you’re not here.” He shakes his head, draws an inhale. “But I’m proud of you. Get as far away from this place as you can.”

I nod.

“I’ll come visit you,” he promises.

“No you won’t,” I answer, knowing he’ll never leave this town.

He laughs, eyes watering. “I hope you find whatever you’re looking for out there.”

“I hope you find something good here.”

“You know me, I’ll be fine.” He lifts a shoulder. “I was actually thinking of renting a place in town, getting out of this house.”

“Seriously?”

“Mr. Sanchez has an apartment above the guitar shop. He said I could rent it cheap if I worked at the shop.”

I smile at my brother. He may never leave this town, but maybe he’ll escape this awful house. “You deserve something that’s all yours.”

He will always be the boy who chases love headfirst: without caution, without fear. He crashes into it, scraped knees and bruised elbows, he leaves fire and smoke in his wake, but he keeps on moving forward. He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t scan elm trees for old lost loves.

He’s braver than me. But maybe he’s also growing up a little, making decisions for himself that aren’t bound by our family’s destiny.

“Hold on…,” he says. He turns and jogs back into his bedroom, then emerges moments later. He grabs my hands and shoves something into my palm.

I peer down at a wad of carefully folded bills. “Where did you get this?”

He folds my fingers over it. “Been saving it,” he says.

I lift an eyebrow. “Archer, seriously, where did you get it?” Doubting that he came by it honestly.

The corner of his mouth curls into a smirk. “Been giving guitar lessons for the last couple of years. When you’re at school, I’ve been working.”

I shake my head at him.

“I don’t tell my twin everything,” he says with a wink.

I hold the cash out to him, trying to give it back. “Archer, I can’t take this. And Dad already gave me everything in his wallet.”

But he pushes my hand away. “I want you to have it. You’re going to need more than you think to start a new life out there. It’s your getting-the-hell-out-of-Cutwater gift.”

I feel the tears coming. “Thank you.” I can barely meet his eyes, and he pushes me gently in the shoulder. I glance around the tiny house one last time, taking in every last detail.

The home that raised me. The home that cursed me.

I wonder if I’ll miss it. If I’ll think of it fondly, years from now, the dark memories fading with time.

Or if it will always feel like a place woven with the worst kind of shadows.

I swivel around, and Archer has grabbed my suitcase and is carrying it through the front door. I hear him descend the porch steps, hefting my suitcase over the creek. “I should have tried to borrow a car,” he calls from outside. “Then I could drive you to the train station.”

“I’m fine to walk,” I answer.

I start for the open door, when my eyes flash one last time over the kitchen table, stacked with unopened mail. Love letters addressed to Archer. Most still unopened. Evidence of the madness that plagues us each summer. But there’s something else among the heart-adorned letters.

A postcard.

I almost blink it away; I almost don’t squint down at it. Because it can’t be. But the handwriting is familiar. Sloped back on itself, loopy, carefree, written by a woman with deceit in her fingertips.

I move closer, staring down at the postcard.

I hear Archer walking up the steps, back through the door.

But my eyes find the return address, landing hard on her name.

Her.

“Shit,” I whisper.

A postcard from Mom.

I start to reach for it—my hands beginning to shake—but Archer is faster, and he snatches it from the table.

“What are you doing?” I try to grab it from him, but he backsteps away, into the living room. “Archer! Let me see it.”

He shakes his head. “No.”

My eyes flatten, confused, but a sharp, thorny memory tugs at me: moments when Archer hid something from me just like this, when he held a letter behind his back where I couldn’t see.

A secret he’s kept.

I lunge forward, and Archer tries to turn away, but I grab his arm and rip the postcard free.

“Lark,” my brother shrieks. “It’s not…” But he never finishes his thought; he must see the color drain from my face.

In my hand I hold a postcard addressed to both Archer and me.

“Why?” I sputter, my eyes clicking to his. “Why were you hiding it?”

His face crushes into a line. “She doesn’t deserve to send us letters. She doesn’t deserve to tell us where she is or pretend she’s part of our lives.”

The postcard trembles between my fingers.

“She sends them as if she thinks we care.”

I feel my eyes widen, the realization sinking heavy through me. “There are more of them?”

My brother shifts from one foot to another, the creek roaring beneath us, filling my ears.

“How many has she sent?”

He turns, staring out the front window. “She’s been sending them since the beginning,” he admits coolly, but there is no regret in his voice. Only bitterness.

“She’s been sending us postcards for three years?”

He nods.

“Archer, what the fuck?” I want to tear him apart. “You’ve been hiding them from me?”

He crosses his arms, closing in on himself like a little kid. “I was protecting you. She left us, Lark.” He finally looks at me, and I can see the tears forming. “She abandoned us. And then she sends us postcards as if she’s just on vacation, like we should be happy for her, living a life out there without us.” He laughs, short and blunt, but it’s an awful sound.

“Where are they?” I grip the postcard in my hand so tight that it starts to bend. “Where are the rest of the letters?”

Archer’s face sinks—he looks like a brother who knows he’s done a very bad thing but it’s something he can’t take back. “I threw them away,” he says to the floor. “I didn’t even read them.”

My blood is fire, my heart a battering ram. I want to step forward and shove him in the chest; I want to shout. Too many hurts are fisting together inside me.

But I look down at the postcard still in my hand, the only one not destroyed.

This is why Archer often insisted on retrieving the mail himself—I always thought it was because most of the love letters were for him. But it was because he was keeping a secret from me. All this time.

“I should have told you,” he says now, but I’m already backing away. He never let me decide for myself what to feel. All these years I thought she didn’t care enough to even send a letter. It stacked more pain on top of the mountain of hurt. But she’s been writing to us all along.

She never forgot about us… not entirely.

“Lark,” Archer says again, but I won’t meet his eyes.

“I don’t want to talk to you right now. There’s nothing you can say to make this right.” He’s blocking my path to the front door, so I turn and escape out the back door into the garden, gulping in the warm evening air. I stare down at the postcard, my whole body shaking.

Moonlight breaks through the low clouds, lightning snaps in the distance, but it doesn’t rain. The sky is dry and sharp and awful.

I run my fingers across the smooth paper of the postcard, reading Mom’s words through a blur of salty pain, each letter a piece of her—the o ’s like yawning mouths, the t ’s like tall steeples, towering over the other words.

We found a port in Sardinia, off the Italian coast. The weather has been warm but windy, and Lark, you would love the old stone buildings and the faces of so many beautiful people to sketch. Archer, are you still playing the guitar?

I’ll be at this hotel for the next two weeks if you want to write back. Would love to hear from you both.

Love always,

Mom

Her return address is a place called Casa Gallasso. She’s been writing to us, hoping for a response, for a letter back that never comes.

I feel ripped apart.

Archer denied me the chance to write to her: to tell her I hate her, love her, want her to come home, and never want to see her again.

He kept this from me. He didn’t think I was strong enough. Didn’t think I could handle seeing her words written with an airy ease, blithe and carefree, while she sipped espresso at some small café, the afternoon Mediterranean sun tanning her ageless skin. Living a life out there, without us.

My eyes rise to the field of tulips, the sound of thunder rolling across the skyline from somewhere far away.

I hear the front door shut, and I know Archer has left. The guilt or maybe the anger too much for him to bear. I won’t see him again before I leave—and I don’t want to.

Everything feels ripped apart.

I blink out at the garden—the thing that is to blame for all of it. For Mom leaving, unable to get away from this house fast enough. For Archer loving all the wrong people and keeping Mom’s letters from me. For Oak lying to me, loving me, when he never should have. For my own heart being turned inside out.

This garden has plagued me. It’s ruined me.

I walk out into the tulips, the hurt of it all like a fist around my dried-up heart.

My knees sink to the soil, and I let out a sob.

What if freedom from this house won’t really set me free? What if I’m no better than Mom—running away from the things I can’t face?

I read the postcard again, swiping at the tears, but they won’t stop falling. They leak into the already-wet soil. This damp, swampy land, this sinking house. I hate it all. I cry, and the sky answers back, thunder rumbling along the belly of the clouds. I dig my fingers into the dirt, ripping up the ground, and the rain begins to fall. It doesn’t begin gently—it falls in sudden sheets. And with each gasping breath in my lungs, the thunder shakes the air, rattling the earth beneath me. I think about fate, about Fern Goode choosing this awful patch of ground on which to build a home, dooming every generation that came after him, to suffer the same heartache, the same loss of love, the reminder of the tulips growing right outside our windows. I think about the magic in this soil, the curse, the bad luck that lives in my veins.

I think how unfair it is that one man’s decision to plant a few bulbs in this swampy dirt would plague me since birth.

Why can’t I choose something different?

Why isn’t there a way out, a way free from this dreadful life?

Why can’t I destroy what’s been sown into the soil? Destroy what Fern made, so I can begin again?

Tears well against my eyes, stream down my cheeks. How much pain can one girl bear in a single day? In a single life?

Love is more than desire: It’s power. Deceit. You can command armies with love; you can alter the world. As long as I’m a Goode, no matter how far away I travel, these tulips will still bloom, and they will still curse my blood. I will never know if the love others feel for me is real.

Real freedom is not a town on the Pacific coast where no one knows my name.

Freedom is a swamp of destroyed tulips that will never bloom again.

I tilt my chin up to the sky and I scream. I tell the storm that I hate this place, every last inch of it. I beg the rain to take it away, to rip this land up from the bedrock and carry it out into the woods, as if it were never here at all.

With my broken heart beating hollow and empty inside me, I weep, and I plead, and I wish this house had never been built over the creek; I wish Fern Goode had never sailed across the Atlantic. I wish these tulips had never pushed their way to the surface, greedy and full of false love. Full of lies. Full of spite.

And strangely, with force, the storm replies.

My feet, my knees, feel suddenly cold and wet. The ground beneath me turns soft, muddy, as if a tide were rising up from the dirt, a lake bubbling to the surface. I wipe at my eyes and turn back to see Forsaken Creek has swelled beyond its banks and is now spilling outward like a dam that’s burst.

I push myself up, water swirling around me, rushing with the force of a river.

The sky snaps again, lightning flaring across the horizon, and the rain throws itself over me like tiny pebbles stinging my skin. I push through the rising swell of the creek, now flooding through the garden, and wade up to the porch, grabbing the sagging railing to pull myself up the steps.

I stand for moment, staring out at the downpour—stunned. I’ve never seen anything like it. Nearly a foot of water now surges among the tulip stalks, making them sway and bend against one another. Threatening to snap.

But it’s not only the garden that heaves against the force of the water. The porch beneath me begins to shift unsteadily, the posts in the ground starting to lose their footing.

My heart thuds. This is not a normal rainstorm; this is something else. Violent and unnatural. A torrent that is only getting worse.

Shit.

I turn for the door and scramble back inside. But the sound of the storm beats against the roof, and I can hear that the creek—usually a gentle stream spilling over rocks—is now a roar, tearing away the soil beneath the floorboards.

I sprint down the hall and duck into Archer’s room to be sure he hasn’t returned, but I find his room empty. The lights overhead flicker, then go out. There is a loud pop sound from the kitchen, and I know one of the circuits has blown. We’ve lost all power. The usual hum of the refrigerator has gone quiet, and back in the living room, all I can hear is the screaming wind, the echoing thunder, and the creek below the house becoming turbulent and angry.

For a moment I stand frozen, unsure what to do.

But the house doesn’t give me time to decide….

It begins to shake and teeter beneath me.

I hear a loud crack, followed by another.

The house is separating from its foundation.

This is bad. My eyes cut to the front door, but the wall tilts strangely, like it’s going to buckle. The window above the kitchen table shatters, glass exploding to the floor. I swivel around, and the garden is churning in the wind, everything blustery and tempestuous beyond the windows. But it’s not the world outside that’s swaying; it’s the house where I stand. It feels like standing in Oak’s rowboat, pitching from side to side as the floodwater lifts it up from the soil. I can’t stay here any longer. My legs take a staggering step, and I find myself slipping back, the house now tilted, the couch beginning to ease away from the wall and slide toward me. I nearly drop to my knees but somehow stay upright, feet scrambling across the wood floor.

I reach the front door, grabbing the knob with both hands. But it doesn’t swing open. It’s wedged shut. The walls of the house have shifted, buckled, and I yank at the knob, panic rising in my chest.

But it won’t move.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Water begins to bubble up beneath the floorboards, cold and churning.

Fear wells up inside me, and I scream, eyes darting around the room. In the kitchen, rain pours in through the broken window. I stagger toward it, wet shoes crunching on the glass. A jagged layer of glass remains at the bottom of the window; if I try to climb through, I’ll tear my flesh apart.

But I don’t have a choice—the house begins to tilt onto its side, water spilling up from below. I slide a chair in front of the window and step up, when I hear a thud against the outer wall of the house. I pause, listening, and I hear it again, another loud smack.

My heart races, fear pulsing against my eardrums, unsure what’s causing the sound.

Thud, thud… crack.

I back away from the window, from the wall, afraid the whole house is about to collapse in on itself. The creek sounds like a torrent, a river expanding and swelling outward, swallowing up everything.

My eyes flash to the front door just as it cracks inward, wood splintering along the wall. I blink, trying to focus through the dark, and I think I see someone standing in the open doorway.

The figure moves toward me, shadows melting into shadows, and I almost slink away, my nerves vibrating, but a hand reaches for me.

“We have to go!” the voice says.

I can’t speak. Can’t think.

“Lark,” he says. “Take my hand.”

I feel his palm grip mine, and he’s pulling me through the doorway, free of the house. But half of the front porch is gone, broken apart. I shake my head, stunned by the amount of water swirling around us. The house has drifted back, farther into the woods, and Swamp Wells Road feels impossibly far away.

“We need to hurry,” he says, and my eyes look into his for the first time.

The boy I never thought I’d see again.

I open my mouth to speak, to ask him what he’s doing here, but he’s already stepping off the broken porch into the water, standing waist-deep. “I won’t let you go,” he says, his hands now reaching up for me. My ears ring, the storm thundering overhead, the house cracking and snapping behind me, but I reach out and he folds his hands around me, lifting me off the porch and into the water. Into his arms. My eyes flash back to the house, where the creek is carrying it away, into the trees, into the dark. Swallowed up by the storm.

Oak’s hands are braced around me, keeping the creek from sweeping my legs out from under me, and slowly we wade through the deep water, until it turns shallow, and we manage to reach the grassy bank. I want to sink to the ground, but Oak won’t let me. “It’s not safe,” he says, urging me up the edge of the creek that has now become a river, until we reach Swamp Wells Road. His truck is parked on the wet pavement, the ditch along the road surging with water.

He opens the passenger door and lifts me inside.

The sound of the storm is instantly dulled. Only the thump of my heartbeat fills my ears. I close my eyes, telling myself to breathe. Telling myself that this is all a nightmare, and if I focus hard enough, I’ll finally wake.

But when Oak opens the driver’s side door and pulls himself inside, all the noise comes roaring back into focus. The rain against the metal roof, the wind howling against the windshield.

He turns the key in the ignition, and heat begins pouring from the vents. I realize for the first time that I’m shaking. Oak wraps something around my shoulders, a sweatshirt, and I open my eyes, holding my hands toward the vents.

Finally I look to the window, and I see what’s been lost.

The sky is gray and wet. At the end of our driveway… the house is gone.

Not even a memory of it remains. The creek carried it away, pulled it out to Rabbit Cross River, where it will surely break apart, board by board, year by year, dismantled along the banks. Our past taken with it. But it’s not just the house that’s vanished.

The garden has been ripped from the soil.

Every bulb, every petal, torn away.

The creek took it all.

Gone.

I’m finding it hard to breathe, to slow my thoughts. Witnessing the loss of everything.

“I’m sorry,” I hear Oak say. As if I should feel sad, as if I should begin to cry. But I feel tangled up, spun inside out. I feel something intangible, unnameable. Unfathomable.

Loss, but also…

I lower my hands from the vents, my body no longer trembling. “What are you doing here?” I ask.

He breathes, is quiet, then absently reaches into his back pocket, retrieves the paperback he always keeps there, and tosses it onto the dashboard, settling back into the seat. The book is wet, soaked through, pages warped. But the heat from the dash will dry the paper. I stare at it as he clears his throat. “It looked like it might rain, so I thought I’d drive somewhere, instead of walking.” He blinks through the windshield at the storm. “I drove over the county line without even thinking about it…. I—I didn’t plan to come here.” His voice is crisp, careful, like he doesn’t want to reveal too much, like he’s trying to keep himself hidden beneath the soft edges of his lips, which I can still remember against mine. But I already know—because Mrs. Thierry told me—he walks by my house each night. A ritual. A habit. A torment he can’t shake. He comes here each night, whether he will admit it or not. “I was driving by your house when I saw the water.”

“Nothing happens by chance,” Mom would say. “Life is a series of predestined moments, timed perfectly, orchestrated by hidden threads that bind us to our destiny.”

But I don’t know if I believe anything she said anymore.

I close my eyes, listening to the rain, trying to make sense of everything.

“My suitcase…,” I say, suddenly remembering, sitting up to peer through the window, but also knowing… it’s long gone. Carried away with the flood. I’ve truly lost everything. All that’s left is the postcard in my shorts pocket and the cash in my wallet.

“You’re leaving?” he asks, knowing what a suitcase means.

“Tonight.”

He tilts his head back against the seat, his face a galaxy of memories—as if he can see every thought, every moment we’ve spent apart, every night I waited for him at my window but he never came.

The silence between us is like a needle pressed into an open wound. Sharp and precise. He is everything I’ve tried to forget, seated beside me.

“You deserve more than this town,” he says through an exhale, like he’s doing everything he can to keep himself steady. “I’m glad you’re finally getting out.” He blinks, and there is almost a smile in his eyes, like he once loved this about me—my dream of escaping this place.

“I always thought I’d be leaving something behind….” I stare at the place where the house once stood. “But now there’s nothing.” Not even a suitcase. No dry change of clothes. A hairbrush. Another pair of shoes. Even Mom’s Walkman is gone. It was all taken by the creek.

This is the destruction of my whole life.

I think of Archer, somewhere in town—oblivious to everything we’ve both just lost.

The rain begins to slow against the hood of the truck, the thunder echoing farther to the east.

“I need to get to the train station.”

Oak’s eyes narrow as he turns to face me. “We should wait here. The fire department, or someone, will probably come. Your house is… it’s gone. This storm might get worse.”

“No,” I say, feeling like I can breathe for the first time. “No one’s coming. No one cares about that house. They’ll hardly notice it’s gone. They’ll hardly notice when I’m gone.”

Oak stares out the window, and there is hurt hanging in his forest-green eyes—pain that has no name. “I’ll notice.”