Page 14 of What You left in Me

It’s too soon when I hit the bend where she collapsed. Though the air is clear now, my chest tightens like it did that day. Fourteen years old and carrying her body back up the trail, telling myself everything was going to be okay when I already knew it wasn’t.

I don’t slow down.

I refuse to.

Fear’s useless, and I’m not giving this place the satisfaction of seeing me flinch.

The forest presses in on me, dragging the ghosts out whether I want them or not. My feet come down harder and harder, till my legs are burning, lungs raw. Because if I stop, I’ll have to remember too much. The storm from all those years ago lingers here too. The night I left. The sky split open with thunder, the trees shaking like they wanted me to go, and me slamming a car door so hard Eleanor recoiled. Ariane stood in the hallway, her eyes wide and accusing, and I drove away anyway.

Every step feels like I’m still running from that moment, and the fucking forest won’t let me forget it.

I push myself to go faster, because the trail is endless and I won’t give it the win. My shirt sticks to my back, sweat stings my eyes, and still, I run on. You can outrun a lot of things. Mistakes, memories, even people… But everywhere I go, there it is: guilt.

By the time I break out of the trees and into town, the sun’s finally up, burning pale in the sky. My shirt clings, soaked through, and every muscle in my legs burns with ache, but I keep moving.

The town looks exactly the same. Someone may as well have pressedPausethe night I left. There’s the same diner with peeling paint. Here’s the same mural on Harrow’s hardware store wall—that was fucking ugly then and fucking uglier now. The same cracked sidewalk where I ate shit on my bike when I was ten. Time didn’t move here. It just sat and waited, like it knew I’d have to come back eventually.

Even if it’s against my will.

I push open the door to the coffee shop, and the bell above it jingles in that shrill, fake-cheerful way that makes me want torip it down. The smell hits me next, lowkey burnt beans drowned in cinnamon, the exact same shitty scent it wore a decade ago. The barista beams like he’s trying to win a customer service medal, and the rest of the room goes quiet, staring at me like I’m a fucking sideshow.

“Finn Wagner?” a man calls from near the window, voice too loud and obnoxious. Who the fuck even is that? “Back from New York? Big city couldn’t keep you?”

I don’t bother with trading witty repartee. Just a nod will do.

Behind me, someone whispers, not even trying to hide it, “Didn’t he used to date the mayor’s daughter? They were caught kissing at her wedding?”

Of course. This town never forgets. It hoards gossip like treasure, keeps it pristine, and ready to drag out the second you walk back in.

I step to the counter and order a black coffee, because if they so much as wave whipped cream at it, I’ll throw the cup in their faces. I slap a twenty on the counter for a drink that costs two bucks, and the kid behind the register blinks at it like its counterfeit. As I start walking away, he turns to his coworker, trying to whisper, failing spectacularly, “He used to scare the shit out of us when we were kids.”

I let the corner of my mouth twitch because that one’s almost funny.Used to?

Coffee in hand, I shove the door open with my shoulder, the bell jingling again behind me. This town hasn’t changed one fucking bit. Not the place, and definitely not the fucking people. They couldn’t mind their damn business then, and they can’t now.

Some things never change. And maybe that’s the problem.

I take a long, bitter swallow of coffee that scalds my tongue. I almost welcome the burn, because pain at least feels honest. Doesn’t matter how far I run—Manhattan, Paris, Tokyo, India—this town waits, patient and smug, and the ghosts keep pace like they never left.

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They coffee’s mostly gone by the time I make it back up the drive, and it does nothing to wash the taste of this fucking town out of my mouth. The estate lurks like a behemoth, the same way it always has. Only, it’s too refined now. That’s a given, with how Eleanor’s been playing dollhouse with a place that used to be home.

I cut in through the side door and I still remember the way it used to slam when I came barreling in as a kid, mud up to my knees, my mother’s voice following me down the hall, laughing instead of lecturing. Now, the paint’s been changed, the floors refinished, the old scuff marks and fingerprints scrubbed out like they never existed.

Eleanor’s voice echoes piercingly from the main hall, crisply rattling off orders about floral arrangements and which PR photographer is allowed to shoot from which angle.

She doesn’t sound cruel, exactly. There’s a clinical curtness to her every word, like perfection is oxygen and, if she doesn’t control every detail, the world as she knows it will fucking end.

I don’t hate her. It can seem that way, but I really don’t. We’ve always managed to be civil, even occasionally friendly, but walking through this house now is like walking through someone else’s version of it. Every trace of my mother’s touch isgone. The curtains she picked, the colors she loved, the stupid ceramic lamp she bought at a yard sale because she said it looked “cheerful.” All of it, erased.

She’s a ghost in her own house, and Eleanor painted over her bones.

I move down the hall, and the new housekeeper rounds the corner too fast, a tall vase clutched in her hands. She nearly drops the damn thing when she sees me standing there. The water inside sloshes hard enough to spill over the rim.

“Sorry, Mr. Wagner,” she stammers, gripping the vase like it might save her. “I didn’t know you were…”

“This is my house,” I cut in, eyes narrowed.