Natalie hesitated, then answered with honesty. "No. But I will be."
After she hung up, she stood in the foyer and looked around. The house was quiet again, but not in the same hollow way as before. This time, the silence felt intentional. Like it was bracing for a new chapter.
She double-checked the lights, unplugged the kettle, and picked up her purse. Her phone remained eerily silent. Still no message from Giles. Not even a placeholder text to feign concern. It was a kind of clarity. He wasn’t coming back. And maybe he didn’t deserve to.
She grabbed her suitcase and opened the door. The air outside was crisp and clear. The sky overhead was pale blue, dotted with soft white clouds drifting slowly west. The tulips in the planter trembled in the breeze. As she pulled the door shut behind her, she glanced back one last time. The house looked unchanged. But she knew better now. The walls held memories, yes. But in each room, there played a slow, sad song about the quiet death of love.
She turned the key, stepped down the stairs, and wheeled her suitcase to the car. The street was alive with city sounds. Horns, footsteps, the occasional bark of a dog or children’s laughter. The spring afternoon held a strange kind of beauty. A season of beginnings blossoming all around her while her own world had just come undone.
That was when the final piece clicked into place. The man she thought she had loved, the man who once held her hand in a vineyard and promised the world, wasn’t the man who had shared her bed last week. That man hadn’t cared enough tofight. To fix. To even reach out. And she didn’t owe him her suffering.
She climbed into her car, started the engine, and watched her building disappear in the rearview mirror. With every mile, the ache in her chest loosened, just a little. She passed the city limits, the skyline shrinking behind her, and turned onto the highway that would take her toward Colorado. Toward Olivia. Toward whatever came next.
She didn’t know what she would find. Didn’t know how long she would stay. But for the first time in years, she was moving not because someone needed her, or because duty dictated it, but becausesheneeded to. Becauseshewas choosing herself. Because it was time.
The road stretched ahead, wide and open and waiting. Natalie pressed her foot to the gas. And she didn’t look back.
3
The highway unspooled ahead of her like a ribbon, weaving its way westward through towns with names she didn’t recognize and skylines that faded into hills, and then into vast open fields. Natalie drove with the windows cracked, the soft wind threading through the strands of hair that had pulled loose from her braid.
It was early evening by the time she passed into the Berkshires, the Massachusetts trees turning from urban ornamental to wild-limbed and unrestrained. Patches of snow clung to the shadowed sides of hills, resisting spring’s slow thaw. The sky, a watercolor of orange and plum, draped the mountains in a soft glow that might have felt romantic if not for the hollow weight in her chest.
She hadn’t eaten since that morning, but hunger never came. Not real hunger. Just the dry, uncomfortable awareness of an empty stomach. Her body felt like it belonged to someone else, someone she had vacated and left behind in that Boston townhouse. Her hands remained steady on the wheel, though her thoughts drifted.
Sometimes they returned to the call with Olivia. The way her friend had said her name with so much concern, so muchknowing. Olivia had always had that gift, reading beneath the words. But mostly, her mind betrayed her. It circled back to Giles.
The first time she saw him, he had been laughing. A loud, unfiltered laugh that broke across the room like a spark. He had leaned over a bar counter to pay for a coffee, chatting animatedly with the barista. Natalie had watched him from her seat in the corner, a medical journal opened on her lap, her scrubs creased from the overnight shift. He had glanced over, smiled at her. That easy, disarming smile. And just like that, something had shifted in her.
They were married three years later. The wedding in Martha’s Vineyard was perfection. She wore ivory lace and bare feet, and he kissed her like he couldn’t believe she was real. There had been laughter, wine, speeches that made her cry. She remembered the feeling of his hand on the small of her back, the way he leaned in and whispered, "You’re my beginning."
Now, that memory felt like glass. Sharp. Dangerous to touch. She passed a rusted gas station and a boarded-up diner. The road narrowed for a while, hemmed in by trees, then opened again into wide, flat farmland. The sun dipped lower, casting moody shadow-shapes across the fields. Darkness soon followed and Natalie flipped on her headlights, the glow illuminating a wooden sign welcoming her into upstate New York.
She didn’t know how long she’d drive that night. She just knew she had to keep moving.
Music didn’t help. It made her feel too much. Talk radio was worse so she drove in silence, the churn of the tires and the whisper of wind through the window her only companions.
In that silence, her mind was cruel. She replayed the moment she found the stockings. The champagne flutes. Thelook on Giles' face. That flicker of annoyance, like she had interrupted the afterglow of his act. Not shame. Not regret. Just frustration. It still made her nauseous.
She had wanted to scream. To throw something. But instead, she had stood there in quiet disbelief, the kind that takes time to settle. The kind that arrives in pieces, days later, while driving through a state you’ve never visited.
She passed a motel with a yellow neon sign and pulled in without thinking. Her body had grown stiff, her eyes dry and gritty. The room was plain but looked clean and held a bed, a chair, a wooden dressing table, a tiny bathroom that smelled comfortingly of bleach. She dropped her bag beside the bed, sat down on the edge, and stared at her reflection in the dresser mirror. Her eyes were bloodshot. Her skin pale. Her mouth pressed into a flat, unreadable line. She thought of calling someone. One of her city friends, maybe. But what would she say?
I don’t know who I am without him. I don’t know how to be alone. Instead, she peeled back the covers, lay down, and closed her eyes. The dreams, when they came, were cruel and chaotic bringing images of Giles laughing with someone she couldn’t see, rooms filled with voices that spoke in riddles, doors she couldn’t open. She woke tangled in the sheets, her chest tight, her eyes damp.
She didn’t cry much. Not the way she thought she would. Mostly, it was just this slow leak. A steady drip of grief and betrayal that never seemed to empty. The next morning, she ate a granola bar in the car and drank bitter motel coffee. The road stretched ahead again, winding into Pennsylvania, then Ohio. Each state passed like a chapter she didn’t want to reread. Fields gave way to towns, towns to rivers, rivers to stretches of silent wilderness. She stopped only for gas, restrooms, and theoccasional coffee shop where she could get something that didn’t taste like food lonely people eat.
She didn’t listen to music until Indiana. Then, without thinking, she tapped her phone and chose a playlist Giles had once made for her. She almost turned it off. But she let it be. Maybe she wanted to hurt. Maybe she needed to remember what love had sounded like before it curdled.
The winding road narrowed as it climbed deeper into the Colorado mountains, flanked on both sides by towering evergreens dusted with the last remnants of spring snow. Natalie leaned forward in her seat, her hands gripping the steering wheel with a mix of anticipation and exhaustion. Her car's tires crunched along a gravel path that twisted up toward a clearing, where the trees began to thin, and the sanctuary finally revealed itself in the golden afternoon light.
It looked like something from another life. A postcard scene she might have saved for later, back when she was still collecting dreams like pressed flowers. A place where wild things healed, where nature was the architect, and time slowed to a rhythm older than grief.
The main cabin sat nestled between two wide-boughed pines, its weathered wood siding dark with age and accented by a wraparound porch adorned with planters of early wildflowers. Nearby, smaller buildings dotted the open meadow, a converted barn, a long, low medical cabin, and what looked to be an aviary with glinting mesh. Beyond that, the land rolled gently into forest, where the tree line swallowed everything in shades of green and pine-shadow.
Natalie parked near a split-rail fence and stepped out. The air was different here, cooler, thinner, but clean in a way Boston never was. It smelled of earth, sap, and the unmistakable crispness of altitude. The stillness was so complete it made her head swim.
The front door to the main cabin swung open, and Olivia Hayes emerged, wiping her hands on a canvas apron, her dark hair pulled back by a scarf. Her face lit up the moment she saw Natalie.
