Funny how that worked. Believing him.
I passed the old drive-in, shut down since we were kids. The gas station where he'd bought me flowers for prom—gasstation flowers, because he'd forgotten until the last minute and everywhere else was closed. I'd loved them anyway. Loved him anyway.
Then, the diner where we'd carved our initials into the booth. The field where he'd first kissed me, sophomore year, both of us shaking and awkward and sure we'd invented something no one else had ever felt.
Millbrook held all of it. Every version of us, every promise he'd made and broken.
But Matt wasn’t here anymore. He was back in the city, probably pacing our kitchen or calling Angela, maybe already at her place while the two of them figured out what to do now that everything had blown up in their faces.
Maybe fucking her again. Why wouldn’t he? There was nothing left to lose now.
I turned off the main road onto the gravel drive, the familiar crunch under my tires carrying me toward the house as the old oak tree came into view, its branches stretching over the yard. The porch light was dark at nearly 3 AM, and the swing my father built for my mother rocked gently in the wind.
I killed the engine and sat there for a moment in the dark, listening to the tick of the cooling motor. The silence of the countryside. No sirens, no traffic, no neighbors. Just crickets and the faint rustle of wind through the fields.
I got out of the car.
The front door opened before I reached the porch steps. My father stood in the doorway, shotgun in hand, white beard catching the moonlight. He looked older than I remembered, bone-tired in a way that went beyond the hour. But his eyes were sharp as ever, scanning the darkness behind me before settling on my face.
"Dad," I said. "It's me."
He lowered the gun. Squinted at me.
"Ellie?" His voice was rough with sleep. "What the hell are you doing here at three in the?—"
He stopped.
I don’t know what he saw. I thought I was still holding it together, still ice and steady and walking out of that kitchen in my mind like I hadn’t shattered on the way here.
But something in my face must have cracked. Something he could read the way he'd always been able to read me, even when I was twelve years old and trying to be brave for a dying horse.
"Ellie-bug," he said quietly. A name from when I was small, when scraped knees and bad dreams were the biggest things I had to survive..
That was what broke me.
Not Matt's excuses. Not Angela's tears. Not the video or the texts or the lies.
My father, standing in his doorway in his old bathrobe, calling me by a name no one had used in twenty years.
The sob came up from somewhere deep—guttural, animal, the sound of something tearing loose. My knees buckled, and I would have hit the porch steps if he hadn't caught me, the shotgun clattering to the ground as his arms came around me.
"I've got you," he said. "I've got you, sweetheart."
I buried my face in his chest and cried like I hadn't cried since I was twelve years old, kneeling in the dirt beside a dying mare. Cried for the marriage I'd thought I had. The future I'd thought was coming. The man I'd loved since I was fifteen years old who'd looked me in the eye and lied and lied and lied.
My father held me through all of it. He didn't ask questions. He didn't say a word. He just held me, steady and solid, while I finally fell apart.
CHAPTER 7: MATT
The taillights disappeared around the corner, and then she was gone.
I stood in the driveway barefoot, gravel biting into my heels, watching the empty road like she might turn around. Like she might come back.
She wasn't coming back.
The night air was cold. I hadn't noticed until now, hadn't noticed anything except Elena's face when she'd said "home" like it was a place that didn't include me anymore. Like eight years could just end with a single word and a closed door.
I turned and went back inside.
