VOLUME I ACT I CHAPTER SEVEN Ashes and Embers (Part One)
VOLUME I
ACT I
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ashes and Embers
(Part One)
It’s strange, the way grief works.
It doesn’t always come in waves. Sometimes it’s a stillness. A silence so loud it rings in your ears. The ache of something missing, not just in your home, but in the shape of your life. The haunting of a shared toothbrush. The sound of keys not turning in the lock. The weight of knowing you may have broken something so carefully built.
K wasn’t home. He hadn’t been in over a week.
His drawers were still full. His toothbrush still sat beside mine. His jacket still hung by the door. But he wasn’t here. And I had no idea if he ever would be again.
Every day, I made the bed on his side as if preparing for someone to return from war. I watered the houseplants he’d picked out for our balcony. I cooked dinner for two and ate for one. I watched our favorite shows, pausing every few minutes to glance toward the empty space beside me, hoping to hear his laugh. But it never came.
Sometimes I’d catch myself talking out loud, little nothings, observations, things I would normally say to him. And every time I did, it hit me harder: the absence. The hollowness where his presence used to be. The realization that I had lived in a version of love that wasn't fully honest, and now I was living in the consequence of that love's unraveling.
He texted, once or twice. Brief updates.
Still thinking. Still need time.
Tell your side to my mom like you promised.
And I did.
I called her. We met at a small café halfway between our homes. I expected her to shout. To storm out. To call me a manipulative girl with no business near her son.
But instead, she just sat across from me, her fingers curled around a steaming mug of tea, and listened.
When I finished telling her everything, how it began, why I did it, how I fell in love before he even knew I existed, she looked at me for a long time before saying, “You know, I always thought you were too good to be true.”
“I wasn’t,” I whispered. “I’m not.”
She nodded slowly. “You were a girl in love. A girl who didn’t know where the line was until it was behind her.”
I cried right there in that café.
She passed me a napkin and said, “You’re going to have to rebuild a lot. Trust. Respect. Yourself.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“You can,” she said. “But whether or not he lets you do it beside him is another story.”
That night, I sat on the balcony with the stars overhead and the city whispering below. I didn’t cry. I didn’t speak. I just sat.
I thought of the girl I was at fourteen. The girl who saw a boy in a park and decided he was her destiny. And I wondered if I’d ever really given him a choice. If I had ever loved him freely, or just made him the center of a world he never asked to be in.
The next day, I got a text from his brother.
He’s coming back.
Two hours later, the sound of a key in the door startled me out of sleep on the couch. I sat up, heart racing.
The door opened slowly. And K stepped inside.
Same face. Same scent. Same man.
But he looked different.
Older. Heavier.
Like he’d aged ten years in the span of ten days.
He stood there for a long moment. Then he dropped his bag and said, “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
I stood, uncertain.
“I don’t either,” I whispered.
He looked around the apartment. The same space we built together, filled with invisible cracks.
“I don’t forgive you,” he said.
I nodded. “I wouldn’t expect you to.”
“But I missed you,” he added.
And just like that, the air shifted. Not healed. Not whole. But different.
We stood on the edge of something new. Not a second beginning. Not yet.
But maybe...
The start of an honest one.
I watched him move slowly through the apartment, taking in the details like he was rediscovering them. His eyes landed on the picture frames. On the fridge magnets we collected from every city we visited. On the folded blanket I always used when he wasn’t home.
Then he looked at me again.
“I don’t want to stay in a lie,” he said. “But I also don’t want to throw away something that could still be real.”
“Then we start from where we are,” I said, my voice steady. “No pretending. No rewriting. Just… us. As we are now.”
He gave a tired, uncertain nod.
And for the first time in days, I let myself breathe.
Whatever came next would be hard. And slow. And messy.
But maybe, just maybe, it would also be worth it.
