VOLUME I ACT I CHAPTER NINE Collateral Truths (Part One)
VOLUME I
ACT I
CHAPTER NINE
Collateral Truths
(Part One)
The cabin by the lake was supposed to be a clean slate—time away from everything and everyone. And for a while, it was. We cooked simple meals, played board games, took long walks without talking. The silence between us softened, like fabric finally breaking in after years of wear.
But some truths don’t vanish just because you go somewhere quieter.
On the third morning, I woke to find K sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the floor with his elbows resting on his knees.
“You okay?” I asked, my voice scratchy with sleep.
He didn’t look at me. “I had another dream.”
My heart tightened. “Do you want to talk about it?”
He exhaled slowly. “I was in high school again. I saw you in the hallways, but I didn’t know it was you. You kept walking past me, always watching, always turning just before I could catch your eyes. I kept chasing you through that building until suddenly, I was older. It was our wedding day, and you were standing at the altar—but you wouldn’t turn around. I kept saying your name, louder and louder, but you just stared straight ahead. Like I didn’t exist.”
I reached for him. He let me take his hand, but his fingers didn’t close around mine.
“I don’t want to keep having dreams where you’re a stranger,” he whispered.
“I don’t want to be one.”
We sat in silence. The kind that didn’t feel forgiving anymore, just necessary.
That afternoon, we went down to the lake. The sky was overcast, and the wind pushed little ripples across the water. K skipped stones, each one slicing clean lines before disappearing into the gray.
I stood behind him, watching.
“You think people can change the way they remember things?” I asked quietly.
He paused. “What do you mean?”
“Like… if you loved someone enough, would you be able to forget the part where they hurt you?”
He turned to me slowly. “I don’t think forgetting is love. I think choosing to stay, even when you remember everything, is.”
I nodded. “Then I hope you’ll stay.”
“I haven’t left,” he said. But his voice carried a weight. The kind that made me wonder if “leaving” wasn’t about distance—but about believing in something enough to hold onto it.
Later that night, after dinner, he pulled out a photo album I didn’t know he’d brought.
“I packed it last-minute,” he explained. “Thought it might help.”
The album was full of old pictures. Us in New York. Us on his birthday, blurry and smiling. Selfies from our road trip two years ago. A Polaroid of me laughing with his brother on some random Tuesday.
The last page held a single photo: our wedding day.
Me in white. Him in navy blue. His arms around my waist. My eyes half-closed like I was afraid if I blinked, the moment would disappear.
“This picture used to make me happy,” he said.
“Used to?”
“Now I wonder what you were thinking about.”
I stared at it. “I was thinking, I got everything I ever wanted.”
“And now?”
“I still have it. But I’m scared I won’t deserve to keep it.”
He turned the page back and closed the album. “Then maybe we should make new memories. Ones we don’t have to question.”
We left the cabin the next morning, but something followed us home.
It wasn’t anger. Or resentment.
It was grief.
For the version of our story that would never exist again.
And grief has a way of sitting beside you even when you’re smiling. Of echoing in every silence, no matter how sweet.
Back home, I tried to fill our days with lightness.
Brunches. Shared playlists. Little love notes tucked in his coat pockets.
Sometimes he smiled when he found them.
Sometimes he didn’t mention them at all.
And I tried not to read into the difference.
But it was there.
One night, as we sat watching reruns on the couch, he looked over at me and said, “You know what scares me the most?”
I muted the TV. “What?”
“That I don’t know how much of my love was earned, and how much was orchestrated.”
My chest tightened. “It was all earned. Every single second of it.”
“But if I never had the chance to fall in love on my own, is it still mine?”
I took a breath. “You did have a chance. You just didn’t know you were already walking toward me.”
He looked at me. Really looked. “Maybe. Or maybe I fell in love with a story I didn’t realize had a narrator.”
I sat quietly, hands clasped in my lap. “I don’t know how to fix that.”
“Maybe you don’t need to fix it,” he said. “Maybe I just need to understand it.”
At night, I started writing again.
Not in my notes app.
In a real notebook. With a pen.
I wrote about the first day I saw him. The sunlight in his hair. The way his laugh cracked in the middle. The way my chest had tightened, even at fourteen, in a way I didn’t understand.
I wrote about the guilt.
About the lies.
About how every step toward him felt like a prayer I didn’t know I was saying.
And then I wrote something else:
I didn’t fall in love with you because I planned to.
I planned because I fell in love with you.
When I finished the page, I tore it out, folded it once, and slipped it beneath his pillow.
The next morning, it was gone.
He didn’t say anything.
But when I opened the fridge later that day, there was a note taped to the orange juice.
Then keep loving me. Just don’t script the next part.
