My mother's texts came first in the thread. The early ones were practical—where are you, call me, are you safe—and then they got shorter and further apart, the way her messages did when she was trying not to say the thing she actually meant.
The last one had come in forty minutes ago. Just my name.Pandora. Like she was calling me back from somewhere.
I kept scrolling. There were people I'd forgotten existed, people who'd been Dane's first and mine by proximity. People who hadn't thought to call me in a year but called today because today was interesting. Because I was a story now. The girl who got left at the altar. The girl who disappeared into the mountains.
A text from a number I didn't recognize.Hey, this is Krissy—we met at Dane's work thing in March. Are you okay? He's not answering anyone.
Another read,Pandora, this is Dane's mom. Please call me when you get this. We're very worried about you both.
Both. She was worried about us both.
I set the phone face-down on the mattress and pressed my palms flat against my thighs.
The morning was still on my skin. Hayes's hands and the porch railing and the river below and the way the mountains had just held still around the whole of it like it was ordinary. Like women came apart and got put back together out there every day.
I could still feel the warmth of the sun. I could still feel him.
And here was the rest of it, buzzing face-down on the mattress next to me.
I picked it up again and looked at it and tried to locate the version of myself that belonged to those names in my notifications. The girl who'd been engaged and had a plan and a Charlotte life that made sense from the outside.
I couldn't find her. She felt very far away. She felt like someone I'd read about.
That was the problem.
I could feel it taking shape—the bad thought assembling itself word by word. The way bad thoughts always did right before they became unavoidable.
I'd been here less than twenty-four hours.
I'd driven through the night in a wedding dress to a stranger's cabin because a man who hadn't shown up to his own wedding told me to. I'd walked through a stranger's door, and I'd eaten his eggs and worn his flannel and told him things I hadn't said out loud to anyone, and then I'd kissed him on the porch and?—
And it had felt like the realest thing that had ever happened to me.
Which was insane. Which was exactly the kind of thing a broken person thought. Precisely what a woman with no judgment and no spine and a track record of defaulting into whatever was in front of her would feel in this situation, in this cabin, with this man who was steady and certain.
What if he was just another next thing?
What if I was exactly what I was afraid of being—someone who couldn't tell the difference between choosing and falling, between real and convenient, between a man who saw me and a man who happened to be there?
I'd thought Dane was real.
I'd been wrong about Dane.
I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum and breathed. Stared at the wedding dress still hanging over the bathroom door. The morning on the porch tried to hold its ground against the weight of all those notifications, all those names, and I could feel it losing.
The footsteps in the hallway were quiet. Hayes didn't knock, but he stopped in the doorway. I didn't turn around. I could feel him reading the room the way he read everything—without rushing it, without filling it with noise.
"Hey," he said.
"I don't know how to do this," I said to the dress.
He didn't ask what I meant. He came in and sat next to me on the edge of the bed, and he looked at the dress too. He waited. The mattress shifted under his weight, and I was aware of the warmth of him beside me, close but not crowding, and I felt something in my chest stop bracing.
"What if I'm just broken?" I said. "What if I don't know the difference between something real and something that feels good because I need it to? I picked Dane. I almost married him. My judgment isn't—" I stopped. Started again. "What if this is the same thing? What if I'm desperate and I don't know it and you're just the next mistake I can't afford?"
Hayes was quiet for a moment.
"You drove through the night in a wedding dress looking for answers," he said. "Not to get him back. Answers. That's not someone with bad judgment. That's someone who already knew the truth and couldn't let herself say it."