He didn't rush to fill that.
"Dane and I—" I stopped. Started again. "I keep trying to locate what I'm going to miss about him, and I can't find it. What does that say about me?"
"Says you already knew," Hayes said.
I turned the mug in my hands. The ceramic was warm against my palms, and I focused on that.
"I didn'tknowknow. I just—I kept expecting to feel certain, and I never did. I thought that was me. I thought I was the kind of person who didn't get certain."
"About him."
"About anything."
He was quiet for a moment. "You drove three hours in a wedding dress to a mountain cabin at nine o'clock at night to get answers. That's not someone who doesn't get certain."
I hadn't thought about it that way.
The morning stretched out around us, unhurried. He refilled my coffee without asking. I told him about life in Charlotte in pieces—not a speech, just the way you talked to someone when they weren't pushing you toward a point. The job I'dtaken because Dane thought it made sense for his schedule. The apartment I'd moved into because it was close to his. The friends who'd drifted off to other cities, other lives, while I'd stayed in orbit around a man I now understood had never intended to land.
"I kept thinking someday it would feel like mine," I said. "The life. I kept thinking I just needed to get to the next thing and then it would click." I shook my head. "The wedding was the next thing."
"And now there's no next thing."
"No next thing." I looked up. "I know that's supposed to feel like a crisis."
"Does it?"
I thought about it honestly. The dress on the bathroom door. The text at two in the morning. Twelve percent battery and eleven missed calls and a life in Charlotte that had never quite fit.
"It feels like being let out of something," I said. "Which I know sounds terrible."
"Doesn't sound terrible to me."
I laughed, and it surprised me—surprised us both, I thought, from the way his expression shifted. Not a big laugh, just the small kind that escaped before you could decide whether it was appropriate.
"I'm Pandora," I said. "You know the myth?"
"Woman who opened the box."
"I've been blowing up my own life since last night, and everyone's going to want to talk about what I let out." I turned the mug again. "All the chaos, all the damage, all the things that can't be put back."
Hayes was quiet for a moment. Then, "That's not how I read it."
I looked up.
"The things that spilled out—they were already in there. You didn't create them. You just stopped keeping the lid on." He set his mug down. "You know what's left at the bottom of the box."
I did know. Every version of the myth I'd ever read.
"Hope," he said. Like it was simple.
I sat with that for a moment, the word settling into the quiet of the kitchen. The morning light had gone warmer through the windows, and I thought about a box with all the false things emptied out of it and one thing left at the bottom, patient and uncomplicated. Was that catastrophe or something closer to its opposite?
Hayes watched me think without interrupting it. That was a thing he did, I was already learning. He gave you room to arrive somewhere on your own.
We ended up on the porch without quite deciding to. I had his flannel and bare feet, and the boards were cool under my soles, and the river was visible through the trees—a silver thread of it catching the light below the slope of the property.
I told him about Dane and how this was supposed to be our wedding night. Not graphically, just the truth of it. We'd never actually been together that way. Dane had always had a reason to wait, and I'd thought it was consideration. I could see now it was just one more way he'd never been real about any of it.