Chapter 14: (END)

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We walked half a block before I let go of Leander’s hand.

“Thank you,” I said. “For saying all that. For standing up for me.”

I meant it casually. A polite acknowledgment of a favor. I assumed he’d been playing a role, stepping into the moment to shield me from Julian’s circus.

Leander stopped walking.

“Wren, everything I said is true.”

He wasn’t smiling. The easy humor, the self-deprecating jokes, the sideways charm—all of it was gone, replaced by a directness that made something shift in my chest.

“I know you just ended an unhappy marriage. I know you might have reservations about me, about anyone, about trying again. I understand that.” He ran a hand through his hair—nervous, not casual. “But I’ll earn your trust. Step by step. However long it takes.”

𝖰𝘂𝗮𝗅i𝘁𝘆 t𝘳а𝗻𝘀𝗅𝗮𝘁𝘪oո𝘴 𝗈𝘯 𝗀𝗮𝘭𝘯𝘰𝗏𝖾𝗅ѕ.𝘤𝘰𝘮

I didn’t know what to say. For the past year, every man who’d spoken to me with intensity had wanted something from me—compliance, forgiveness, a return to a life I’d already left. Leander wasn’t asking for any of that. He was offering. And the difference was so stark it took me a moment to recognize it.

“Give me time,” I said.

He nodded. “All the time you need.”

We walked the rest of the way home in a comfortable quiet. At my uncle’s door, he waited until I was inside before turning to leave. I watched him go through the window. His stride was unhurried. He didn’t look back to check if I was watching.

Somehow, that was the detail that stayed with me.

When I checked my phone, Sloane had sent a voice message. I played it while changing out of my shoes.

The story came in fragments. Ivy, pregnant and increasingly volatile, had grown suspicious of Julian’s new assistant. The irony was so precise it barely needed commentary. She’d thrown scenes at the office. During one of their arguments, she’d fallen. She lost the baby.

Sloane’s voice went quiet for a moment, then continued. Julian had given Ivy a sum of money. A settlement. A transaction, same as the necklace, same as the Caribbean trip he’d promised me—throw enough cash at a problem and hope it resolves itself.

So that’s what he’d meant by “resolving things with Ivy.”

I put the phone on the nightstand and sat in the dark for a while, thinking about a woman crying in a hospital and a man writing a check. Then I stopped thinking about it, because it wasn’t my story anymore. It was theirs, and they would have to live in it.

The months that followed were the quietest of my adult life.

Leander kept his word. He didn’t push. He didn’t crowd. He showed up when he said he would, remembered the things I told him, and gave me space to figure out what I wanted without making that space feel like absence. He brought my grandmother oranges because she’d mentioned once that she liked them. He helped my uncle fix the kitchen faucet that had been dripping since before I arrived. He never asked about Julian.

I fell for him the way you fall asleep after a long illness—gradually, without noticing, and then all at once with a relief so deep it almost hurts.

He proposed on a Tuesday. No elaborate setup. No restaurant. We were sitting on the bench by the lake where we’d taken our first walk, and he produced a ring from his coat pocket with the clumsy gravity of a man who’d practiced this moment a hundred times and was still terrified.

“I know Tuesdays aren’t traditional,” he said.

“I don’t care about traditional.”

“Good. Because the ring is also slightly crooked. The jeweler said it adds character.”

I laughed. He laughed. I said yes.

His parents were overjoyed. My uncle cried, then denied it, then cried again. My grandmother held my face between her hands and said, “This one has kind eyes.” Coming from her, that was the highest possible clearance.

The wedding was set for the end of the year.

In the weeks before it, my phone rang several times from a number in China. I’d pick up and hear nothing. No voice, no breathing, no background noise. Just an open line and a silence that felt deliberate, as if someone on the other side was holding the phone to their ear and listening to the sound of my life continuing without them.

The night before the wedding, the number called again. Late. Past midnight. I was in my old room at my uncle’s house, dress hanging on the closet door, shoes lined up beneath it.

I answered.

“Julian, I know it’s you. Stop pretending.”

Nothing.

“I’m happy now. Please don’t interfere with my happiness.”

The line stayed open for three more seconds. I could hear the faint static of a long-distance connection, the ghost of a breath. Then a click, and he was gone.

I set the phone on the nightstand. Turned off the lamp. Lay in the dark, looking at the ceiling, and thought about a man alone in a room on the other side of the world, listening to nothing.

Then I turned over and went to sleep.

The news reached me weeks later, relayed through Sloane in a careful, measured voice that told me she’d debated whether to share it at all. On my wedding day, Julian had driven drunk. He’d crashed into a highway barrier. The injuries left him permanently disabled.

I listened. I didn’t ask for details. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t sound either too cruel or too kind, and neither felt right.

It was a tragedy. His tragedy. And I carried no part of it.

The wedding itself was small. Leander’s parents, my uncle, my grandmother in her wheelchair in the front row with a tissue already in her hand. A few friends. Marjorie closed the coffee shop for the day and brought a cake she’d baked herself, slightly lopsided, with frosting that read “About Time” in wobbly letters.

Leander held my hands at the altar. His fingers trembled, just barely, and when I looked up at him I saw something I hadn’t seen directed at me in a very long time—a man looking at the woman in front of him as though she were exactly who he wanted to be looking at. Not a memory. Not a replacement. Not a version of someone else. Me.

We exchanged rings.

My grandmother wept. My uncle put his arm around her and wept too. Leander’s mother took photographs. The cake was sweet, the frosting slightly too thick, and when Leander cut the first slice he got it on his shirt and laughed with his whole body.

Outside, the December air was sharp and clean. The kind of cold that makes you pull your coat tighter and lean into the person beside you.

I leaned in.

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The End.

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Message from Noa: Lovely readers, I hope you have a great time these days. God loves you and Noa wishes you all the best. (─‿‿─)

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