Chapter Three
870 Words
Jack
Jack didn’t say a word as he and Lilly walked back to the truck.
She didn’t either—not right away. She just climbed into the passenger seat, buckled herself in, and started peeling the paper off the rest of her muffin like she hadn’t just walked through a landmine of grown-up emotions.
Jack got in, shut the door, and gripped the steering wheel. He stared through the windshield for a long moment, watching the sun climb over the bakery’s roofline. The smell of cinnamon still hung in the air, mixed with the faint scent of dust and old paper trailing from the bookstore.
Lilly took a bite, chewed, swallowed. “That was kind of mean.”
Jack blinked. “What?”
“What you said to Emma. The walking away part.”
He let out a breath, dragging a hand down his face. “Yeah.”
“Did you mean it?” Lilly asked, not accusing—just curious, like she was asking why clouds floated or why squirrels twitched so much.
Jack didn’t answer right away. He turned the key in the ignition, but didn’t pull away.
“She left, Lil,” he said finally. “Six years ago, like none of it mattered. Like we didn’t matter.”
“But she came back.”
“Not for me.”
Lilly frowned. “You don’t know that.”
He glanced at her. “She said it herself. She’s here to finish things and go.”
Lilly stared at him, then looked out the window. “She looked sad when she said it.”
Jack didn’t respond. Of course Emma looked sad. That was her way—quiet and contained, like she locked everything behind her ribs and threw away the key. She probably cried with her shoulders, not her face. Maybe not even then.
“You miss her,” Lilly said softly.
Jack let his head fall back against the seat.
“I don’t know what I miss,” he muttered.
That wasn’t true, of course. He knew exactly what he missed. He missed summer nights in the back room of the bookstore, the smell of her hair when she fell asleep on his shoulder. He missed the way she talked about books like they were people, how she always read the last page first, just to make sure she could handle the ending.
He missed the version of himself that existed when she was around.
“She’s not staying,” he said again, more to himself than to Lilly.
Lilly looked at him like she was trying to decide if he was brave or just stupid.
“Maybe she would,” she said, “if someone gave her a reason to.”
Jack let the truck idle, the engine rumbling beneath them like it had something to say. He stared at the bakery’s delivery van across the street, trying to focus on anything but the silence pressing in around him.
Lilly tore a piece of her muffin and popped it in her mouth. “You never sent those letters.”
Jack blinked. “What?”
“The ones you wrote. After she left.” Lilly glanced at him, her expression cautious but curious. “I saw you. At night. In the kitchen.”
He frowned. “You were supposed to be asleep.”
“I was five. I had bad dreams.”
Jack let out a breath through his nose and leaned his head back against the seat. Of course she remembered.
“I wasn’t going to send them,” he said. “I just needed to write them. Get things out of my head.”
“But you kept them.”
Jack didn’t answer.
He had. Every one of them, folded up in a worn shoebox at the back of his closet. Some were angry, sharp-edged and full of things he could never say aloud. Others were quiet—just pages of the life he was living without her. Updates she’d never asked for. Moments he wanted to share, even after she’d walked away.
“I thought maybe one day you’d give them to her,” Lilly said gently.
Jack stared out the windshield. “What would that fix?”
Lilly shrugged. “I don’t know. But it might explain what you meant. About walking away.”
Jack’s throat tightened.
“She left first, Lil.”
Lilly nodded. “But you stayed quiet.”
Jack looked down at his hands, fingers tightening on the wheel. She wasn’t wrong. He could’ve called. Could’ve written more than angry words he never intended her to read. Could’ve chased her down, told her—
What?
That he still loved her?
78That the town she ran from was still standing, and so was he?
Instead, he’d buried it. Buried her.
Until now.
“I don’t even know if she’d want to read them,” he muttered.
Lilly just gave a “hmmm” and kept eating her muffin while Jack pulled out and went to Nate’s house like he could help but deep down Jack knew he could. And well, Lilly could go play with the Mickelson kids while he helped Nate paint one of the houses on the block.
- Writer
