Chapter 4: What She's Not Ready to Say
1132 Words
The letter was still on the counter three days later, propped against the sugar bowl exactly where she'd left it, unopened, because opening it meant admitting she'd have to decide something.
It was from the estate lawyer. Aunt Cee's will had never quite specified what should happen to the cottage only that it should stay in the family "until someone loves it enough to keep it," which was, Jessica thought, a deeply on-brand way for her aunt to leave a legal document. Her mother wanted it sold. Her brother didn't care either way. Jessica hadn't said what she wanted, mostly because she hadn't let herself think about it.
She finally slit the envelope with a butter knife.
The Whitfield Group has expressed interest in the property for a boutique inn development. We would need a decision from all beneficiaries by the end of September.
End of September. Right around when she was supposed to leave anyway.
She set the letter down and looked around the kitchen the same faded yellow curtains, the crack in the tile by the stove her aunt used to call "the cottage's smile lines," the mismatched mugs she'd drunk cocoa from as a kid, feet swinging above the floor, no idea yet that a life could get taken apart by strangers with opinions. This place had never once asked anything of her. It had just existed, patiently, waiting for her to decide if she wanted it.
She didn't know when she'd started thinking of it as hers instead of the cottage.
Her phone buzzed on the counter, she'd turned it back on two days ago, strictly for emergencies, promising herself she wouldn't look at anything else. A text from her mother sat at the top of the lock screen: Have you thought more about the Whitfield offer? We really do need to move on this, sweetheart, and it would be good for you to have a fresh start with the money instead of holding onto….
She didn't finish reading it. She didn't need to. She'd gotten fluent, over the years, in translating her mother's particular brand of gentle, well-meaning erasure.
She carried her coffee out to the back porch instead of answering and sat on the top step, knees pulled up, watching the tide pull back from the sand in long silver ribbons.
Selling made sense. It was the practical choice, fund a fresh start somewhere with better memories attached, a clean break from a town she'd only visited two childhood summers and one catastrophic adult one. It also meant not having to decide anything else about her life beyond that single transaction.
But there was something about the cottage's stubborn refusal to fall down that felt like the only honest thing left in her life right now. It didn't perform. It didn't curate itself. It just was, cracked porch and all, and something about that plain honesty had already started working on her in ways she wasn't ready to name.
She thought randomly, of Finn's photographs the way he'd made the water look like something worth an entire season of dawns. She wondered if he'd ever pointed the camera at this house. If somewhere in his files there was a version of this porch that looked the way it felt to sit on it right now.
You have ten weeks. You don't have to decide today.
Didn't feel true. Ten weeks had once been exactly enough time for an entire relationship to unravel in public, thread by public thread. Ten weeks was proof a life could change completely before you even had time to brace.
She finished the coffee cold and tucked the lawyer's letter into a drawer, under a stack of place mats nobody had used in years. Not today, she thought. Just not today.
She hadn't meant to remember the whole thing. It came anyway, that night, right when she was almost asleep like her brain had been saving it up just to spring it on her.
It had started with a notification. That was the part almost nobody understood when she tried to explain it that the end of her old life hadn't arrived as a phone call or a conversation, but as a little red number in the corner of an app. One hundred and Forty-seven comments on a photo she hadn't posted, on an account that wasn't hers.
The photo was of Jonah. Jonah and Ashley, her business partner and her friend tangled together on a hotel balcony in Miami, some aggressively cute caption about "finally," like the two of them had been waiting years for permission she hadn't known she was withholding.
Someone had tagged her in the comments, not out of cruelty exactly, more out of the internet's endless appetite for a story with a villain and a victim clearly labeled. Does she know??? Oh my god does Jessica know.
She hadn't known. That was the part that still made her stomach drop, standing in someone else's kitchen four hundred miles away. She'd found out the same way thousand strangers had, through a screen, in real time.
The next six weeks were a slow-motion autopsy of her own relationship, performed by people who'd never met her. A think piece about "red flags she missed." A meme, briefly and unbearably, captioned "POV: you build a business with your cheating boyfriend's side chick." Jonah's own tearful non-apology, which somehow generated more sympathy for him than she'd gotten through the whole ordeal, because that was apparently how it worked, the person humiliated in public looks worse than the person doing the humiliating.
She deleted the apps within a week. Closed the studio she and Ashley had built together, unable to walk past the desk without her whole chest seizing.
Rule one, she'd decided somewhere in the wreckage. Never build a life that can be taken from you by someone else's decision.
Rule two: don't let anyone get close enough to matter that much.
She hadn't finished rule three. Every version of it circled back to the same impossible math, that the only way to guarantee she never got blindsided again was to never again risk being fully known.
Which was, she was uncomfortably aware, exactly the kind of resolution a person made right before doing the opposite thing entirely.
She thought of Finn's stillness on the beach. The way he hadn't asked her a single personal question, hadn't looked her up, probably didn't even know what a follower count was in any way that mattered. It felt, right now, like the safest thing in the world.
Doesn't matter, she told herself, lying in the dark with the tide loud through the cracked window. You're leaving in ten weeks. Whatever this is, it ends before it starts.
An excellent plan. She almost believed it.
- Writer
