Eleven Missed Calls

CHAPTER THREE: Maplewood

HANA'S POV

The cab driver didn’t say much.

I was thankful for that. I had already used up all my energy in the last twenty-four hours. I packed one suitcase. I stayed in a small hotel room in midtown, sitting on the edge of the bed and staring at the wall. I slept for only three hours, and I kept the light on like a scared child.

I had nothing left for small talk.

Outside the window, the Georgia highway stretched out ahead of us. The farther we drove, the fewer billboards I saw. The trees grew thicker and greener. The sky seemed bigger than it ever did in New York, no matter how high you looked. Coming home always did this to me. It slowly untied the tight knot in my chest.

I leaned my forehead against the window and watched Maplewood getting closer.

I grew up here. I learned how to bake in this town. Every Saturday morning, I stood in my mother’s kitchen with flour on the counters, music playing on the radio, and my father sitting at the table reading his book. He would turn the pages quietly without looking up, but he was always there. Always present.

When I was eighteen, I left for culinary school. I had a small scholarship and one rolling suitcase. I loved my hometown, but I also needed to leave it. I had big dreams and the kind of determination only young girls have.

Even after everything, I never stopped belonging to this place.

The cab turned onto Sycamore Street. Before it even stopped fully, I saw my mother standing on the porch.

She wasn’t doing anything. She just stood there in her house coat, arms crossed against the morning cold, like she had been waiting for a while. I had called my parents earlier, and they understood without me needing to say anything.

She walked down the porch steps before I even finished opening the car door.

She didn’t speak. She just wrapped her arms around me right there on the sidewalk. I was still holding my suitcase. She held me tightly, and I stood there in front of the house where I grew up and felt something inside me begin to relax. Something that had been tight for months. Maybe longer.

I didn’t cry.

I was too tired to cry.

I just breathed in the smell of her coffee and cinnamon and thought, this is real. This is safe.

My father made coffee without asking.

That was his way of showing love. He believed in being present. He placed a mug in front of me at the kitchen table and sat down across from me. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t push. His silence meant: I’m here. Take your time.

My mother sat beside me. She managed to stay quiet for about four minutes, which for her was impressive.

Then she said softly, “How long?”

It wasn’t exactly a question. It sounded more like she already knew.

“A while,” I answered.

“How long is a while, Hana?”

I wrapped my hands around the warm mug. “Eight months in separate bedrooms,” I said. “Two years of trying for a baby. It didn’t happen. We stopped talking about it. And somewhere in all of that, we became strangers.”

My mother made a small sound. My father slowly turned his coffee mug on the table.

I looked up at her.

“I’m your mother,” she said simply. “I can see things.” She held my hand. “You don’t have to stay somewhere that makes you disappear.”

“I know,” I whispered.

“We just want you to be happy,” she said gently.

I understood what she meant. There was a word she wasn’t saying yet. I wasn’t ready for that word. I wasn’t ready for anything permanent.

I had left a piece of paper on the counter. I packed one bag. I came home. That was my whole plan.

“I just need time,” I said. “Please. Just time.”

“You can have all the time you need,” she said.

My father quietly refilled my coffee.

I slept most of the first day.

I lay down on my childhood bed in the afternoon, planning to rest for one hour. When I opened my eyes again, it was dark outside. I could smell dinner cooking downstairs. I heard my mother’s voice on the phone, speaking softly, the way she does when she doesn’t want her words to travel upstairs.

I stared at the ceiling.

Then I did what I had been doing since the cab ride.

I reached for my neck.

Nothing.

My fingers touched bare skin. Every time, it surprised me. It felt strange. Wrong.

Ethan gave me that necklace eight weeks after we met. It wasn’t a big dramatic moment. Back then, he wasn’t the powerful businessman everyone admired. He was just a man who came to my bakery early in the mornings.

One Saturday, he showed up before opening time and sat at the counter reading his architecture book while I worked in the back. When I came out, he had a small box sitting on the counter.

Inside was a thin gold chain with a tiny croissant pendant.

“You came back four mornings in a row for the croissant,” I had teased him.

“I came back for you,” he said. “The croissant was just an excuse.”

I put it on that day.

I never took it off. Not once. Not for four years.

Until the night I left.

I don’t even remember taking it off. It’s like some quiet, honest part of me made the decision before I did. That part of me set it on the nightstand and walked away.

Right now, it was still sitting in New York.

And I was here.

I pressed my hand against my collarbone and told myself it was just a necklace.

But I didn’t believe that.

Someone knocked on the door the next afternoon.

I was in the living room watching a show, but my mind was somewhere between present and elsewhere. I stood up, went to the door and opened it.

He was leaning against the porch railing with a container in one hand and an easy smile that had not changed since we were seventeen.

He was taller than I remembered, or maybe I had just forgotten. He was the kind of man who took up space without trying.

I smiled at the familiar face.

"Heard you were home," he said.

Something in me relaxed. That was the thing about people who had known you your whole life. Your body recognized them before your mind caught up. Safety, or the memory of it. It was hard to tell the difference sometimes.

"News travels fast," I said.

He lifted the container slightly. "Took a wrong turn and ended up at Mae's."

I looked at the container. Peach cobbler — I could smell it through the lid. Mae's peach cobbler, the kind we used to split four ways on Friday nights after football games because none of us had more than five dollars, and it was always worth every cent.

I stepped back from the door.

"Come in," I said.

Jake Rivers talked, and I listened, while eating cobbler. He talked about us growing up, our jobs and everything and nothing.

For the first time since I left New York, I felt something close to peace.

But I noticed the way he looked at me sometimes. Not constantly. Just in small, quiet moments. Like he had something he had wanted to say for years.

I noticed.

I didn’t say anything.

My phone lay face down on the table. It had been buzzing all morning. I ignored it carefully. Looking at it meant feeling things I wasn’t ready to feel.

Jake glanced at it. “Do you want to answer that?”

“It's nothing. Don't worry about it..”

It buzzed again.

And again.

Before I could stop myself, I flipped it over.

Eleven missed calls.

All from Ethan.

There was one text message. I hadn’t opened it yet. I could only see the first line:

Hana, I went to the bakery. Simone said—

I turned the phone face down again.

Jake watched me, calm and patient.

“Hana,” he said softly.

“Don’t,” I whispered.

He nodded.

Outside, the afternoon light turned golden. My necklace was on a nightstand in New York. My husband had gone to my bakery and found me gone.

I reached for my neck again.

Bare skin.

Eleven missed calls.

I picked up my fork.

I didn’t call him.

But I did open the message.

Hana, I went to the bakery. Simone said you were gone. I’ve been sitting outside Sunday Morning for twenty minutes trying to understand what I did wrong. I keep thinking maybe I did everything wrong. I don’t know how to fix something when I don’t know what broke. I know you probably won’t answer. I’m sending this anyway. Please just tell me you’re safe.

I read it twice.

Then I put the phone down.

I pressed my fingers against my collarbone again, thinking about a small gold croissant necklace and a man who once said he came back for me.

"Stay for dinner," I said.

The words were out before I fully thought about it.

Jake went still for just a moment. Then something in his expression shifted. He looked like a man who had been waiting a long time for a door to open and was now being very deliberate about how he walked through it.

"Yeah," he said. "Okay."

I turned back to the window.

Eleven missed calls on a face-down phone. A necklace on a nightstand in New York. And a man settling into the chair across from me like he had always meant to be there.

I had decided to let someone in.