I slammed the front door. The sound echoed through the perfectly quiet house, a violation of its sterile peace. I knew my mother was watching from the living room curtain, her face a mask of icy fury. But I didn't look back.
I just walked.
The autumn air, which had seemed nostalgic and cozy just an hour ago, was now sharp and cold. It bit through my thin California blouse, but I barely felt it. My skin was burning from the inside out—with the fire of a five-year-old betrayal and a delayed, desperate, irrational hope.
Where was I going? I didn't know. I was just walking.
My feet carried me on their own, on a familiar, burned-in route. Away from my parents' perfect lawn on Wilson Avenue, away from the neighborhood of doctors, lawyers, and mayors. I was walking toward the old part of town.
I moved down cracked sidewalks, past houses filled with people who had known me my entire life. Mrs. Gable, watering her chrysanthemums, waved; I must have nodded back, but her face was a blur. I was a ghost in my own past.
I crossed the town square, the heart of Willow Creek. The fountain that never worked. The benches where old men played chess. The old white chapel, its copper steeple green with age.
"I’ll be at the old chapel... I’ll wait all night."
I stopped, breathing hard, and leaned against the cold trunk of an old oak. For a second, if I squinted, I could see him. A phantom silhouette of the boy with the guitar, sitting on the steps, staring into the dark, waiting for the sound of my footsteps. The boy who had waited in June of 1965, while I, unknowing, cried into a pillow, cursing him for his silence.
He must have thought I betrayed him.
The thought was sharper than my mother's betrayal. Her lie was about fear and control, but his pain... his pain was caused by me. By my absence.
Five years. What had happened to him? Did he hate me? Was he married? Was he happy? Or...
I pushed off the tree, shaking away the worst thoughts. I had to know.
I knew this town like the back of my hand. I knew the shortcut through the park, past the old quarry, toward Elm Street. His street.
As I walked, turning off the manicured Main Street, the town changed. The houses grew older, the lots smaller, the paint more chipped. This was where the mill workers and their families lived. This place smelled like raw lumber and real life.
And this was where the memories lived.
There was the bench by the duck pond. The first place he kissed me. I was sixteen, he was seventeen. It was awkward, clumsy, our teeth clicked, and then he'd laughed that gravelly laugh, and I thought I would die from happiness.
There was the alley behind the Rialto theater. He’d dragged me back there after midnight with his acoustic guitar. He’d played me a song he’d just written. It was about a girl with "storm-cloud-colored eyes." I’d felt like the only person in the universe.
He wasn't "just the boy with the guitar," as my mother had called him. He was light. He was the only one who saw me—not the mayor's daughter, not the straight-A student, just Mia. And I had let her put him out. I had believed the lie and built a life on it.
I reached the end of Elm Street. His house had always been the last one on the line, a big old farmhouse that smelled like apple cider and the turpentine from his father's woodworking shop. Mr. Harrison was a carpenter, always ready with a homemade lemonade. Mrs. Harrison was always in the kitchen, her hands floured, her laugh as warm as her apple pies.
Their house had been my second home. It had been my refuge from the sterile order of my parents' place.
I turned the corner, my steps slowing on the gravel path. And froze.
The house was gone.
Or rather, it was there. But it wasn't the living, breathing thing from my memories. It was a skeleton. A shell. The ghost of a house.
The one I knew had been white with bright blue trim, a huge front porch overflowing with his mother's geraniums.
This house was gray.
The paint had peeled off in long strips, exposing weathered, blackened wood. The garden, Mrs. Harrison's pride, was an impassable jungle of weeds and dead sunflowers, their heavy heads bowed. Ivy, thick as rope, climbed the walls, its fingers digging into the siding, as if trying to pull the house back into the earth.
One of the upstairs windows—his window, the one I used to throw pebbles at—was broken. A black, gaping hole, like a missing tooth.
I walked forward slowly, toward the front gate. It wasn't hanging off one hinge—it was just gone, lying flat on the ground, half-swallowed by the grass.
"Ethan?" I whispered, and my voice sounded stupid and small.
The wind rustled through the dead weeds. It was the only answer.
I took another step, pushing through the non-existent gate, and walked up the overgrown path to the porch. The flagstones I remembered were coated in moss. The porch steps groaned loudly, painfully, under my weight.
I raised my hand to knock on the front door. My fist stopped in mid-air.
The door was open.
It was hanging, askew, an inch from the frame, blocked by a drift of dead leaves. A smell of damp, mold, and rot wafted from the dark gap.
He wasn't here. He hadn't been here for a very, very long time.
All the hope that had been bubbling in my chest, all the adrenaline and rage that had propelled me from my mother's house—it all drained away as if a plug had been pulled. I was flooded with a deafening, icy void.
The house was abandoned. He was gone. I was too late.