Page 144 of Never Forever

As if he’d scripted it, a deer stepped out of the tree line and I gasped, drawn toward the window. Something scratching at my brain.

A memory I only half-remembered.

“Wait,” he murmured.

A younger deer stepped out, and suddenly, there were five deer in his backyard.

“Does that…” I whispered.

“Happen all the time? Yes. Last spring I had a black bear and her cubs.”

“Shut up.”

He laughed.

We watched those deer until something spooked them and they ran off.

“This house,” I breathed. “I love it.”

“I thought you would.”

I looked up at him sharply. Brow furrowed.

He shrugged. “I spent years imagining you here. I thought about everything you might like…You don’t remember?”

I didn’t know what I was supposed to be remembering.

“Follow me,” he walked down a shadowed hallway past two closed doors and then opened the last one. The bathroom.

It all came back.

I’ll never live on an island again. I want to live in the forest. With deer. And bears.

“Matt,” I breathed. I was afraid to go in. Afraid of what I’d see. So much had been rewritten, I didn’t know if I could take anymore.

A jacuzzi tub. Two sinks. A mirror with lightbulbs around it.

“Just like you told me you wanted.”

Drawn like a magnet, I walked through the door.

“I was…a kid.” I had been a kid with a childish idea of what luxury was. What glamour was. But here was that bathroom. Ajacuzzi tub. Two sinks in marble. Two mirrors, one with those fancy bulb lights like they had back stage in theaters. Those bulbs had seemed like the epitome of making it. If I could gaze at my reflection surrounded by those bulbs, it would mean success.

“And,” he said, walking past the glass shower and the separate little room for the toilet. He opened another door to a closet. It wasn’t huge. It wasn’t nearly as big as the one I had at home. But it was…perfect. This whole place was… perfect.

It was what I’d always dreamed of.

Tears bit hard at the back of my throat and I pressed my hands to my lips, but that wasn’t enough. I buried my face in my hands.

“Carrie,” he breathed. “Please don’t cry.”

“You did this for me. You did all of this for me. Admit it.”

“Yeah. I did this for you.” He admitted it like it was no problem. Like it cost him nothing.

“Why?”

“Carrie-”

---