Page 162 of The Unfinished Line

Our final conversation had been curt, my temper short, her voice distant. I hadn’t understood. I hadn’t begun to imagine…

An entire new cascade of anguish overcame me, a nauseating guilt racking my body.

No!It wasn’t possible. I slammed the heels of my hands into the wall. Seren was wrong.Wrong!

Itcouldn’tbe Dillon. I needed to call her back. Ask if they were certain.

But I didn’t. Because deep down, I knew.

She’d bought a train ticket to Swansea on her credit card that morning, then taken a cab to Mumbles Head. A fisherman had seen a woman climbing the stairs toward the lighthouse shortly after high tide.

They’d searched for her for days and found nothing.

And now they had.

Afraid I was going to vomit, I rolled onto my side and curled into a ball, hugging my knees. As if I could hold myself together. As if I weren’t coming unglued at the seams.

Fuck her.Fuck her.FUCK HER! How could she do it? Leave me like this? Like she’d never loved me at all.

At some point, I crawled to the balcony. The sun had risen. A sun that had no right to rise. I lay there, half-in, half-out of the open glass doors, listening to the sounds of the city waking beneath me. How could the world keep on turning when my life was falling apart?

I couldn’t bring myself to get up. On hand and knee, I pleaded with a God I no longer believed in to let me sleep, to wake, to find it was all just a dream—the continuation of a neverending nightmare. That I would open my eyes and find it was four days earlier. That I would have a text from Dillon, saying she’d won Leeds. Saying she was on her way home.

But each time I dozed off, exhausted from insurmountable heartache, I’d wake once more, only to relive the stabbing, undeniable actuality that this was real—and lose her over and over again.

And so the cycle went—for hours. Days. Weeks.

My mom came and stayed with me. She brewed tea that grew cold on my end table, held my hand when I would let her, called my agent and manager. She made meals I never touched, and comforted me as I wailed with grief in the middle of the night, or broke down in sobs at my breakfast counter.

My manager rescheduled my studio pick-ups, citing ‘a death in the family.’ I wanted to come clean, to explain Dillon, but she convinced me to keep it vague.

It wasn’t the time. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. Later, maybe.

I was in no condition to fight her. And she wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t function. I could hardly brush my hair—dress myself.

On more than one occasion, I stood leaning over my balcony railing, staring at the courtyard thirteen stories below. I thought about jumping. I mean, I thought about it in the way anydisconsolate, bereft, heartbroken lover might think about it: not with any real intent (I didn’t have the nerve for that), but with the wish that I could. Anything to relieve all the hurt, all the pain I was suffering.

I’d sit and watch our piling beneath the pier for hours, desperate to remember every detail of that night: our first “real” kiss, the water lapping at our feet, the way she’d lit my world on fire. I could feel the warmth of her fingers pressed against the small of my back, taste the mint tea on her tongue. I fantasized details I couldn’t remember, preventing myself from turning to hysterics when I couldn’t recall things that didn’t matter—the color of her shoes, the way I’d worn my hair, the location of the North Star.

I’d play little head games with myself, making negotiations with the universe: if I could count fifteen hundred waves break on the shore without blinking, if I could hold my breath for one hundred revolutions of the Ferris Wheel, if I could trace the path of a falling star all the way to the horizon—a portal would appear on my balcony, something I could step through, allowing me access to join her—wherever that might be. They were always unachievable tasks, impossible victories—games that I could never win.

I knew it was all bogus. I wasn’t actually crazy. And when I grew tired of torturing myself, I’d slip to my knees, press my forehead against the glass railing, and cry.

Countless days I spent trying to figure out what I could have done better for Dillon—and even longer nights dwelling on the ever-pressing, impossible question:why?

Why had she done it?

She never left a note, never explained herself. The text I received that morning was the last thing she ever sent—my response permanently unread.

Her bike sat in the corner of my living room; I couldn’t bear to move it. Some days, I’d pour whiskey over a glass of ice, and by the time I shifted to drinking straight from the bottle, I’d talk to the bike as if it were a conduit allowing conversation between the living and the dead.I’m sorry, I’d tell it, over and over—for failing her, for not doing enough to make her feel like life was worth sticking around. And then again, as the contents of the bottle emptied, my focus would inevitably shift to seeking resolution it would never find.

Why, why,why?

I wanted to imagine she was drunk when she jumped. That an outside influence forced her to believe having no life was better than the life she left behind. But her toxicology report had been clean, without a single drop of substance in her body. She’d stood on that ledge, clear-headed and sober, and made her last decision with a sound mind.

Had she planned it on the seven-hour train ride to Wales? Had she climbed the steps to the lighthouse knowing she’d never walk down? Or had it been a rash decision, a shortcut to a palliative end?

Alone, just her bike and me, I’d tip back the bottle, drowning in my sorrow, and wonder if she tried to swim… if she regretted jumping in? If she’d ever given a single thought to the hurt I would feel, the loneliness I’d face being the one left behind?

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