Page 229 of Reverse

He focuses on me, his expression pained. “If you ever . . . need me,” he utters softly, “I’ll be right where you left me, okay?” He turns back toward the window as the roar in my chest intensifies.

“Okay,” I agree easily. “You, too.” I pause with my hand on the door. “Easton?”

“Yeah, Beauty?”

“Did you justlie to mefor the first time?”

“I don’t know,” he utters weakly as Joel knocks again. “I don’t want it to be.”

“Okay,” I say, opening my door. “Okay,” I whisper, “well, I won’t say goodbye then. H-h-have a good show tonight.”

He nods as I open the door and step out of the SUV. Joel gazes at me, reading my expression, before pulling me into him—my laptop smashed between our chests as we hug.

“Take care of him, please, Joel.”

“I’m trying,” he presses a kiss against my temple.

“I love you,” I sniffle, “you know that, right?”

“You too, sweetheart. I’m here for you always.”

“Same.”

A sob escapes me before I rip myself away from his warm embrace and turn, starting at a dead run toward my apartment.

Standing in Easton’s jacket on my balcony that night, holding my Edgewater teddy bear, wind whipping around me, I blur out the downtown noise as I replay our parents’ love story—clicking in the last pieces of the puzzle that has plagued me since I began my search a year ago. It’s on the wind, in an urgent whisper that Stella’s words come to me.

“Look up.”

And I do. Straining against the restraints of my balcony, I search for and fail to find a single star while standing in the haze of the bustling city below. Sniffing the collar of Easton’s jacket, I note the absence of a scent that used to be so present. He was just with me, his warmth within reach, but I couldn’t allow myself to get intimate or reacquainted with it. I wouldn’t have survived it. The only thing I regret now is everything left unsaid. So many things I wished I would’ve told him, knowing that we may never speak on that sort of unguarded, intimate level again. Remorse riddles me until I decide for what it’s worth to relay some of it by text, in hopes to open a window, even if the door feels closed. Just as I go to compose a message, a video attachment comes in from Joel. I open it to see Easton paused on screen, on stage behind his piano, a lone spotlight shining down on him.

Joel sent me tonight’s encore.

Heart speeding, I click play, and Easton begins to play the opening of “The Dance,” an old favorite of my father’s I’m oddly familiar with. But within the first few bars, I realize Easton’s playing a verydifferentversion than the one I know. When the words begin to pour from his lips, he sings about love found and lost. About being thankful for the ignorance of the cost of the toll that love would take. The music takes a haunting, drastic turn, and Easton goes heavy, gutturally screaming along with LL’s heavy guitar riffs. My entire body lights on fire, every hair standing on end with the knowledge that he’s singing of our demise. Every word burns through to my core as he plays expertly along the keys before tilting his head back and screaming, coming apart on stage. I see andfeelit all, the bitterness and rage in his posture, the agony in his expression, the loss of us. Hysterical sobs leave me as Easton brutally echoes the most defining moments of my life. He leads the song through a heart-stopping crescendo . . . and then it’s just him and his piano, the final notes ringing in clearly as he whispers the last lyric into the mic before slamming it closed.

The meaning of this act is not at all lost on me.

Gaping at the screen as the stage goes black and the video stops, a notification lowers for a new email.

An email I haven’t thought to look for since the Super Bowl. An email I’ve been too immersed in my own pain to realize was never sent.

Opening the document, I watch in real-time as Easton signs our divorce papers. Bracing myself on the thin rail of my balcony, all the hope I’ve been harboring disintegrates to ashes and begins to scatter away from me. Remnants of who I was a few minutes before, I again look up to the starless night sky, knowing I’ll find no solace there—or anywhere else.

My supernova just passed me by.

SIXTY-NINE

“Adrift”

Jesse Marchant

Natalie

Seven months later . . .

“This. Is. Living!” Holly exclaims as she plucks sunscreen from her bag sitting between our loungers in our beachside cabana. “Likereallyliving,” she cries joyously, shimmying further into her chair as I scan the tranquil, tropical water and those frolicking in the surf.

“I can’t disagree.” I manage to summon another smile as I sit back in the luxurious chair while the gnawing continues in my gut. The gnawing that’s been eating away at me since we touched down two days ago.

---