Page 10 of Born to Run Back
Hope.
We were still circling each other like planets, never quite intersecting but locked in the same gravitational pull, drawn to this sacred ground where everything had changed.
I would never be the same, and the only other person who could understand was a woman who would never be the same either.
I knelt beside the memorial, arranging my stones with an almost religious passion. Each one had to be perfect, had to communicate something I couldn’t say out loud. The smooth gray one went at the base. Stable, foundational. The speckled granite piece sat slightly apart, like a silent guardian. The river stone, polished to an almost mirror finish, caught the light and threw it back in fractured pieces.
My hands were steadier than they’d been in weeks. Here, in this ritual space we’d created without ever speaking a single word, I felt like myself again. Not the failing teacher who’d forgotten how to connect with his students, not the insomniac who drank too much bourbon and stared at his ceiling until dawn. Just a man who’d witnessed something sacred and was trying to honor it the only way he knew how.
The last stone was different. Smaller, darker, shot through with veins of quartz that gleamed like trapped starlight. I’d found it yesterday, half-buried in the muddy bank where the water had receded, and something about it had caused me to stop breathing.It looks like her tears,I’d thought. Crystallized grief, beautiful and terrible and absolutely perfect.
I placed it at the very top of the cairn, the capstone of our impossible cathedral, our place of bastardized, hopeless worship.
Standing there in the silence, I closed my eyes and let myself remember. Not just the accident—I’d replayed that night a thousand times, maybe more—but the moments after. The weight of her in my arms, the way she’d trusted me with her brokenness, the sound of her breathing slowly evening out against my chest. For thirty-seven minutes, I hadn’t been so alone.
That had to matter. That had to mean something.
When I opened my eyes, the memorial looked different. Complete, somehow. As if the final stone had been the missing piece of a puzzle I’d been working on my entire life without knowing it.
I understood then what we’d been building here, week after week. Not just a shrine to the dead, but a temple to connection itself. To the dreadful, wonderful possibility that two broken people could find each other in the darkness and make something close to holy from their shared pain.
Walking back to my car, I didn’t look over my shoulder. I didn’t need to. I could feel the weight of our creation behind me, solid and permanent and real. Tomorrow, I’d return to my ordinary life, to lesson plans and faculty meetings and the delicate maintenance of forced normalcy. But tonight… tonight, I’d built something that mattered.
Something that was ours.
Even if she never knew it.
Part Two
Love Isn't Rescue
Chapter Four
Half-Remembered Nights
Wendy
Tuesday,2:32a.m.,oneweek later
The headlights shone across the guardrail as I rounded the familiar curve, my pulse already quickening with that Pavlovian anticipation.
Eight weeks now. Eight weeks of this ritual, this sacred choreography of need and stones and the growing, gnawing certainty that I was either losing my mind completely or participating in the most important conversation of my life.
But something was different tonight.
The asphalt where I usually parked still glistened with recent tire tracks, the wet shine that spoke of departure rather than arrival.
Someone had been here. Recently. Very recently.
My hands trembled as I cut the engine, the silence rushing in like water into a sinking boat. The memorial looked different in the glow of my headlights—larger, more elaborate. The familiar stones were there, including the dark one with the quartz veins that had appeared one night and instantly become my favorite, the one I’d named “Starlight” in the private language of my deteriorating mind.
But tonight, the entire arrangement had been rebuilt. Restructured. As if he’d knelt here for an hour, maybe more, carefully placing each stone with the devotion of a monk building a monastery.
I sat frozen in place, staring at the evidence of his presence. The tracks were still damp enough to reflect my headlights, which meant… minutes. I’d missed him by mere minutes.
Minutes.
The word ricocheted through my skull like a fucking bullet. Minutes meant I could have seen him. Minutes meant if I’d left my apartment at 2:10 instead of 2:20, if I hadn’t stopped to change my shirt twice, if I hadn’t stood in my hallway for six full minutes working up the courage to grab the painted rock from my kitchen counter—
