My voice wavered, and the tears returned, stinging hot behind my eyes. I closed them, took a deep, steadying breath, and then let myself fall backward into memory—starting at the place I always tried so hard to avoid.
“The day I found out about Buck was one of the hardest days of my life.”
I’d never really talked about it. Not fully. Not even with myself. I’d buried it beneath survival and silence.
“I never went through his phone,” I began, my voice barely above a whisper. “I trusted that man with everything I had. Hewas my first kiss, my first love… my first and onlyeverything. But that day, after all our years together, something just felt different. Off.”
He’d been on his phone more than usual. He was distant, distracted. Normally, I’d nudge him, tease him, and he’d smile and put it down, giving me the kind of attention I lived for. But not that day.
“I asked him to listen to me. I was excited about the farm stand plans. I had all these ideas, and I just wanted to share them. But he got frustrated. Cold. He brushed me off and kept scrolling, and after a while, I gave up.”
I swallowed hard, my fingers twisting in my lap.
“Then he went to the bathroom and threw his phone on the bed. He was so careless with it, so irritated, and I just… I knew. My gut screamed at me. Something wasn’t right.”
I let out a small, bitter laugh, not because it was funny, but because of how absurd it all sounded now. How naive I’d been.
“I picked it up. Opened it. And there it was. The girl he’d been cheating on me with… foryears, apparently. And she was pregnant.”
Silence fell like a curtain over the room. My friends didn’t move. Didn’t speak. They knew the broad strokes of the story, knew Buck had cheated, knew there was a baby involved, but hearing it from my lips, raw and real, hit differently.
“She sent him a picture of the pregnancy test. Big, bold plus sign. No question.”
I looked up, my voice quieter than before. “That was the moment everything inside me broke. I fell into pieces. And instead of blaminghim, I blamed myself. I thought…maybe if I’d been better. Prettier. More sexual. More exciting.I kept asking myself,What did I do wrong?”
The weight of that guilt still lived in my chest, pressing down like a boulder I couldn’t push off. Talking about it now wasn’t therelief I thought it would be. Not yet. But maybe this was part of healing—sitting in the discomfort, trusting it would pass.
“El…” Aspen’s voice was soft as she reached over, her hand curling around mine with a tenderness that cracked something further open inside me.
“None of that was your fault,” Penny added, her tone fierce and full of sisterly conviction.
“A real man doesn’t cheat,” Theo said. “He talks. He tries. He doesn’t destroy.”
I could only nod, swallowing the lump in my throat.
“I ended things with him,” I continued, voice thick. “He tried to deny it. Tried to twist it back on me, blaming me for his choices. And I let him, for a while. I pretended his words didn’t get to me, but they did. More than I want to admit.”
My hands trembled in my lap, and I rubbed them over my knees, trying to ground myself.
“Then the whole town found out. The whispers started. The pity stares. The way people looked at me like I was broken or like maybe I deserved it. And I just… I couldn’t take it anymore. So I left.”
I closed my eyes, my voice barely a breath now.
“I left because I didn’t know how to stay.”
The girls were all tear-filled now too. Hearing the truths I’d kept tucked away, the raw, intimate parts of what I’d endured, pulled emotion from them as well. It settled over the room like a thick blanket.
“While I was gone,” I began quietly, “I spent a lot of time reflecting. Asking myself what I wanted, what I needed.And the only word that kept coming up wasdifferent.I wanted things to be different. I wantedmeto be different. I wanted my life, my world… all of it to shift into something unrecognizable from what I left behind.”
So that’s what I chased.
“I reinvented myself. Became someone new to the people I met along the way. I shoved away my old life and tried to become this version of myself that I thought, hoped, I could love.”
But so much of that time away felt like pretending. After a while, it became exhausting. Lonely. I was tired of running. Tired of missing the people I loved. Tired of missingme, the version of myself that existed before it all crumbled.
“You all were here,” I said, looking at them with a faint smile. “Living life while I was… gone. I didn’t let anyone in. Not for a long while. But there was one person I kept turning to, one small, steady thread of home I couldn’t let go of.”
“Logan,” Aspen said gently, her expression soft, her smile tight with understanding.