Eight Years Later I No Longer Love You Chapter 06
“Want to pair the daisies with some white roses? They dry beautifully.”
Old Nancy at the farmers’ market handed me the stems. The greens in her basket still carried the smell of fresh soil.
Mrs. Doyle laughed beside me.
“Willow, this really suits you.”
I breathed in the faint scent, and smiled too.
“Yes please, Nancy. Wrap them up for me.”
She wrapped them with practiced hands, gave me a look, and gently tucked a small daisy behind my ear.
“You’re a beautiful thing, sweetheart.”
Eight years.
My life had been stuffed full of relentless pace.
This was the first time I’d felt the kind of ease that belonged to me alone.
The old me couldn’t buy a bouquet or spend an afternoon in the sun without first asking herself: is he coming home tonight?
I carried the flowers back to the cottage, trimmed the chamomile and white roses, and slid them into a stoneware vase I’d picked up at a lakeside antique shop.
I set the vase in the middle of the wooden table.
Wind came up the lane from the lake, carrying the scent of fresh water and green things.
Mrs. Doyle poked her head over from next door and smiled.
“This place finally feels like a home.”
I flipped through one of my old books. Sunlight fell across the pages, warming the letters.
The phone was quiet.
The flowers on the table were quiet.
It was good.
…
Seattle.
Adrian sat on the living room floor, his hair a mess.
He scrolled through his contacts again and again, and realized that in eight years, Willow’s friends, her life, her interests, had all been pushed to the edges of his world.
He didn’t have a single person he could ask.
Once the sun came up, Adrian drove to the SaaS company I used to work for.
The receptionist tapped through the system and politely handed his ID back to him.
“Ms. Hayes submitted her resignation a week ago.”
Adrian pressed his hands to the counter, his voice tight.
“She didn’t say where she was going?”
“That’s not information the company can share.”
“She didn’t leave a new number?”
“No comment.”
The receptionist paused, then added one more thing.
“She handled everything cleanly.”
Adrian didn’t say anything else.
(One of the girls at the front desk told me about it later. She’s sharp. She knows what to say and what not to say.)
Back at the studio, Adrian locked himself in his office, pulled up the server, and started digging through the test documents I’d left behind.
Report after report.
Bug logs. Logic patches. Optimization notes.
Not a single complaint.
He kept scrolling. This time, without a shred of impatience.
Then, in the afternoon, he clicked on a test file from the very first build, six years back.
In the blank space at the end of the document, hidden in pale text, were a few small musings.
【I really do love flowers and lakes.】
【If I ever have time, I want a little cottage where the wind blows through. To buy flowers, sleep, and watch the moon.】
Adrian stared at those lines, his cursor stuck on the page. He didn’t scroll any further.
There was a soft knock at the door.
Sophie walked in holding a warm taro milk tea, her voice pitched just soft enough.
“Adrian, the test team’s behind again. She’s really being unreasonable this time. Bailing at the critical moment. Everyone’s paying for it.”
Adrian didn’t take the drink.
Sophie set the cup on the desk. Her eyes drifted to the old project drive, and her fingers moved toward it, naturally.
“Why don’t I stay tonight? I can help you go through the old files. Save you the frustration of looking at all this.”
Adrian’s hand got there first, pinning down the drive.
Sophie’s fingers stopped in midair. Her smile didn’t quite catch.
“Adrian?”
Adrian looked up at her. His eyes traveled across the silver fox pendant at her throat, and settled back on the cup of tea.
“No. Focus on your own work.”
“But I just want to help you.”
“Get out.”
The wounded look on Sophie’s face was about to break, but she bit her lip, picked up the tea, and turned to leave.
“And,” Adrian added, “Willow is not someone you get to have opinions about.”
The office door shut.
Adrian looked at those lines I’d written. Buy flowers. Watch the moon.
The shooting star meadow rose in his mind.
Then he remembered me asking, once, if he could add a bench and carve our initials into it.
A wave of something suffocating rose in his chest, again and again.
He had personally handed romance to Sophie.
But the person who had grinded through the lean years with him. All she’d wanted was to see a real meadow and a real lake.
The person who had backed him with everything she had. All she’d asked was for a bench in one throwaway scene, carved with their initials.
And he had never even asked.
—