Eight Years Later I No Longer Love You Chapter 08
Tahoe nights were still and gentle.
A crescent moon spilled its light into the little yard, wrapping the lilac tree in silver.
When the knock came at the gate, I was chatting with Mrs. Doyle in the courtyard.
Mrs. Doyle went to open it.
A man stood outside.
He spoke, quietly.
“Can I come in?”
I looked up.
Adrian.
It had been a while. He was thinner. His eyes were heavy with exhaustion.
I nodded. Mrs. Doyle glanced at me, sighed, and turned to go, pulling the gate shut behind her.
Adrian dragged in a suitcase. There was mud caked on the sides of his shoes, and a couple of boarding passes were still stuck to the handle.
His eyes traveled past the garden wall, over the wicker chair under the lilac tree, over the stoneware vase on the wooden table, and finally settled on the little daisy in my hair, which was starting to dry out.
“I looked in a lot of places. I only got here tonight. I heard your voice down the lane, and I followed it.”
His voice was a little hoarse.
I turned and poured him a glass of water.
“That’s a lot.”
I said it plainly, then straightened the vase and looked up at him.
Hearing those words, he seemed unsettled by the strange familiarity of them.
He bent down and unzipped his suitcase, pulling out a folder.
A debit card, a property transfer deed, and a stack of printed game screenshots.
In the screenshots, the shooting star meadow had been remade.
The little fox was gone. In its place was a firefly sprite made of flower petals.
Rows of benches had appeared beside the treehouse. Every single backrest was carved with my initials.
Moonlight lay across the petals. Precise and reverent.
He held the screenshots out to me.
“I had them redo it. From now on, that meadow belongs to you.”
I didn’t take them. I just looked at him quietly.
His hand hung in the air. The papers lifted at one corner in the wind, and he pressed them back down.
“The apartment. I’m transferring it into your name. The card has the project’s dividends from these last few years. And what I owe you for all the testing you did.”
Looking at those things, I suddenly remembered how, years ago, he had handed me the backend access to the first version of his game and told me his world was half mine.
Later, he’d quietly clawed that half back, piece by piece.
I picked up the flowers on the table and went back to trimming a dead leaf.
“Adrian, I’m doing fine on my own. All of this just means I’ll have to sign things, hand things off, stay in touch with you. I don’t want to.”
Adrian rushed to speak.
“Willow, I know this isn’t enough.”
His voice slowed. Like every word had to be turned over in his mouth first before he dared let it out.
“I always assumed you wouldn’t leave. I always assumed everything you did was just what you were supposed to do.”
“I gave you my worst temper, and I gave someone else my best patience.”
When he got there, his eyes drifted to the vase of chamomile.
“What I owe you, I don’t think I can pay back.”
I dropped the dead leaf into the little basket.
“If you can’t pay it back, don’t.”
He looked at me. The exhaustion of the road, sitting at the back of his eyes, dropped away completely after that one line.
“You don’t even want to hate me anymore?”
I thought about it, and shook my head.
“Hating someone takes time and effort.”
Adrian looked down at those papers, and let out a laugh. A very bitter one.
“I thought if I made up for these things, you’d at least be willing to hear me out. I…”
“You always used to tell me I was childish.”
I looked at the papers in his hand and cut him off, though my voice wasn’t sharp.
“To me, this is just as childish.”
He didn’t argue.
After a long silence, he set the debit card and the deed down at the edge of the wooden table, and pressed the screenshots under the vase along with them.
“You can throw these out, donate them, whatever. I won’t ask again.”
I frowned.
“Take them with you.”
Adrian took a step back instead.
“This is the last thing I can do.”
He looked at me. Then he finally bent, and said it seriously.
“Willow Hayes. I’m sorry.”
I didn’t tell him it was okay. I didn’t tell him I forgave him.
Eight years of nights he never noticed, anniversaries he never remembered, a bench that came too late. None of that could be wiped away with a single line.
I just slid the trimmed chamomile back into the vase.
“Drive safe.”
Adrian’s shoulders dropped, as if he’d finally understood he was being shown out.
He turned and started to leave. At the end of the little lane, he stopped and looked back.
Inside the white walls and gray roof, the shadow of the lilac tree filled the little yard. I sat among the flowers. A book at my hand, a cup of tea, the wind off Lake Tahoe.
And every one of those wishes he had never actually listened to, all those years ago.
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