Epilogue: The Letter (Handwritten. Folded neatly. No return address.)
Hey,
I don’t know if you’ll read this. Or if you’ll care. But I needed to write it anyway.
There’s something about silence — not the angry kind, not the cold kind — just quiet. The kind that makes you sit with your own voice long enough to know what it’s really trying to say.
You were right to leave.
I want to say that first.
You didn’t walk away from love — you walked away from the damage we were doing to it. And that takes more courage than most people will ever understand. I didn’t at the time. Not fully. I just knew it hurt like hell.
I’ve thought a lot about what we were. About what I made you carry.
I let my past with Liam bleed into my future with you. I brought you into a storm and then asked you to stay still while I tested how strong your sails were. That wasn’t love. That was fear wearing its best disguise.
And even now, after all this time, after therapy, long walks, tough talks with Liam, and nights staring at the ceiling thinking of your laugh... I still don’t regret meeting you.
I regret how I held you.
You told me once that love wasn’t a test. That it was presence. I didn’t get it then. I do now.
I don’t know where you are. Or who you’re with. I hope they see the parts of you I never learned how to hold gently enough. I hope they never ask you to prove your heart.
But if — if — you ever want to find me again, even just to sit in the same room and breathe the same air for a while… the door will be open.
I don’t expect anything. I’m not writing to ask.
I’m writing to say thank you.
For being the person who made me better — even after you were gone.
Still yours, in the quiet places,
Andy
-
Quiet Places (My perspective)
The ward is never truly still.
There’s always the hum of something — monitors, air vents, the low shuffle of soft-soled shoes in the hallway.
But I’ve learned how to find stillness inside all that noise.
The letter came yesterday. Hand-delivered by a nurse, no stamp, no postmark. Just my name, written in the same uneven, careful hand I’d seen on scraps of notes and taped lunchboxes years ago.
Andy.
It took me until now to open it. Not because I didn’t want to read it — but because I wanted to be ready for whatever it would pull out of me.
I wasn’t ready.
By the third line, I had to stop. By the fifth, my hands shook. Not from the illness — from the weight of his voice pressed into paper. The way he still wrote like he was speaking only to me.
He said I was right to leave.
That I hadn’t walked away from love — I’d walked away from the harm we were doing to it.
That it had taken him years to understand.
I believed him.
I believed every word.
And yet, as I sat here in this chair, the drip hissing softly beside me, the taste of antiseptic in the air, I felt the same thing I’d felt the day I left — love.
Not the wild, consuming love of the beginning.
Not the bruised, ragged love of the end.
But the kind that just is. Quiet. Untested. Whole.
I’ll never walk back through his door. My body won’t let me. Time won’t let me.
But as I fold the letter again, smoothing its creases with care, I realise that in a way… I’ve already gone back.
Every word brought me there.
To the workshop smell of sawdust.
To the laugh he tried to hide.
To the man who broke me a little and built me a little more.
I slip the letter under my pillow.
And I close my eyes.
The stillness finds me this time.
-
After (Andy’s Perspective)
The call came in the morning.
No one ever calls in the morning unless it’s bad news. The nurse’s voice was careful, measured — the way people speak when they’re trying to put padding around a truth that will still hit like steel.
You were gone.
She said you’d been comfortable. Peaceful. That you’d had a letter under your pillow.
My letter.
I drove to the coast that afternoon. Not to the hospital. Not to anyone. Just… to the sea.
The wind was sharp, the sky low. I stood there until my hands went numb, the roar of the water drowning everything but the thought that you’d read my words — and then you’d gone.
I don’t know if you forgave me. You didn’t have to.
But I hope you knew that every word was real. That when I wrote about the quiet places, I meant this — standing in the wind, eyes closed, feeling you here like you never left.
Liam came by later. He didn’t say much. Just sat with me in the workshop while I worked a piece of cedar until my hands ached.
We’re better now, him and me. You’d like that. You’d take some credit for it, and you’d be right.
I kept the letter you wrote me the day you left. It’s in the same drawer now as the last one I wrote to you. Both creased. Both touched too many times.
I think about what I said — If the timing ever gets kinder.
Turns out, it didn’t.
But you still left me better than you found me.
And that’s love, isn’t it?
-
Goodbye (Liam’s Perspective)
I didn’t go to the service.
Couldn’t.
Wouldn’t.
I told myself it was because funerals aren’t my thing, but the truth? I didn’t want to share you with a room full of people who only knew pieces of you.
I went to the cliff instead.
The one you told me about — where the wind cuts sharp and the sea sounds like it’s breathing right beneath your feet.
I brought a bottle. The good stuff. Not for drinking — just because you hated cheap whisky and I wasn’t about to insult you now.
Didn’t say much. Didn’t need to.
I just sat there, letting the cold bite, and thought about the way you used to look at me — not the way Andy did, full of history and weight — but like I was still being written. Like I could still turn into someone worth the page.
You were the only one who never asked me to be less.
The wind picked up, so I poured a little over the edge.
“Don’t haunt me,” I said. “You’d be insufferable.”
And I smiled, because I could hear your laugh in my head — the real one, the one that broke out before you could stop it.
Then I left the bottle there.
Because some things are worth leaving behind.
THE END. |
