“Chris,
If you’re reading this, it means you finally let yourself feel what we were both too afraid to say out loud that night. I don’t know where you’ll be when you open this, or how much time will have passed, or who you’ll be with when you do.
But I need you to know something, and I need you to know it in my own words, written down where you can read them as many times as you need to.
I never stopped loving you. I know I never will.
I know you’re leaving for Germany tomorrow. I know medical school is your dream, and I would never, ever ask you to give that up for me.
I love you too much to be the reason you don’t become who you’re meant to be. But I need you to hear this at least once in your life, even if it ends up being too late by the time you do.
If you ever come back to Millbrook. If you ever wonder whether what we had mattered as much to me as it did to you—it did.
It mattered more than I have words to explain. It always has. It always will.
I’ll be here. Until life takes me somewhere else.
I love you. I always will.
Bella”
I read it three times, tears streaming down my face unchecked. Once sitting on that trunk in the dusty attic, my breath coming in ragged gasps.
Once in my car after I’d grabbed my wallet and keys in a daze.
And once in the long-term parking lot at Logan Airport. After I’d driven there on pure autopilot and bought a ticket on the first flight to Albany.
The words had soaked into me like water into sand. Filling empty spaces I didn’t even know existed.
Answering questions I’d stopped asking years ago because the answers seemed impossibly out of reach.
Fourteen years of emotional distance suddenly made perfect, terrible sense. The hollow feeling that had followed me through every relationship.
The restlessness that never quite went away no matter how successful I became.
The persistent sense that something crucial remained unfinished. Waiting patiently for me to be ready to face it.
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