“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.
The Spontaneous Journey Home
I didn’t pack a bag. I barely remembered to grab my phone charger.
I just drove straight to the airport in the clothes I’d been wearing to clean my attic. Bought a ticket to Albany and sat in the departure gate in a complete daze.
That note clutched in my hand.
The flight felt endless despite being only an hour and twenty minutes. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t read.
Couldn’t focus on anything except the loop of memories playing in my head like a film I couldn’t pause.
Bella laughing on the back of my bicycle as we rode through town. Bella falling asleep on my shoulder during bad movies at the old theater.
Bella crying quietly in my car the night I told her my parents were moving to Germany. The way she’d tried so hard to be supportive even though her heart was breaking.
I had absolutely no idea if she was still in Millbrook. No clue whether her words about staying until life took her somewhere else had already happened.
She could be married with children. She could have moved to California or anywhere else in the world.
She could have completely forgotten about me and moved on with her life. The way I should have done but somehow never quite managed.
The not-knowing was almost worse than any answer could possibly be.
When the plane finally touched down in Albany, my hands were sweating. My heart was racing like I’d just run a marathon.
I rented a basic sedan that smelled like industrial air freshener. I drove the forty-five minutes to Millbrook on roads I still remembered despite not having driven them in over a decade.
The town looked simultaneously exactly the same and completely different. Smaller than I remembered, somehow.
The buildings looked older, more worn. But the basic geography was unchanged.
Main Street with its collection of small shops. The diner where Bella and I used to get milkshakes after school.
The park where we’d spent countless summer afternoons.
I found myself pulling into the parking lot of Millbrook High School. I hadn’t consciously decided to go there.
The building looked smaller now. Less imposing than it had seemed when I was a student.
I sat in the rental car for ten minutes. Gripping the steering wheel, trying to figure out what exactly I was doing.
What I hoped to accomplish.
I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a speech prepared.
I just knew with absolute certainty that I needed to see Bella. Even if it turned out to be the most awkward and painful conversation of my entire life.
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