Chapter 46
Chapter 44: The Backstory Of How they Happened.
Sedona’s POV
“He made me laugh,” Rachel said, and there was something in her voice that made me look
at her more closely. She sounded wistful, like she was looking back on a fond memory.
“During the worst of it, months after your sudden disappearance when I was imagining all
these terrible scenarios about what might have happened to you, Enzo would say these
completely absurd things that would catch me off guard and make me laugh despite myself.
And then one day I realized I was looking forward to seeing him, like actually wanting to
spend time with him. Not because he might have news about you or he has a new lead he
wanted us to look into but just because I wanted to see him p>
“When did you know?” I asked turning to face my ex fiance Enzo, who looked at me with a
complicated look on his face, like he was trying to be mindful of my feelings concerning this.
“That it was more than friendship p>
He was quiet for a moment, considering. “There was a day-about four months after the
wedding-that-wasn’t. Rachel and I had met for coffee, which we’d been doing every week by
then, and she mentioned casually that she’d been on a date the night before. Some lawyer
her mother had set her up with, hoping to get them into a relationship with each other as the
man was from a very high class family. Very accomplished, apparently. Rich family p>
“Michael Peterson,” Rachel supplied the information, adding in the missing bits as she rolled
her eyes remembering that man.
“Sedona he was the worst and I felt my mum intentionally did it just to make me miserable.
He was absolutely dull. Talked about himself for ninety minutes straight, his winnings, his 99
streak of success and no failures yet, how he was raised in a traditional home and wanted a
traditional wife, basically listing what he rather have me doing p>
“I hated him,” Enzo said simply, continuing from where she stopped. “Immediately and irrationally, because there was no valid reason for me to hate him even though he was a douchebag from the sound of it. I’d never met him, knew nothing about him except what Rachel had told me, and I wanted to find him and tell him he wasn’t good enough for her.
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Which was when I realized that I’d developed some very inconvenient feelings that wasn’t
right or appropriate given the context back then p>
“He didn’t tell me right away,” Rachel continued. “He spent three more months agonizing
about it, having sleepless nights and getting drunk, convinced that pursuing me would be a
betrayal of you somehow. Meanwhile, I’d figured out my own feelings but was also convinced
that acting on them would be wrong because you were still missing and it felt disrespectful
to fall in love with your former fiancé when we didn’t even know if you were alive p>
“So we were both miserable and pining for each other while pretending to just be friends p>
Enzo finished, clapping his hand together as he added. “Very Italian of me. Very
melodramatic p>
“What changed?” I shifted slightly, adjusting Molly’s weight as she stirred against my
shoulder before settling again as she kept sleeping, the conversation lulling her into a much
deeper sleep rather than waking her up.
Rachel and Enzo exchanged another look, and this time I saw something darker in it, it wasn’t
exactly pain but something close to it.
“Your parents held a memorial,” Rachel said quietly.
“Eighteen months after you disappeared. Not a funeral, exactly, since there was no… since
you weren’t…” She stopped, visibly struggling with the words.
“Since there was no body,” I finished for her, my voice flat, spitting out the forbidden words
that she couldn’t bring herself to speak. “They thought I was dead p>
“We didn’t know what to think,” Rachel said. “Eighteen months with no contact, no sightings,
no credit card usage, nothing. The investigators your father hired said that typically if someone was going to resurface, they’d have done it by then. They suggested that we should
consider the possibility that something had happened to you. That maybe you’d met with foul
play, or had an accident somewhere remote, or p>
“Or decided that disappearing permanently was more preferable to coming back,” I said.
“That was my theory,” Enzo said. “Not foul play. I didn’t believe that you were dead. You did nothing bad to anyone that would decide to have you killed. I never believed that theory. But I thought perhaps you’d started a completely new life somewhere, that you’d made a clean
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break and had no intention of ever returning. Which, to be clear, I understood. Your family’s
expectations were… Something that you struggled with p>
“The memorial wasn’t really for you,” Rachel continued, not really, it was a way for us to
acknowledge what we had lost, and if we could find a way to keep living in your honour
instead of just waiting indefinitely p>
I closed my eyes briefly, imagining it. My parents, my brother, Rachel and Enzo and everyone
I’d known, gathered somewhere at the gloomy ends of a cemetery filled with other graves as
they were there to mourn a version of me that they’d made up from absence of the real me.
“That must have been terrible p>
“It was one of the worst days of my life,” Rachel said simply. “Your mother couldn’t stop
crying about it, she was inconsolable that day. Your father gave this speech about you- about how proud he was of you, how he regretted not telling you that more often, how he wished he’d listened when you tried to tell him you weren’t ready for marriage.” Her voice
wavered.
“Cameron didn’t speak. He just stood at the front holding your tennis racket-the one you
used at the junior nationals and had given it to him as a good luck charm-and I think
everyone there understood that he was barely holding himself together. But he didn’t want to
fall apart in front of everyone else p>
The image was almost unbearable as ears rolled down my eyes as I didn’t wipe it but I spoke.
“I didn’t know. I never meant for p>
“We know,” Enzo said cutting me short as he nodded his head slowly.
“We know that now. But Sedona, you have to understand what it was like for those of us you left behind. The not-knowing was its own kind of torture. At least with death, we were certain of this. Instead of just waiting, hovering around this endless question mark that nobody had
the answer to p>
“After the memorial,” Rachel continued, “Enzo and I went back to his apartment. We’d both agreed to support each other through the day, to make sure neither of us was alone with it. And we sat there in his living room, both of us completely drained from the day, not saying anything to anyone, exhausted and not ready to call it a night, and he turned to me and said-
She looked at him.
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“I said, ‘I can’t do this anymore,” Enzo finished for her as he glanced at me and added.
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“I told her that I was in love with her, that I had been for months, that I knew it was probably wrong and definitely complicated but that life was too short and too uncertain to keep
pretending I didn’t feel what I felt p>
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