The Letter I Refused to Accept Chapter 08

The Letter I Refused to Accept Chapter 08

Six months after I started school, I took a day off to go with Diana to a follow–up appointment at the hospital. Her illness had been fairly well under control lately.

When we came out of the hospital, I pushed her wheelchair down the sidewalk. The city was already getting decked out for the holidays.

It was the first New Year’s we’d spent together since we’d been apart for seven years.

On New Year’s Eve, I pulled up a livestream from back home. At the same moment, on the other side of the ocean, they were counting down to the new year.

[Three, two, one. Happy New Year!]

The second the countdown ended, someone knocked on the front door.

I looked through the peephole, and I went rigid. It was Cole, who was supposed to be home for

the holidays.

At the same time, my phone buzzed a few times. It was an unknown number, but my gut told

me it was Cole.

Sure enough, when I picked up, he was silent for a few seconds. Then he spoke, his voice rough. “Sienna, happy New Year.”

Heavy snow was falling outside the window, and neither of us said anything for a long time.

I hung up and blocked the number all over again.

The next morning, the snow had stopped.

When I opened the curtains, Cole was standing outside the yard like an ice sculpture. He was covered in snow, and his lips had turned purple from the cold.

As if he could feel it, he suddenly looked up, and our eyes met before either of us was ready. A light flared in his lifeless eyes.

He’d been standing out there all night, and his whole body had gone stiff. He wanted to call my name, but the muscles in his face kept twitching and wouldn’t cooperate.

“Let him come in.”

At some point, Diana had come up beside me. She’d probably noticed something was wrong the night before, when I knocked over a plate.

I shook my head. I didn’t want anything more to do with him.

But Diana insisted. “See him once. When a splinter’s stuck in your skin, the wound won’t heal

until you pull it out.”

In the end, I listened to her. I texted Cole and told him to meet me at a coffee shop nearby.

An hour later, I watched him walk toward me. He must have gone back to his hotel and

changed clothes. But no matter how nice his clothes were, they couldn’t hide how worn down

he looked.

It had only been six months, but Cole had changed a lot. There were dark bruises under his eyes, stubble covered his chin, and his cheeks had gone hollow. He looked like a walking shell.

When he saw me, his eyes lit up. “Sienna, I finally found you.”

“I dropped out of school. If you want to study over here, then I’ll come too.”

He didn’t ask how I’d ended up there. He didn’t ask what had happened during the six months I’d been gone either. He only stubbornly wanted to be with me.

Cole looked at the girl in front of him. She didn’t smell like restaurant food anymore, and she didn’t have to keep rubbing her freezing wrists through the winter. She’d become prettier and

more grown up.

That day at her house, he’d sat on the couch until the next night, and no one had ever come.

Before he left, he’d stared at her Union University acceptance letter on the coffee table, lost.

The truth was, he’d had regrets before.

When he’d watched Sienna cry happy tears over a fake acceptance letter, he hadn’t been able to

describe how he felt. For a second, he’d wondered what it would be like if it were real.

Did that mean he and Sienna could keep going to school together and walking out of class together? He could pick her up from her shift the way he used to.

Maybe they’d get married after graduation and have a kid who looked like her.

But one wrong choice had shattered every one of those dreams.

He hadn’t seen that back then. He’d stupidly thought they’d only miss out on four never imagined it would end like this.