Two Thousand Kilometers South, Away From Everyone I Loved Chapter 09

Two Thousand Kilometers South, Away From Everyone I Loved Chapter 09

The Brown family fell apart completely. The instructor didn’t drop the charges. Anna was facing an enormous lawsuit for damages. To plug the financial hole, my parents were forced to sell the family house at a fraction of its value. Leo, unable to stand the suffocating atmosphere at home, got into a massive fight with my parents and dropped out of school, running off to work odd jobs out of state.

As for Lucas-he broke down entirely.

He went back to Chicago, only to find he couldn’t focus on anything anymore. He took a trip back to our hometown, trying to find some trace of the past in my old room. What he found was an empty space. Nothing but a bed and a desk. Everything else was gone.

A few days later, he received a giant shipping box. The sender: Stella Brown, Miami Campus.

His hands shook as he tore it open. Inside were every single gift he had ever given me over the

years. Cheap hair clips. Plush toys he’d grabbed on a whim. The old tablet he’d used to brush me off.

At the very bottom of the box lay an envelope. He tore it open, and a shower of shredded paper

scraps spilled out.

It was a note he had written to me senior year of high school. “Once Stella gets into Northwestern,

we’ll get married.”

Now that note was torn into a thousand pieces, impossible to piece back together.

Lucas knelt on the floor, staring at the fragments scattered around him, and finally covered his face with his hands and wept aloud. He finally understood what he had lost. Someone who would never,

ever turn back.

That year, Miami was hit by the heaviest rainstorm it had seen in a decade.

I had just finished the final revisions on my drawings in the studio when my phone rang. It was the security guard at the gate. “There’s a guy out here, standing in the pouring rain at the entrance. He’s insisting he has to see you. Honestly, he looks like he’s about to collapse. Do you want to come

take a look?”

I sighed, grabbed a black umbrella, and walked downstairs.

Outside the iron gate, Lucas was drenched to the bone. Rainwater streamed down his hair and into his eyes, but he didn’t even bother to wipe it away. The moment he saw me emerge, he lunged at the

gate.

“Stella! You finally came to see me!” His eyes were red-rimmed, his voice fractured and broken, against the roar of the storm. “I was wrong. I know I was wrong now. I shouldn’t have favored Anna. I shouldn’t have taken your things. I shouldn’t have shouted at you. From now on I’ll only be good to you. I’ll never speak to her again. Please-just come back with me. I’m begging you…”

He reached through the iron bars, trying desperately to grab the hem of my clothes.

I stood beneath my umbrella, not a single drop of rain touching me. Through the cold iron fence, I watched his miserable, pathetic state. And I felt nothing. Not even a shred of vengeful satisfaction. Only a kind of distant pity.

“Lucas.” My voice was perfectly calm. “Love that comes too late is worth less than the weeds on the

ground.”

I slipped the black umbrella through the gap in the iron gate and dropped it at his feet. “Give it to whoever you want. I don’t want it anymore. It disgusts me.”

I turned and walked back into the campus. Without a single moment of hesitation.

Lucas stared at the black umbrella lying in the mud and collapsed into the filthy water. The torrential rain swallowed every last one of his sobs. The security guard shook his head and pulled his window shut. The man rotting there in the mud was now sealed off forever, completely outside the borders of my world.