Chapter 4: The Morning After
The key scratched in the lock, a sound like breaking glass in the silent hallway. Mia pushed the door open, her body still humming with a low current from the night. The fairy lights over her bed were still on, their hum softer than the ringing in her ears from the bass at The Anchor. Her pink dress felt like a costume now, itchy and too bright for the gray dawn leaking through the blinds.
The room was a monument to the chaos of her mind. Canvases leaned against every wall, half-finished dreams in turquoise and burnt sienna. A splash of vermillion had bled onto her pillowcase. The air was thick with the ghosts of turpentine and old books.
And there, in the center of it all, was Ethan.
He was slumped against her headboard, fully dressed, one hand curled loosely around a cheap ballpoint pen. His dark curls were mussed against her pillow. On his lap, splayed open like a wound, was his notebook—the one with the worn green cover he always carried.
Her heart, still buoyant from Liam’s song, gave a confused, sideways lurch. “Ethan?”
He didn’t stir. A soft snore escaped his lips. He must have come here after he left the bar, waiting for her. The thought was a tender ache. Her reliable Ethan.
Then she saw his face. Even in sleep, his expression was pinched, troubled. Tear tracks, dried and silvery in the faint light, gleamed on his cheeks.
A cold thread of alarm pulled tight in her chest. She moved silently, the feather on her earring trembling. She knelt beside the bed, the worn carpet rough against her knees. Her gaze fell to the open pages.
His handwriting, usually neat and small, was a frantic, sprawling thing. Words were crossed out, rewritten, underlined violently. Her name was everywhere. Amelia. Not Mia. Amelia.
Her eyes, without her permission, locked onto a block of text near the top of the left page.
“She wears the sunrise like a dress, and I am left in the long shadow it casts. I catalogue her colors: the pink of her laugh, the blue of her gaze when she’s lost in a line. He gets to sing it. I only get to write it down, and hide it.”
The blood in her veins turned to ice water. He gets to sing it.
Below that, another fragment, the ink smudged: “The taste of her lipstick was cherries and war. I lost.”
The memory of the riverbank, his thumb on her mouth, flashed behind her eyes with shocking clarity. The quiet intensity of his look. His abrupt departure. She had compartmentalized it, filed it under ‘weird Ethan moment.’ Now it screamed from the page.
Her breathing shallowed. She turned her head, the feather brushing against his clenched fist where it rested on the comforter. She read on, her heart pounding against her ribs.
“Eight years of satellite love, orbiting a sun that doesn’t know I’m there. Jake in the margins. Liam on the stage. Me in the crowd, scribbling this pathetic…” The sentence ended in a furious scribble.
Pages and pages. Years. Poems about her hands holding a paintbrush. About the scar on her knee from when she was twelve and he’d carried her home. About the sound of her voice down a bad phone line. About the hollow space in his chest when she smiled at him, whoever he was that week.
It wasn’t admiration. It wasn’t simple friendship. It was a map of a longing so deep and detailed it stole the air from the room.
A soft groan escaped him. His eyelids fluttered.
Mia jerked back as if burned, but it was too late. He was waking into the horror she had just uncovered. She remained on her knees, frozen, the evidence screaming between them.
Ethan’s green eyes opened, blurry with sleep. They focused on her face, so close to his. For one merciful second, there was only sleepy confusion. Then he saw the open notebook on his lap. He saw her expression—the shock, the dawning, terrible understanding.
His face went deathly pale. He moved faster than she thought possible, snapping the notebook shut and clutching it to his chest like a shield. The motion was violent, full of shame.
They stared at each other. The fairy lights hummed. A car horn blared somewhere in the waking world outside.
“Mia,” he croaked. His voice was raw from sleep and crying.
She couldn’t speak. Her mouth was dry. She looked from his terrified eyes to the green cover of the notebook, then back again. A hundred moments re-contextualized themselves in her mind with a series of silent, devastating clicks. His always-being there. His quiet support of every one of her doomed romances. The way he looked at her sometimes, a look she’d mistaken for deep friendship.
“All… all this time?” The words were a whisper, fragile as a moth’s wing.
Ethan closed his eyes, a pained finality in the gesture. He gave one short, almost imperceptible nod.
The silence that followed was a physical thing, heavy and suffocating. It was broken by the buzzing of Mia’s phone on her desk. Liam’s name flashed on the screen, a cheerful heart emoji next to it. The sound was obscenely loud.
Neither of them moved to answer it.
Ethan finally opened his eyes. They were glassy with a fresh sheen of tears, but he held her gaze. The defenseless truth of him was laid bare, more intimate than any physical nakedness. There was no hiding now.
Mia, still on her knees, reached out a hand. Not toward him, but toward the notebook. She stopped halfway, her fingers hovering in the space between them.
“Ethan…” she began, but the sentence had nowhere to go. I’m sorry? Thank you? Why didn’t you say something? Every option felt wrong, a defilement of what was on those pages.
He watched her aborted gesture, his shoulders slumping further. He looked like he was waiting for a blow.
The phone stopped buzzing. The room plunged back into a silence that was worse, because now it was full of the words they weren’t saying, the history that had just been irrevocably rewritten. The fairy lights flickered once, then held steady, casting their warm, forgiving glow over a scene they were never meant to witness.