Chapter 5

The skies above the sleepy town of Rosewood were overcast, the clouds heavy with a rain that never quite came. The quiet streets, lined with oaks and weather-worn brick buildings, seemed to echo with a shared nostalgia. Alan hadn’t intended to stay long. Just a few days to visit his grandmother and head back to the city. But that shifted the moment Stacy’s message lit up his phone.

“Can we meet? I need to talk to you. It’s important.”

The words were brief, but they unsettled him. Stacy didn’t explain. She just said she was coming to Rosewood—no details, no warmth, no trace of the affection that had once defined them. Asking to meet at a café instead of his grandmother’s house sent a warning flare through his gut. He tried to reason it away. Her parents were divorcing; maybe she just needed neutral ground. Still, he couldn’t shake the discomfort.

As Alan pushed open the door to Hearth Café, the familiar scent of espresso and cinnamon met him. The place was mostly empty, save for a couple reading newspapers and a teenage girl scribbling in a sketchbook, lost in her own world. Then he saw her. Stacy sat by the window, her face pale and drawn, hands wrapped tightly around a coffee cup she hadn’t touched. Her eyes flicked up when she saw him, but there was no smile. Just tension. And guilt.

Alan walked over, forcing a small smile. “Hey,” he said, leaning in to kiss her cheek. She didn’t move, didn’t even pretend to lean in. She sat there, rigid and cold.

He lowered himself into the chair opposite her, the scrape of wood on the floor sounding too loud in the quiet room. “Baby, what’s going on? You’re making me nervous.”

Before Stacy could answer, a cheerful voice interrupted. “Alan?”

He turned. A tall, slim brunette in a black apron stood nearby, a grin lighting up her face. Monica. His childhood friend.

“Monica?”

“I thought that was you!” she said, stepping closer. “It’s been, what, two years?”

Alan nodded, caught off guard. “Yeah. Just here visiting my grandma.”

Monica’s eyes moved to Stacy. “You must be Stacy. His fiancée, right? I’m Monica. I’ve known Alan since we were kids.”

Stacy forced a smile that didn’t reach her eyes and extended a hand. “Nice to meet you.” Monica noticed. Her own smile faltered as she glanced between them, an unspoken question in her expression.

“Well, I’ll let you two talk,” Monica said, giving Alan a soft touch on the shoulder. Her hand lingered for just a moment. “I’ll check on you later.”

When she walked away, the silence returned, heavier than before.

Alan leaned forward, his voice low. “Okay. Talk to me.”

Stacy looked down at her coffee, her voice flat but steady. “I need to tell you something. And I need you to just listen.”

Alan nodded slowly.

Stacy exhaled. She spoke of her parents’ marriage, of her lies and manipulation. Her voice trembled only once, when she confessed she’d encouraged her mother to have an affair. Alan sat frozen. Her voice cracked as she said the man’s name.

“Jim.” It spilled out like something toxic. Alan flinched. The name wasn’t new to him—but the context was a betrayal in itself.

“He just charmed her,” Stacy said, her eyes glassy. “She never would’ve gone to him if I hadn’t ... planted the idea.” She looked up at Alan. “My mom’s breakdown, my dad’s rage, Jim losing his job—it’s all my fault. I started it. I destroyed everything.”

Alan’s hands were clenched into fists beneath the table. His jaw locked so tight it ached.

“I thought I was helping her,” she whispered. “I thought I was setting her free.”

A long, unbearable pause followed.

“You didn’t think it would burn everything to the ground,” Alan said, his voice quiet.

Stacy blinked back a tear. “No.”

The silence swallowed the table whole. Then he asked, his voice low but sharp, “Did you cheat on me, too?”

The question hung in the air like a blade. Stacy froze. She wanted to lie, to say it was different, that it meant nothing. But Alan’s eyes were too clear, too piercing. There was no room for lies. She looked away and gave the smallest nod.

Alan let out a hollow laugh—sharp, bitter, and entirely joyless. His eyes glinted with something between heartbreak and hysteria. His hand shot out, grabbing her untouched coffee cup. He hurled it against the floor. It shattered with a violent crack that silenced the café.

Monica rushed over, her eyes wide. “Alan! Oh my God—what happened?”

Alan didn’t answer her. His eyes were locked on Stacy, red with fury, his voice breaking open like a dam. “She cheated on me,” he growled. “This fucking bitch cheated on me.”

Stacy flinched as if he’d struck her. He had never raised his voice at her, never used that word. It cut through the air.

“You let me plan a life with you! And the whole time, you were letting someone else fuck you?” His words were venom spit through gritted teeth, raw and echoing off the walls.

Monica’s expression hardened as she turned on Stacy. “How could you? He would have done anything for you. And you throw it all away for what?”

Alan took a step forward, his eyes wild. “Was he better than me? Is that it? Did he make you scream the way I used to?” Stacy’s face was ashen, but she didn’t move. She looked like someone slowly sinking underwater. “Or was it just easier?” Alan snarled. “Easier to fuck some random guy when you come from a pathetic, cheating mother?”

Stacy’s breath caught. That was too far. And yet, she didn’t stop him. She didn’t defend herself. Because a part of her knew she deserved it.

Monica stepped between them like a shield. Her voice sliced through the chaos. “Alan, stop. Look at me.” His breath came in fast gulps, but he looked at her.

“Don’t do this,” she said, her voice softening as she touched his chest. “Don’t burn yourself down. She already lit the match.” She turned back to Stacy, her eyes like flint. “You don’t get any sympathy. You broke him. Do you even see what you’ve done? You could have left him with honesty, but you had to drag him down into your own filth.”

Then, before anyone could react, Monica grabbed a glass of ice water from the table and threw it in Stacy’s face.

Gasps filled the café. Someone murmured, “She deserved that.”

Cold water dripped from Stacy’s lashes, her blouse soaked through, clinging to her like a second skin of shame. She stood slowly, her dignity dissolving. Without a word, she picked up her purse and walked to the door.

Monica turned back to Alan, her voice calm now. “Let her go. You don’t need her.”

His voice followed Stacy out the door, cracked and broken. “Get the fuck out of my life! Don’t you ever come back!”

The bell above the door chimed like a funeral toll as she stepped outside. She walked to her car, each step away from Alan peeling something from her soul. She got in and let the silence swallow her.

She hadn’t told Alan the whole truth: she’d wanted this breakup, she couldn’t stay, that she would have eventually left him for her father and broken his heart in a quieter, crueler way. This public humiliation, Alan’s rage ... it was a clean, violent break. It cauterized the wound.

And Monica? Stacy had seen it in the café—the way she’d stood in front of him, the way she looked at him like he was something worth protecting, not just fixing. Monica’s rage wasn’t just vengeance; it was love in its most feral form.

“He’ll be okay,” Stacy murmured to the empty car. “Because she’s there.”

Oddly, the thought didn’t burn. She had messed up beyond repair, shattered a life she had helped build. But as she pulled onto the old road out of Rosewood, leaving behind the man she once wanted to grow old with, she felt a strange, terrifying clarity. She had faced the worst of herself and survived.

As she drove away, the overcast sky finally broke, and a gentle rain began to fall.

The two weeks that followed the explosion at Hearth Café passed in a strange, muted haze. For Stacy, it was like watching a film of someone else’s life. The memories of Alan’s face, contorted in a mask of pure, unadulterated rage, were vivid, sharp-edged, and yet, they felt completely disconnected from her. They were images, nothing more. There was no accompanying sting of remorse, no deep, gut-wrenching ache of loss that she had steeled herself for. When she thought of Alan now, which was surprisingly infrequent, it was with a distant, almost clinical curiosity. He was a character in a book she had finished reading, a man whose story had reached its definitive, violent end. The finality of it was not a source of pain, but a strange, hollow relief. The life she was supposed to live with him had been a cage, gilded and comfortable, but a cage nonetheless. She had not just broken out of it; she had helped burn it to the ground. And standing in the ashes, she felt, for the first time in a long time, free.

The real ghost wasn’t Alan; it was the apartment. The space they had shared for three years, a place once filled with the comfortable clutter of a shared future, was now a cavernous, empty box. Her footsteps echoed on the bare hardwood floors, the sound bouncing off walls that were now stark and white, stripped of photographs and art. Sunlight, once a welcome guest, now cut sharp, lonely rectangles across the dusty surfaces, illuminating the ghosts of where furniture used to be. Most of her life, or what was left of it, was sealed away in brown cardboard. The boxes were stacked against the walls in haphazard towers, a temporary fortress she had built around herself, a barricade between the past she was dismantling and the uncertain future she was being forced to confront.

Her father’s presence was the only solid thing in the midst of the chaos. Mark was an anchor in the swirling emptiness of the apartment, but he was also a storm cloud, a silent, brooding weight that filled whatever space he occupied. He had been there all day, his silence a wall so thick and impenetrable she didn’t know how to begin to chip away at it. He hadn’t said more than a dozen words since he’d arrived that morning. He just moved with a grim, relentless energy, lifting the heavy boxes of books and kitchenware as if he could physically haul away the weight of the last few months, as if manual labor could exorcise the demons that haunted him. His jaw was perpetually set in a hard, unyielding line, and his eyes, when they weren’t focused on the task at hand, were distant and bleak, staring at something she couldn’t see.

“Well, that’s the last of the big stuff,” Stacy said, her voice sounding small and thin in the echoing room. The screech of the packing tape gun was unnervingly loud as she sealed a final box, the black marker scrawling ‘Kitchen Stuff - Fragile’ across the top in her neat, looping handwriting. She pushed a stray strand of hair from her forehead, her skin damp with a light sheen of sweat. “Just this one and a few bags of clothes left to go.”

Mark stood by the large picture window that overlooked the tree-lined street. The late afternoon sun slanted through the glass, stretching his shadow long and thin across the floorboards until it touched the opposite wall. He didn’t turn. He just nodded, his gaze fixed on the empty space where their plush, beige sofa used to sit. You could still see the faint, rectangular indentations in the beige carpet, a ghostly outline of a life that no longer existed.

“Good,” he finally said, his voice a low, rough rumble. “We can get you out of here for good.” The words were meant to be practical, but they were layered with something else, a possessive finality that sent a faint shiver down her spine.

Stacy wiped a bead of sweat from her temple with the back of her hand. The air in the apartment was thick and heavy, stagnant with the smells of cardboard, dust, and something else ... the faint, lingering scent of Alan’s cologne. It was a crisp, clean scent, a mix of cedar and bergamot that used to cling to his shirts, to their pillows, to her skin. She was only now realizing, with a startling jolt of relief, that she would never have to smell it again. It was the scent of a life she had outgrown, a man she had never truly been able to love the way he deserved.

“Dad...” she started, her voice hesitant, testing the fragile silence between them. She watched his reflection in the windowpane, saw the muscles in his broad shoulders tense up, a subtle but immediate shift in his posture. “Can we ... can we talk?”

He let out a short, humorless puff of air. “About what, Stacy? The boxes are packed. The truck will be here tomorrow morning. There’s nothing left to talk about.”

“About ... everything,” she pressed, refusing to be dismissed. She took a step closer to him, her bare feet silent on the dusty floor. “About Mom. About ... you know. The affair.” She saw it then, in his reflection, the muscle in his jaw that jumped and twitched, a tiny, tell-tale sign of the storm brewing just beneath the surface. “Dr. Brenda called me again this morning. She’s really pushing for that group session. She thinks it’s the only way we can start to ... heal.” Stacy took a breath, the words feeling foolish and inadequate even as she said them. “She said it’s important. That you, me, and Mom all need to be there, together, in the same room.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Mark repeated, finally turning away from the window to face her. His face was a stoic mask, but his eyes were like chips of ice. His voice was flat, cold, and utterly final. “Your mother made her choice. A choice she’s going to have to live with for the rest of her goddamn life. And you...” He paused, his gaze sweeping over her, a flicker of something unreadable in their depths. “You did what you thought was the right thing to do. It’s over. It’s done. End of story.”

The finality in his tone, the cold, deliberate way he was trying to slam the door on the entire catastrophe, lit a spark of defiance in her. “It’s not over!” Her voice came out sharper and louder than she’d intended, the sound ricocheting off the bare walls. “Don’t you dare say that! It’s not over for you, and you know it. You walk around our house like a ghost. You barely eat. Half the time, you won’t even look at me. You won’t say her name, like she’s Voldemort or something. Pretending like none of it ever happened isn’t going to fix anything, Dad. It’s not going to fix you, and it’s not going to fix us.”

The stony mask of denial on his face finally cracked. It didn’t just crack; it shattered. His features twisted into a snarl of pure, unfiltered rage, a pain so raw and visceral it was terrifying to witness. “What do you want me to do, Stacy?” he shot back, his voice rising to a roar that filled the cavernous apartment, vibrating in her bones. “You want me to talk about it? Fine! Let’s fucking talk about it! You want to talk about how your mother, that fucking bitch, took a wrecking ball to twenty-six years of my life? How she took everything we built, every memory, every promise, and pissed it all away for some smooth-talking piece of shit from her office?”

He stalked toward her, his heavy work boots thudding against the floorboards, closing the distance between them in three long, angry strides. He was no longer a sad, broken man; he was a volcano, erupting with months of repressed fury and grief. “You want me to tell you that it hurts?” he spat, his eyes wild and desperate, flecked with a terrifying red. “Of course, it fucking hurts! It’s like a cancer, Stacy, and it’s eating me alive from the inside out! You want a list? The woman I gave my entire life to, the woman I loved more than I loved myself, she threw it all in the garbage like it was nothing. Like I was nothing. And my own daughter...” His voice broke then, the raw anger momentarily fractured by a wave of profound, soul-deep betrayal. He stopped just a foot in front of her, his chest heaving. “My own daughter ... you stood right there and handed her the match to light the fire.”

The brutal, ugly words hung in the air between them, sharp and heavy and true. In the past, she would have flinched. She would have cowered, cried, or run from the sheer force of his pain. She would have apologized, pleaded for forgiveness, tried to smooth over the jagged edges of his rage. But not today. Today, something inside her shifted, a tectonic plate grinding into a new, unshakeable position. This wasn’t an attack. This was a surrender. This was the first crack in his armor, the first time he had allowed the real, undiluted poison to spill out. And in that moment, looking into his ravaged face, she didn’t see an angry father berating his child. She saw a broken man, a man that she and her mother had brought to his knees. And she knew, with a sudden, chilling certainty, what she had to do. This was her moment. This was her purpose.