44. Maddox

FORTY-FOUR

I take a step closer as I watch her fight to keep her features even. "Since seeing you again, I've thought about it a lot. And all I keep coming up with is that there's something I'm not understanding. Something I don't know." I want to touch her, but I keep my hands at my sides. "What happened, Little Bunny? What made you run?"

She pushes her hands into the front pockets of her shorts. "I wasn't running. Maddox…" Hannah presses her lips together. "Do we really need to do this? Can't we just pretend…?"

"No pretending." Now that I'm here, there's no stopping. "Just the truth."

Hannah nods once. "My mom… Right after, when I got back to my dorm room that morning." She refers to our night in the library. "I got a call from a nurse. My mom had a stroke."

"Fuck," I breathe out.

"She was in the hospital."

"Jesus, Hannah."

"I had no choice. I had to come home."

I think about the way our hands parted when we left the library. And how I spent the day thinking about her, and she spent her day…

"Why didn't you tell me?" I ask, knowing I have no right to feel any sort of hurt over this. But I still can't believe she just left.

"I tried." She repeats the statement from last night.

"I don't —"

"I put a letter in your mailbox." She rushes the sentence out.

"You…" I trail off. "What?"

She shrugs like it's not a big fucking deal.

"A letter?" I try to wrap my head around it.

"No one answered when I rang the doorbell." She lifts her shoulders again, but it's a smaller movement this time. More restrained. "So I put it in the mailbox."

I tried.

What can only be guilt presses in around my lungs. "I never got it." Saying the words feels like throwing a punch. "I never got your letter, Hannah."

She gives me a weak smile.

She wrote me a fucking letter. The day her mom had a stroke.

"What did the letter say?"

"Maddox—" Her gaze drops away from mine.

"Please," I cut her off.

"It said what I just told you." She pulls her hands from her pockets and lifts them before letting them flop back down to their sides. "That my mom was in the hospital and that I had to catch a bus home. And with the shop—" She looks up at me. "We owned Petals, that flower shop from my résumé. Mom practically lived there, running the place. And if she couldn't work… then I'd have to."

The timelines all click into place.

Hannah left for school because Ruth ran the shop. But a week later, Ruth couldn't run it anymore.

"What else did the letter say?" I need to know all of it. Need to know the extent of the damage.

Only one shoulder goes up this time. "I said something foolish about how much our time had meant to me." Foolish. It wouldn't have been foolish. "And I wrote down my number." The blow hits. I knew it was coming, that she would have included it, but to hear her say it… "I said something about how I know long distance sucks, but that I'd like to talk to you again. Maybe read together." She whispers the last sentence.

I take a step back.

She wanted to read to me over the phone. Like she'd done that night.

"And then I never called." I feel like I'm breaking my own heart.

Hannah gives me another one of those fucking shrugs. "I get it."

"No." I shake my head. "No, there's nothing to get. I didn't— Hannah, I never got that letter. If I did, I would've called."

"Okay." She says it like she doesn't believe me.

"I would have." I run my hand through my hair. "I don't know what happened to it, but I never got it. You have to believe me."

Hannah is biting her lip, but she nods.

An intense sense of loss fills me, and I fucking hate it. There's so much time we could have had together, but instead, we lost it all.

"Why didn't you write to me again?" My voice sounds different from a moment ago. "You knew where I lived."

She huffs out a broken laugh. "Because writing that letter once was hard enough. And because I didn't want to be the desperate hookup begging for attention from hours away."

I grit my teeth. "You weren't just a hookup. You have to know that."

"How?" She lifts and drops her hands again. "How was I supposed to know that, Maddox? As far as I knew, I left you a letter telling you how I felt, and you ignored it."

I clench my fists. "That's not what happened."

"I believe you, okay? I believe you never got the letter, but at the time, I didn't know that. And it hurt." Her voice cracks. "I figured you didn't care."

"I cared a lot." I take a step closer.

Hannah stops me with her next question. "Did you go to the library looking for me?"

My mouth opens, but I don't want to answer.

Because I didn't.