Brooke
By noon the next day, I still hadn’t heard from Brody. I’d given up on the notion of him contacting me any time soon. If Brody wants to hide away in a cabin, then so be it. Who am I to chase after a man who no longer knows what he wants. He’ll have to come home and face me sooner or later.
The many tears that I shed over him have long since dried. I don’t even feel any sadness, just a strange nothingness. It feels as though I’m dead inside. The only other time I felt like this was in the months after my parents died. Back then, I’d had Brody to pull me away from the edge of the dark abyss that I couldn’t see beyond. I never thought he’d be the reason that I come back to this place.
I can’t be bothered to shower today, I sit festering in the t-shirt that I blindly pulled on in the dark last night. It’s only in the harsh light of day that I can see with bitter irony that it’s one of Brody’s old shirts.
Maybe I should burn it.
In my hands is the cold cup of coffee that I made first thing this morning; I’ve found it to be strangely comforting as I balance it on my knees while I stare out of the window. I’ve been trying to work out what I’ll need to do. How do you separate yourself from someone who has been your whole life for as long as you can remember?
Obviously we’ll need to sell this house. I’m not sure whether Brody will want to move out right away or if we’ll stay under the same roof until it’s sold. I suppose one of us can move into the spare bedroom.
It’s funny, I always thought that we would use that space for a nursery. I had it all planned out in my head. The earthy neutral colors with a teddy bear motif across one wall. In the corner nearest the window, we would place the old rocking chair that I’d picked up from a secondhand store for ten dollars and had spent quite a lot of my spare time lovingly restoring. I’d have hung pictures all around the room of Brody’s and my families so that the baby would take comfort from the smiling faces in the photographs. That room has always represented the promise of our future, now it will represent the destruction of our relationship.
We’ll both have to endure the Emmerton gossip train for a while. Old Mrs. Banks and her cronies will have a field day with this. Maybe I should start looking for jobs out of state, somewhere as far away as possible from this town. Somewhere hot and tropical. Somewhere where…where I don’t have to watch Brody move on. Where I don’t have to stand by while he falls in love with someone else, and marries them. Giving them the babies and the life that he promised me. Where people won’t give me pitying looks as I turn into Emmerton’s version of Miss. Havisham right before their very eyes.
I think that might have been one of the main reasons that Hope left town. Not only did she have to contend with a broken heart, she had to do it with the whole world watching her. Hope couldn’t even go grocery shopping without having to endure the whispers and the stares or people asking her to sign a copy of the latest gossip mag that had Caden’s face splashed across its front page. I wish Hope was here right now. My beautiful, headstrong baby sister would know what to do. What to say. Somehow she’d make it better. Stop me from thinking too much about it.
I think this is the longest Brody and I have gone without speaking to one another since we started dating. It doesn’t feel right. Everything feels so wrong, like my world has been knocked off of its axis. Of course Caden could have been lying or playing a mean trick on me like he did when we were kids. His way of getting me back for all the crap I’ve given him over the way he broke Hope’s heart. I wouldn’t put it past the selfish, entitled brat. He always did think that the world owed him.
I just don’t understand it. This isn’t Brody. He wouldn’t be this cruel…not intentionally. And until he comes home, I’m stuck in the land of limbo.
A whole week passes and still there is no word from Brody.
Any hopes of laying low, curled up in a ball and waiting for him to return, have been dashed by the fact that I need to go to work. My boss had been very understanding about my need for time off while I searched for my missing fiancé. However, seeing as Brody isn’t in any immediate danger, he made it very clear that continuing to throw myself a pity party would probably result in the loss of my job.
Fortunately, I’ll be out of sight, stuck doing back office duties. My boss hates anything that could make the bank look bad. And apparently, the assistant bank manager breaking up with her long-term, live-in fiancé via a text message, relayed by said fiancé’s superstar manwhore of a younger brother, counts as making the bank look bad. I should be thankful I’ll be out of the public’s gaze. He’s spared me from seeing the gossip train in action.
As it is, Brody’s disappearance is the most newsworthy thing to happen in Emmerton since the married sixty-two-year old pastor got caught in a very compromising position with a twenty-year-old last year. As I predicted, at every place I have gone over the past week, people have been gossiping about Brody and me. Whether it’s the fact they just blatantly stand and stare at me or talk behind their hands so that they think I don’t know that I’m the subject of their conversations, people I’ve known since I was small now think that it’s okay to mock my life. I’ve never hated living in a small town as much as I do now.
What hurts the most is the things that I’ve heard them say as I’ve walked by. Lies about how Brody found out I was cheating on him and had run off to the cabin to lick his wounds, that I’d murdered him in his sleep, or how Brody had had his head turned by the new girl in his office and didn’t want to cheat on me so he ended our relationship. I’m still at a loss about how anyone knew anything anyhow.
My life has been reduced to counting down the minutes until I can head home to a cold, empty house. My evenings are spent searching the internet for information on what to do if you split up from your partner. We jointly own the home, however, Brody has enough money to buy me out. I wish I could say the same. I’m still not sure what I’ll do when Brody eventually turns up. It’s not like he can stay away forever, he still has to run McAllister Construction.
The thing is, if Brody left Emmerton, his loss would be felt. I, on the other hand, wouldn’t be missed. In the eyes of the people here, I don’t contribute anything toward the town anyway. I don’t attend church, I don’t hang with the coffee clique, I don’t have any kids, and I don’t indulge in gossip. All I am to them is one of the orphan Elderhouse girls and nothing else.