Where The Road Bends

At the intersection, I could turn right and be home by nightfall — warm bed, unread emails, a life I’d stitched back together piece by piece.

But turning left would take me somewhere I’d promised never to return.

The blinker clicked like a metronome to my hesitation. A hawk coasted overhead, silhouetted against the burning sky. Cicadas screamed in the trees. The air smelled like dust and memory.

It had been ten years since I last saw Elmridge. Ten years since I threw a duffel into the back seat and drove off without saying goodbye — not to Jonah, not to the others, and definitely not to her.

Not to Maya.

My knuckles tightened on the wheel. The GPS urged me toward the right turn, into the safe and paved and known. But the road left twisted into the woods — the kind of road you take not because you should, but because something old and unfinished is pulling at your spine.

A road like a wound.

It’s just a detour, I told myself. Just a quick look back.

I turned left.

The trees thickened fast, pressing in on both sides like they remembered me — or maybe resented me for leaving.

The road narrowed. Familiar curves came like déjà vu: the dip just before Hollow Creek, the crooked mailbox still charred at the edges from a Fourth of July sparkler gone wrong, the hand-painted “SLOW DOWN, KIDS PLAY HERE” sign someone had nailed to a birch tree — though the kids were long gone. We were the kids then, and we didn’t slow down for anything.

It felt like driving into a photograph someone forgot to develop.

Then I saw it: the glint of water through the trees — the lake.

It glittered under the bruised evening sky, smooth and silver, like something holy. The dock still reached into it like an open hand. No music. No shouting. No Maya, barefoot and wild, cannonballing into the shallows while the rest of us laughed or dared each other to join her.

Just the hush of dusk and the water whispering like it was keeping secrets.

And there — emerging through tangled weeds and thistle — stood the Ashgrove House.

My breath snagged.

The porch sagged like an exhale. The shutters were crooked, half-latched. The white paint had peeled back to bare wood in places, like the house was slowly revealing its bones. Ivy climbed one of the columns. A wind chime I didn’t remember hung from the eaves, catching what little breeze there was. It made a hollow, rusted kind of music.

The blue bike was still there.

Leaning against the porch rail, tires flat, chain rusted. Maya’s bike.

I hadn’t meant to come. Not really. But now, standing in front of it, heart thudding like a held breath, I realized I’d been coming back in some quiet corner of myself for years.

My fingers found the porch railing. The rough grain bit into my palm, every splinter a reminder I hadn’t been here for years. My feet moved without permission.

The wood creaked under me, like it knew who I was.

My hand hovered over the doorknob — muscle memory and dread fighting for control. Maya used to leave it unlocked, always. “If something wants in,” she’d said once, brushing past me with a cigarette and that crooked smile, “it’ll find a way.”

Before I could decide whether to knock or turn back, a voice — soft, low, impossibly familiar — came from inside.

“You came back.”

He stood in the doorway like a ghost I’d conjured.

Jonah.

His hair was longer, tied back in a loose knot. A little older in the face, maybe, but unmistakable — same steady shoulders, same gaze like a tide pulling you under.

He was barefoot. Always barefoot.

“I figured you wouldn’t,” he said.

“I didn’t know I was going to,” I replied.

He stepped back. I stepped in.

The house hadn’t changed.

The couch still slouched in the corner. The shelves still bowed with the weight of old books and board games missing half their pieces. The kitchen smelled like dust and black coffee. On the fridge, crooked beneath a lemon-shaped magnet, was the photo strip.

Four frames. Four kids who thought they’d live forever.

Lena — all laughter. Sam — flipping off the camera. Me and Jonah — forehead to forehead, eyes closed, smiling like we didn’t know what would come next.

“She never took it down,” Jonah said behind me.

I nodded. “Even after?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

We sat on the porch with sweating bottles of ginger beer.

The lake shimmered in the distance. A frog croaked once, then went quiet.

“You’ve been here the whole time?” I asked.

“Mostly.”

“Why?”

Jonah twisted the cap between his fingers. “Someone had to keep it real.”

“I thought you hated me.”

He shrugged. “I did. For a while.”

“And now?”

He looked over. “Now I just don’t want to hate anyone anymore.”

I found my old sketchpad behind a loose floorboard upstairs.

Still had my name on the cover. Inside — pages of wings, vines, faces. Half-finished things. And one drawing, near the end, that stopped my breath.

Maya.

Just her outline, wild hair and fierce eyes unfinished, like I’d been afraid to give her form.

I brought it down to the table. Jonah found it later.

“She used to sit behind you when you drew,” he said. “Wouldn’t talk. Just… hover. Like she was guarding something.”

“She said I was a coward.”

He nodded. “She said a lot of things.”

The silence swelled. I didn’t fill it.

That night, we built a fire in the old ring behind the house.

Jonah lit it with his usual precision — small, careful, methodical.

We drank something strong from mismatched mugs. Let the smoke wrap around us like a question.

“She loved you,” I said.

“She loved us,” he replied. “But we didn’t know what to do with it.”

“She loved me in the mornings,” I said, surprised at my own voice. “And you at night.”

He smiled, sad and knowing. “She burned at both ends.”

“And we didn’t stop her.”

Jonah didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to.

The next morning, I found a note slipped under my door.

Yellowed paper. Familiar loops.

Maya’s handwriting.

I don’t hate you. I never did. But I don’t know how to love you without wrecking something. Maybe Jonah does. Maybe that’s why I can’t stay to watch it happen.

If you’re reading this, maybe you’re braver now. Or maybe just tired of running.

Either way — I hope the house still smells like cedar. I hope the lake is still quiet at night. I hope you find each other.

And if you do — don’t waste it this time.

I read it twice. Then again. Folded it and kept it in my chest pocket, where the weight of it grounded me.

We scattered her ashes that night from the dock.

The lake was a mirror. The moon hung low and fat over the pines. We let the wind carry her. Let the water take what was left.

“She would’ve hated how quiet this is,” I whispered.

“She would’ve made a scene.”

“She would’ve jumped in after herself.”

We laughed then — the broken, honest kind. The kind that heals.

A few days later, I stood at the same intersection.

Right was still there — emails, bills, empty calendar squares.

Left was Jonah.

Jonah stepped beside me. Not asking. Just there.

His fingers brushed mine. No pressure.

Just an echo of a choice.

Turning left wasn’t a return. It was a beginning — rough, uncertain, but mine.

I turned left.