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An end and a beginning
When Ike returned home that night, he spent the next hour or so sitting in the tree house staring up at the stars and thinking of Lacey.
Just half an hour before, she had more or less told him what he had been praying to hear since the first day he saw her, yet it didn’t feel as good as he thought it would.
There was something missing.
Something that once taken is hard to get back.
Something Mark had taken.
Trust.
And love.
Lacey cried and cried, for herself and for poor Ike.
All she had put him through, she seriously wondered why he bothered.
But unfortunately she knew why.
She felt so sorry for him at that moment she would have given anything to love him, but it was just too far beyond her. It had been taken from her and she couldn’t seem to get it back.
And the hatred she should have felt for Mark was not focused on him, but on the emptiness he’d left her.
She cursed and hated the emptiness.
The un-wholeness about her and the constant knowing something was missing.
But most of all she hated not being able to love Ike.
The way he wanted her too.
The way she wanted too.
As she cried, she knew she could not stay here in Tulsa.
She had to go.
She could not put Ike, or herself, through this anymore, it just wasn’t fair.
Maybe she would come back, but for now she had to get her life back on track.
Maybe she would come back for him, but for now she had to save herself.
And Ike from the pain.
All that was left of Lacey was a note Ike found on his bedside table when he returned from Phoenix, a note that shattered his world, for the third time in the last two months.
Dear Ike,
By the time Ike was finished reading Lacey’s letter, the ink was so smudged he was unable to make it out.
But he didn’t need to.
He knew it by heart.
And by broken heart.
On the long stretch of road between Tulsa and Kansas City, the tears in Lacey’s eyes could have flooded the stars out of heaven and the pain in her heart was searing like a hell fire.
You will never know how sorry I am for doing this, but please know it would have killed us both me staying here. I am leaving to save us because the reality is too heartbreaking to bear. I love you and I always will, but I need you to understand it can’t work. Not now anyway. Maybe I will come back for you, so please keep me in your heart, but for now I must go. I would kill myself over and over to undo the pain I have caused you and please know you are my soul, my angel, my everything.
I love you so much it hurts, but it hurts too much.
My soul mate,
Lacey.
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