Petal [h.s.]

EPILOGUE II - THE LETTER

Too many days to count without Harry

The sky was a dark shade of blue.

It was five in the morning and I had hardly slept. Sleeping has become a rarity for me ever since I moved to California.

I expected all of the broken pieces of my life to come back together as soon as I stepped foot into this state to live my California dream, but life was more of a nightmare than anything. I had taken hit after hit after hit ever since I arrived on the West Coast.

Turns out, my dream shop wasn't my dream shop-it had plumbing issues and water damage and a hornets nest had somehow worked its way into my basement. On top of that, every new employee that I hired wound up not working out. One showed up to their orientation high out of their mind; one tried to teach every customer that walked through the door about "our lord and savior Jesus Christ"; and the most recent one was caught giving head to her boyfriend in the stock room during her shift... three separate times. I was all about sex positivity until it interfered with my business, so she unfortunately had to go.

If it weren't for Buffy's new girlfriend Stella helping out when she could, we would have been drowning. We technically still were drowning. We had double the customers here as we had in Juniper Bay and we were making enough profit to hire at least three other employees, but it seemed impossible to find anyone that was willing to take the job seriously.

I had been drowning so badly in work that I started to find less and less time to keep up with Harry. Especially this last month... I still hadn't replied to the last text he sent, but I wasn't sure that I even wanted to anymore. I wasn't as angry now, but when he texted me, I was furious. Just a day or two before that fucking text, Buffy received an invitation in the mail for his wedding.

I still remembered how it felt to walk up behind her as she opened it, seeing the way she stared down at it in disbelief. She tried to hide it from me when I made my presence known, but I had it in my hands before she could even blink. I was shaking as I read over the entire thing, seeing that he was marrying her this summer. As I opened my mouth to speak, Buffy snatched the invite back from me and began to shred it into pieces, her entire body trembling as she did so.

We got really drunk that night.

We never talked about it after that. I didn't want to and I knew that Buffy didn't either. She was finally in a good place and in a new and happy relationship that was full of love and affection. She had everything she ever wanted with Stella. She didn't need reminders of her first love. If Harry had known about Jessie and Buffy, it would have been an act of cruelty for him to allow that invitation to be sent.

It was an act of cruelty against me, though. He had to have known I would see it. It felt like he was sending me a message, like he was putting the final nail in our coffin.

I hadn't talked to him since I saw that invitation. I typed out a thousand texts in response to the last one he sent but I erased them every time. I couldn't let myself fall back down the Harry rabbit hole, no matter how much I missed my bunny. And god, did I miss him.