Chapter 8: What’s Wrong With Ordinary?

And what truly made me give up in my previous life—

Was what Aubrey said at the end.

She said, "Boise’s not like here. People will talk if Mason and Caleb’s family can’t keep up."

What’s wrong with being a small-town girl?

Back then, it was Caleb who insisted on marrying me, a nobody.

I was full of anger and resentment.

Aubrey, though, sneered.

"Caleb married you only to get through a rough patch in his life."

Five years ago, Caleb was passing through and stopped here. He said fate brought him to Maple Heights for a reason.

He didn’t know who he’d meet. But to get through that time, he first had to meet a woman. So he pretended to be a lost traveler, came to town, and asked for a glass of water.

The first door he knocked on was mine.

"Fate said the first woman he met would change his life. Otherwise, how could you, an orphan with no family, have caught his eye?"

The blood drained from my face, scraped away inch by inch by Aubrey’s mocking eyes.

Of course I wanted to question Caleb. But that night, while I slept, they left quietly.

The last breath I held onto before death—

Was just to wait, hoping to see Caleb and ask if it was true.

But in the end, I never saw him.

After being given another chance, I still wondered—

Why couldn’t I go back a few more years, to the day Caleb knocked on my door?

If I could, I would surely have poured that glass of water out on the porch right in front of him.

But fate is like this.

After all the bitter waiting and obsession of my last life, I no longer care to pursue the answer.

In a sense,

Caleb’s trial has passed. My trial has also passed.

So I should live my own life.

Thus, when Caleb told me again that he would take Aubrey and Mason, I accepted it calmly.

And in the days that followed, I carefully planned the rest of my life.

I made lists: bus schedules, a map of Idaho I picked up at the gas station, numbers of a few distant cousins in Colorado. The smell of fresh laundry and coffee filled the house, and I let the world shrink to those small, manageable things I could control.