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For anyone who has ever made a bad decision because of a broken heart
“I believe there are far more possibilities than happily ever after or tragedy. Every story has the potential for infinite endings.”
She loved the heat of the sun and the overbright colors everyone wore. But now the brilliant streets of Valenda seemed too lurid. Here, everything was mist-touched. It was all foggy grays, rainy blues, and deep purples the exact color of fresh plums.
Evangeline had to look down at the damp cobbles to make sure her feet were still on the ground and that she hadn’t taken flight, for parts of her were soaring. Stepping into the North didn’t just feel like the start of something, it felt like the start of everything.
“Love at first sound,” her father would say. Then her mother would always kiss him on the cheek and say, “For me, it was just love at first.”
Then her parents would both be sure to tell Evangeline that not all loves happened at first; some took time to grow like seeds, or they might be like bulbs, dormant until the right season approached.
Evangeline wasn’t even inside the official ball, and already it felt like the start of a Northern fairytale, when everything was just a little more than it should have been. The happiness felt touchable, the magic in the air was tasteable, and the sky seemed a little closer to earth. If Evangeline had a dagger, she imagined she could have sliced into that night as if it were a cake and stolen a piece of it to take a bite of all the wondrous dark.
Evangeline had never understood why it had taken her so long to stop loving Luc. Even when she didn’t want to love him, the feeling had lingered. People called it falling out of love, but falling was easy. Letting go of Luc had been more like climbing the face of a rock. She’d clawed her way out, fighting to shake it off, to let it go, to find something else to hold on to.
She’d wanted to just forget him, to close her eyes and have it all go away. But there were reasons powerful emotions didn’t vanish in a blink, reasons why a person had to become stronger than her feelings to let them go.
What would have been was a question that no one ever knew the answer to.
