The Moon Is the Third Dream of Farewell

Once she found out I wouldn't live past twenty-five, the childhood sweetheart who used to fight me over everything changed.

She stopped competing to be first, stopped bickering with me. Even when I called her a shrew the way I always had, she just took it, her eyes rimmed red.

She watched sunrises with me, took me to see the aurora, filled the whole sky with floating lanterns for me, and in front of everyone she said, eyes wet:

"Even if he doesn't have long, he's still the only husband Lottie Barnes will ever have."

But the year I turned twenty-two, a bright, tall young man appeared at her side.

They rode roller coasters together, ate late-night dinners out together, laughed together riding through downpours...

Everything she and I could never do, they did.

Lottie promised me she'd send him away in three months.

She knelt at my feet. "He and I only have three months. But you and I still have three years."

On my birthday, the night Lottie was supposed to cut the cake with me, she never came home.

I stood at the window and watched her and that young man hold each other again and again under the streetlight, pulling apart only to cling back together,

and finally kiss in the rain like they could never be separated.

The clock struck midnight. The three-month deadline came and went.

I finally decided I would stop waiting for Lottie to turn back into the girl who used to cry, afraid I would leave.

...

I pulled my gaze back from the bay window, and the moment I turned, I saw Lottie stepping in from the entryway, changing out of her shoes.

The air carried a faint scent of cedar.

That was the smell that clung to Steve Matthews.

She saw me standing by the window and paused. "Why aren't the lights on?"

I didn't answer.

"Steve's landlord came pounding on his door drunk tonight. He was terrified and called me, so I went over to help him sort it out."

The light fell across my pale face. I gave a thin twist of my mouth.

"You don't have to explain so much to me."

She visibly froze.

Before, anything involving Steve Matthews used to set me bristling, and even in silence those prickles were enough to leave her restless and rattled.

But now I was calm, too worn out to stir up even a ripple.

Lottie seemed unused to that calm.

She stepped toward me without thinking, her hand lifting to touch my hair.

"If I don't explain, you'll just bottle it up alone and torture yourself."

"You're the person I've always wanted to keep going with. I care how you feel, so how could I not explain?"

I turned my head away on instinct, and her hand stopped in midair.

"Steve has no one in this city, no one to lean on. Something like this happens and of course he panics."

"...I've already started processing his resignation."

Lottie drew her hand back, her tone softening a little.

"But he doesn't really know anyone in Riverton, and the thing with the landlord has to be settled before he can go, or I won't feel easy about it."

She looked at me and added, "Give it a few more days, okay?"

I stared at the trace of unfaded urgency in her eyes, my face blank.

"Fine."

The tension in Lottie's shoulders visibly eased, and she pulled out a delicate velvet box.

"Happy twenty-second birthday. I had this watch custom-made this year."

She bent to fasten it on my wrist. "It looks good. It suits you."

She probably hadn't noticed that the little star shape was identical to a watch Steve Matthews had once posted on his social media feed.

Lottie turned and went into the bathroom. I lifted my hand, took the watch off, and slid the ring off my left ring finger while I was at it, the one I'd worn for four years.

Lottie had gone all the way to Europe to have it custom-made for me the year she turned eighteen.

She'd said, "Russ Simmons, you're the only husband I'll ever have in this life."

At four in the morning, a snatch of Steve Matthews's voice, thick with tears, leaked out.

"...I dreamed the landlord came knocking again. I'm so scared..."

Without the slightest hesitation, Lottie got up, walked out to the balcony, and soothed him gently.

"Don't be scared. I'm here. Dreams aren't real..."

I lay in the dark, my bones aching too much to close my eyes.

In my ears was that gentle voice that had once belonged only to me, coaxing me to take my medicine, coaxing me not to cry, coaxing me that the sun would rise again tomorrow just the same.

Now, every word of it was landing on someone else, cutting straight into my heart that was already ruined through and through.

After dawn, I started clearing out the room.

The photos on the wall came down one by one and went into a drawer.

One was from the year we were fifteen, the first time she took my hand, my face so red I didn't dare look up.

She'd written something on the back:

The hand I took at fifteen, I won't let go of it until I die.

But after Steve Matthews appeared, she never took my hand again.

At noon, Lottie rushed home as usual to cook for me.

It was a habit she'd kept for years. No matter how busy she got, she always came home to eat with me.

Today she'd made beef and tomato stew, my old favorite.

I lifted a bite to my mouth and tasted nothing.

After the meal she counted two small white tablets out of the pillbox and pressed them into my palm.

"Russ, time for your medicine."

I took them and swallowed them down with warm water.

Something rose up in my throat, sweet and metallic. I turned my head and coughed twice, and bright red spilled out between my fingers.

Just then the phone on the table buzzed.

A voice message came in from Steve, playing out loud.

"Ms. Barnes, I can't get this quarter's data report to balance no matter what I try..."

Lottie glanced at me on reflex, brows drawn tight, restless.

"Get some rest. I need to go handle something at the office."

She didn't even wait for me to answer. She grabbed her coat and slammed the door on her way out.

I curled up alone on the cold couch and sat there without moving until the sky went dark.

Today was my follow-up appointment.

Lottie had forgotten it long ago.

I took a cab to the hospital by myself. The doctor looked at the scans and let out a heavy sigh.

"Mr. Simmons, the cancer cells have spread everywhere. The time you have left... you need to prepare yourself."

As I walked out through the hospital doors, my social media feed refreshed.

It was a set of photos from Steve.

The caption read: Move went smoothly! Thanks to a certain someone for taking me out for a big dinner to celebrate~

In the photo, Lottie was carefully picking the bones out of a fish, laying the meat into the bowl of the boy across from her, who was beaming.

Just then, my father called.

"Russ, how did the checkup go today?"

"It went fine."

"Didn't Lottie say she was going to take you around the world? Your dad still remembers her saying she'd take you to Iceland to see the northern lights, to Switzerland to ski. She said you'd set off once your birthday came. Have you two booked the flights and the hotels yet?"

Listening to the worry in my father's voice on the other end, I finally couldn't hold it together. I choked up and got the words out.

"Lottie... she's fallen for someone else..."

I hung up, and Riverton's December snow came down over my head.

Looking at all that white, I remembered how, every time we used to go out, Lottie would bundle me up piece by piece, scarf and gloves and hat, saying, "You've always hated the cold. If you catch a chill you'll be in too much pain to sleep all night, and I can't stand that."

A snowflake landed on my lashes. I blinked once, and it melted and ran down.

The truth was, ever since I found out Steve existed, a ridiculous thought had taken hold of me.

Why did I have to find out at all?

If I hadn't, then until the day I died, Lottie would have stayed the fifteen-year-old girl who held my hand.

Would have stayed the girl who, even after I slapped her, still smiled and said "It's okay."

Would have stayed the one who kept watch at my bedside for three days and three nights, holding my hand, saying she was "afraid of losing me."

I could have carried that illusion and died in peace.

But I found out anyway.

Lottie went from that warm, fierce girl into the hateful traitor she is now.

My hair was falling out in clumps now, and the bone pain kept me from closing my eyes at night.

Lottie thought I was asleep. Every night she'd be out on the balcony gaming on a call with Steve, and their laughter carried inside, sharp and grating.

That noon, Steve showed up using "dropping off company documents" as his excuse.

The second he was through the door, he wandered a lap around the living room in his sneakers.

"It's so cozy in here. No wonder you never want to come back to the office, Ms. Barnes. Turns out you've got such a nice little safe harbor at home."

I ignored him.

When he reached the coffee table, he let out an "oops" and knocked over the pill box I'd just set out, dead on target.

The last few cancer pills spilled out.

He scrambled to pick them up, and in all the fumbling he crushed several under his feet.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to..."

Lottie heard the commotion and came striding over, frowning.

"What happened?"

Steve ducked behind her, looking like a startled little deer.

"I accidentally knocked his medicine off... Ms. Barnes, did I mess up?"

Lottie glanced at the crushed bits on the floor. Her tone didn't so much as ripple.

"Broken things bring good luck. We'll just buy more."

Back in the day, when she ran to every pharmacy in the city for me in a panic, she probably never imagined she'd one day stand in front of the same person and tell someone else, about medicine he'd knocked over, "We'll just buy more."

It really was different now.

That evening.

The savage pain triggered an acute hemorrhage. I collapsed on the freezing floor, my mind slipping away.

Using the last of my strength to dial 911, I pressed Lottie's number with shaking fingers.

I wanted to hear her do what she'd done every other time, when I curled up in pain, cupping her hand over mine and saying, "Don't be scared, Russ. I'm here."

The phone rang for a long time before anyone answered.

Steve's bright laughter came through. "Ms. Barnes is helping me with the claw machine! Whatever you need, I can pass it along for you!"

Behind him, the cheerful music of the arcade played on.

The phone slid out of my hand, and the world went dark.

When I woke, I was in a hospital. Lottie sat by the bed, cotton candy stains from the arcade still on her clothes.

I opened my eyes in a daze, and somewhere in my mind, the way I did every time I got sick, I reached for her hand without thinking.

The moment my fingertips brushed her sleeve, she shook me off.

"Why would you do that to Steve? That video online, did you post it?"

Lying in the hospital bed, all I felt was how absurd it was.

Absurd that I'd come so far from the boy I'd been at fifteen and still hadn't learned it:

the person in front of me stopped being someone who would hold my hand a long time ago.

Seeing that I wouldn't speak, Lottie shoved her phone screen right up to my face, anger in her voice.

"He's got no one in this whole city. I was already getting ready to send him off. Why would you do something like this?"

In the video, my father had rushed to the street outside Lottie's company. Steve had just gotten off work, and my father raised his hand and slapped him across the face in front of everyone, eyes red as he cursed him:

"You shameless homewrecker, seducing another man's girlfriend!"

Steve had been branded a "homewrecker," and the post ran thousands of comments deep.

Lottie drew a deep breath. Her voice shook a little.

"Do you even know Steve almost jumped off a building?"

"I didn't post the video..." I explained, my voice barely a thread.

Before I could finish, Lottie's phone rang again.

She glanced at the name on the screen, didn't spare me another look, and dropped one last line:

"You take a good hard look at yourself, and stop stirring up trouble!"

Then she turned, slammed the door, and was gone.