"Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, I'm beggin' of you, please don't take my man." Jolene by Dolly Parton.

a/n- It's a double update! Yay! There's another chapter after this, so make sure to read along. 

My lower jaw felt like it was anchored to the pavement; still agape, still gasping for air. The unkind heatwaves pierced through my flesh, prompting beads of sweat to leak out of my pores and trickle down my skin. "What pet store?" my voice was barely audible. "Wha- what is he talking about, Nick?"

Nick couldn't even meet my eyes, let alone give me answers. His head was buried between his shoulders as he stared at the pavement, still muttering curse words.

Giving up on Nick, I turned my body around to face Noah and willed myself to ask again. "Where in LA? Tell me Noah, please?"

Noah's tilted head housed a pair of wide eyes under an almost-unibrow. His eyebrows were pinched together, only separated by a thin roll of skin. He looked at me warily for a brief second before he caught Nick's eyes behind my shoulder and clenched his jaw. I craned my neck and followed his vision to see Nick's pale face contort in agony.

"Let me tell her, bro." Nick finally spoke, still staring at the concrete. Cupping his neck with one of his hands, he inhaled a deep breath and looked up at us—at Noah. "She needs to hear it from me. She is my fiancé."

Noah's head jerked back a little, a fleeting wince passing through his features. He schooled his expression quickly and looked between us, before allowing Nick to have his way.

"Baby, let's go home and I'll tell you everything." Nick cooed, stretching his hand out for me to grab. I looked at it like he was handing me fire. Is he kidding me?

"How the hell does he know you?" I said, ignoring his invitation. What even was home to us? Where even was it? He wasn't welcome in my apartment and I sure as hell wasn't going to step a foot into his after he threw me out like a pile of trash. "What are you not telling me, Nick?"

"I love you so much, May. I will do everything I can to protect you. I have done everything I could to protect you." He spoke, vehemently stabbing his chest with his index finger. "You're the love of my life. The one person I want to spend the rest of my life with. Everything I do, everything I did; the good, the bad, the worst was all for you. I want you to know that."

My nostrils flared, letting out residual smoke from my flaming heart. "Did you know?" I took a step toward Nick. "Did you know he was in an accident? Is that what this is about?" I risked a few more steps until I was just a breath away from his chest. "Did you?" I tilted my neck up and peered into his eyes.

In a swift motion, Nick framed my face between his hands and dropped his forehead to mine. His trembling hands shook my head as he spoke with so much passion in his voice. "I love you. I'd do anything for you. I would—"

Bringing my weak hands up to his chest, I shoved him away and freed myself from his smothering grasp. My cheeks were wet with tears I hadn't known were spilling from my eyes. Too weak to stand on my feet, I squatted on the ground and hugged my knees, allowing myself to cry it out.

I didn't need to know the details of whatever Nick wasn't telling me. The mere fact that Noah remembered him was like a dagger to my chest. He couldn't have remembered him had he not met him after his accident.

My sobs accelerated as my mind raced, trying to bring the pieces together, trying to make sense out of all that was going on. Noah's hand found my shoulder and urged me to stand up. "Do you know a man called Xavier?" he asked.

My loud wails abated, but the shiver in my chest carried on. Still burying my head in my arms, "that beat maker guy?" I mumbled between my chattering teeth.

Noah exhaled heavily and grabbed one of my hands, dragging me to a stand. "Yes, the beat maker guy." He smiled. Tipping his head in the general direction of where Nick was standing, he began explaining. "I met Nick a few years ago when I went to LA to meet with Xavier."

I ignored Nick's torturous, pleading eyes and looked into Noah's virtuous ones. His mouth was the fountain of verity. Thirsty for the truth, I was ready to drink from it.

"A year or so after my accident," Noah spoke, holding my gaze, "I woke up to a huge chunk of money deposited on my account. I was unemployed and swimming in hospital bills, so the money really came out of nowhere. I thought it was some kind of mix up, so I called my bank and asked them to trace where the money came from. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the money was issued by a company called Xonthebeatz."

Nick's intermittent sighs were loud and bothersome as they disturbed the flow of Noah's speech. Noah's eyes drifted away and a sad look came across his features. I grabbed his hand and squeezed it reassuringly, encouraging him to go on. He looked at me with a desolate smile before he cleared his throat and continued reminiscing.

"Apparently, they were paying me for a beat they had bought from me in 2013. I had no recollection of meeting Xavier let alone selling my work to his company thanks to my amnesia. And neither had my wife, or any of my family members, for that matter. I used to sample that dude's beats when I was a kid, for fuck's sake." Noah paused to let out a burst of self-deprecating laughter.

"So, I scheduled a meeting with Xavier and flew out to LA, where he explained to me that I was entitled to a lifetime revenue of the two songs I had sold to his company. One of them had just been purchased by an artist and that was why he had sent me my share of the check. I told him about my accident and my amnesia and he showed me the split sheet I had signed and played my songs to me."

Noah smiled as he tugged on my hand. "May, it was the craziest day of my life. I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. I don't know how to explain it to you. I just-" I kept nodding, bobbing my head up and down uncontrollably, waiting for him to get to the part where Nick was involved.

"But then he asked me if I was still with my girlfriend from the daycare." Noah's gaze became distant as his forehead wrinkled in concentration. My stomach sank as I anticipated what his next words would be.

"I went through my hazy memory trying to remember if Ava had ever worked at a day care. When I asked if he was talking About Ava, he said he didn't remember her name, but that she was a spitfire who had held him hostage while he was picking his dog up from daycare and chewed his ears off telling him about my beats. He said he wouldn't have given me a chance if it weren't for her." He let out a throaty chuckle. "Ava doesn't like dogs. She would never work at a doggy daycare. So, I wasn't surprised when he said it wasn't her when I showed him our wedding picture on my phone."

It had completely slipped my mind—the beat Noah had sold that time he had come to LA. I never thought about it. It was an insignificant detail that had been hiding at the back of my head behind all the memories I had of my life with him.

But a flutter went through my body as I listened to Noah's story and relived those carefree days of my life. I remembered Noah's happiness when I sent him Xavier's business card. His triumphant smile when he sold his beats. How animated he got whenever he spoke about his music.

Leaning against his car with his hands tucked inside his pockets, Nick was listening attentively with a nervous look permanently plastered on his face. I was going through an emotional whirlwind trying to figure out how he was involved and to what extent.

"After I woke up from my coma, I had spent months in therapy trying to fill in the gaps in my memory. My family had told me that nothing significant had happened in my life in that gap I couldn't seem to connect. But they were wrong. So many big things had happened, actually. The most fucked up thing about losing your memory is you lose a chunk of yourself along with it. You feel hollow and you rely on people to fill in the missing spots. And sometimes, the stories they tell you make no sense. I was tired of letting them dictate my memories. I wanted to find the girl Xavier was talking so highly about. The fact that it was my first hearing about her rubbed me the wrong way."

People had been coming in and out of the parking lot, throwing questioning glances at us. Someone had even nearly blinded us with their headlights. But the three of us were too absorbed in our miserable little world to even care.

I stood wide-mouthed, carving his mellow features to my memory as he explained to me how he had asked Xavier the address of the doggy daycare and begun his quest of finding me—the spitfire girlfriend Xavier told him about. And how he never found me, but instead found Nick.

Next to the doggy daycare I used to work at was a cannabis store Nick used to purchase his weed from. When Noah got out of the cab and walked toward the daycare, Nick had also walked out of the cannabis shop, and that was how they ran into each other.

"Well, that's putting it lightly." Noah ran a shaky hand over his face, wiping away the anger that was creeping in. "He backed me up to a wall, ready to crack my skull open. I knew he wasn't a stranger right then; I knew he knew me when I saw the fire in his eyes. He was angry at me. Which was crazy because I didn't even know the guy. He kept telling me how fucked up I was while his hand was on my fucking throat.

"Anyway, he stopped his aggression once he noticed my prosthetic and asked me what happened. I told him everything. Because I was desperate for the truth. The truth my family had withheld from me. I told him about the accident and the memories I was missing." Noah said, with a wry smirk on his face.

"I asked him if he knew the... girl I had dated who worked at the daycare. He told me I never dated such person and he called me a cab to my hotel. That was the first and last time I ever saw him. And that's how I remember him. As the nice guy from the pet store, not as your lying fiancé."

An unnatural, gut-wrenching ball of silence bounced between us, triangulating from Noah to Nick to me in a periodic motion. Not a single one of us dared to grab it. We were too busy witnessing each other's demise. We stood idly gazing at one another, as each of us drowned in confusion, guilt, and betrayal, respectively.

Why must love be so devious?

Unanswered questions shrieked at us, ringing loud in our ears. My trembling hands stilled and curved into a fist. My nails dug into my palms, my knuckles turning white. A veil of contempt engulfed me from head to toe as Nick's face blurred from my vision. I saw red at that point. Only red.

A car or two pulled out of the dark parking lot before I finally broke the silence with my fury-laced questions. "How could you, Nick? How could you hide this from me? You saw me lose myself every day. You saw me fall apart piece by piece. All because I was deprived of the truth. Why did you let me suffer? Why did you watch me fade?" I gritted through my labored breaths, the frantic walloping of my heart hindering my lungs from inflating and deflating. My green eyes sought Nick's turquoise ones, hoping to pry wordless answers out of them.

I had known Nick for much longer than I had known Noah. I had spent more time studying Nick's features than I did Noah's. I knew Nick's physical cues better than I knew Noah's. Which was why a fist of betrayal clenched my pounding heart when Nick averted his gaze, shaking his head briskly. "Baby, you don't understand." He said in between his curses as he walked toward me.

Noah stood between us, his body taking a protective stance, blocking Nick from reaching me.

I was never all in with Nick. I never loved him like I should—like he deserved. I'd never have caught a grenade for him, I'd never have taken a bullet for him. But I had trusted him with everything in me. I had trusted him with myself and my secrets. I had trusted him with my weaknesses. I had let him gather me when I fell apart. I had let him see me at my worst. To find out he had betrayed my trust killed me inside.

"That night," I spoke, keeping my body hidden behind Noah's, but peeking my head out to meet Nick's eyes. "That one New Year's Eve when you held me as I cried. Did you know then too? What about the days after, when you soothed me as I bawled my eyes out thinking he left me for Ava, did you know then too? All those years you watched me beat myself up, cry myself to sleep, go to hell and back to heal. You knew the truth yet you let me suffer? Why?"

What was left of my heart pleaded to the gods above. Give me the strength to walk away. Help me find solace in betrayal. Heal me.

"I was looking out for you, May." Nick replied in a hoarse voice.

That was the last word I heard before I brisked to my car and drove away, leaving a stunned Noah and a piteous Nick behind. Sometimes, walking away was the right answer. Sometimes, choosing oneself was the way through life. Sometimes, taking the coward's way out was brave.

I had spent all those years thinking I was wronged. But seeing Noah, hearing his side of the story, made me realize he was the one that was wronged. By everyone, including me. He was the victim of our story.

I stepped on the gas and sped my way out of the parking lot. I wasn't a callous driver, but all I could think about was getting out of there as fast as possible. I didn't glance at them through my rear window. I didn't look at them as I left. It was just too painful; too agonizing to walk away. To choose my peace.

My vision got cloudy, preventing me from seeing anything in front of me. My car felt too small. There was no air coming into my lungs. I gripped the steering wheel so hard and forced myself to pull over on the side of the busy highway. I was shaking so hard; I felt the car shaking with me. My knuckles turned white as tears wet my face and neck.

I closed my eyes and drew a slow breath in through my nose, exhaling it through my mouth. I counted to five and told myself everything was going to be fine.

Nothing in life should be this difficult. No one in life should be in this much pain. Not Noah, not Nick, and certainly not me. I made the right decision to drive away. I assured myself before taking a mouthful of my water and resuming my drive.

I ignored all the noises coming out of my phone while I made the thirty-five-minute commute to my apartment in silence, replaying Noah's words. I was in dire need of isolation. I had had enough crazy to last me a lifetime. I was mentally taxed and physically exhausted.

Unfortunately, life hadn't gotten the memo that I had hung up the gloves, because as I walked to my apartment barely holding myself together, another surprise awaited me on my doorstep.

I couldn't even get a word out as I stared at what stood right in front of me in disbelief. I was face to face with the villain in my story, the wicked witch, the evil queen in the flesh. With her long hair, flawless skin, and legs for days, Ava Thompson was at my door looking at me with her Bambi eyes, one hand cradling her belly pouch, the other holding onto a little girl who was a spitting image of her and Noah.

All the insecurities that were hidden beneath the grooves and fissures of my brain came out, clogging my synaptic junctions, prompting my neurons to fire harsh words straight into my ears. At that moment, I was on my 19th birthday again, spending the night scrolling through her social media, comparing her strong features to my dull, her perfections to my flaws, telling myself I could never be her even if I tried.

"Where is he?" Ava spoke, a single tear breaking loose from one of her wide eyes and rolling down her cheek. The night breeze waved her yellow dress like a white flag, her sad eyes blinking in their desperate call for peace. "Where's my-" She steadied her wobbling lips and wiped away her tear with the pad of her palm. The bright light above my apartment door caught the wedding band on her finger, finishing her sentence for her with its dazzling glitter. Her husband.

"What the hell." I sighed and walked around her to my door. She didn't get to start a cold war and call a ceasefire on her own. She didn't get to ask me where her husband—the very man she had stolen from me—was. She was the last person I wanted to see—the last person I wanted to speak to.

I fumbled with my keys as Ava sniffled behind me, whispering something incomprehensible to the little girl. I was on the verge of passing out. My body was overwhelmed with too much sorrow that I was barely standing straight. The pain that radiated through my body wasn't just emotional. It was physical, too. I was physically ill to take on another battle.

"Tell her Mija."

I inhaled a deep breath and turned around to face them.

Ava jerked the little girl's hand, pushing her toward me. "Tell her."

Looking at me like I was the boogeyman, the girl who had Noah's frown hugged her teddy bear close to her chest and whispered, "please don't take my daddy away," as fat tears escaped from her doe brown eyes. The corners of her lips—which were identical to Noah's—were drawn downward as soft sobs escaped from them, stabbing me straight in the gut.

Crouching down to be at eye level with the girl, "Oh, honey," I wiped away her tears with my hand and tipped her wrinkled chin up, "I'm not taking your daddy. I promise." Her body was trembling as more tears adorned her face. Guilt had my arteries narrowing and my heart galloping.

"What's your name, sweetie?"

The girl with a replica of my favorite brown eyes on earth looked at me guardedly before she looked up at her mom and stepped away.

"Carmen," Ava spoke, regarding me. "Her name is Carmen." she said in between sniffles.

A small smile tugged on my lips. "You named her after your mom."

Ava's frown wavered, and a smile overcame her features. "We named her after Mama," she confirmed, looking at her daughter lovingly. "Here," Ava handed little Carmen her cellphone, "Go play inside and wait for mommy. Okay, Mija?"

Throwing the door open, I walked Carmen in and sat her on my sofa. "Is my daddy here?" she asked, her gaze traveling around my living room.

"No." I brushed her hair away from her forehead. "He's not here." I replied to her in the softest voice I could muster while anger soared through me. The anger wasn't directed at her; it was directed at her mom for everything she had done to me.

After giving Carmen a cup of water, I left the door ajar and walked outside. Ava was pacing around my porch with her hands intertwined behind her back. She was visibly pregnant. Her abdomen was round and distended, straining her yellow summer dress.

"What the hell was that?" I asked in a subdued voice, as the shock of it all kicked in.

"Where is Noah?"

I scoffed. "You've got some nerve showing your face here."

"May, where the fuck is Noah?" she was frantic, her hair was in complete disarray and her eyes were enclosed in red circles.

"Excuse me? Don't you feel a little stupid asking that question?"

"I feel stupid for a lot of things I have done in my life. But asking about my husband's, the father of my kids', whereabouts isn't one of them." She rubbed her stomach and held my gaze. "I am a pregnant woman, begging you to please let my husband go. Don't break my family apart. Please."

The Ava standing right in front of me looked nothing like the Ava that had been living in my head. In reality, she was human—delicate, maternal, and very fragile, whereas, in my story, she was evil personified.

"Please, May," Ava continued, "don't wreck my marriage. Don't let my children grow up in a broken home. I'm begging you. I know that you don't like me, with our history and everything, but please, it's not about us anymore. It's about my kids. It's about their lives. Don't take him away from us."

"I hate you." I grunted, swallowing back angry tears. "With everything in me, I hate you, Ava. I have never hated a person the way I hate you. You are selfish and unkind and cruel. You are the worst person to ever exist. You didn't play a fair game. You hurt me in the worst way."

A remorseful look took over her face. Her chest shook with violent shivers as she bawled into her hands.

"But I love Noah. And you are his person now. You make him happy. You gave him the life he'd always dreamed of. You are his present and future. Take your kid and go home. He's coming to you. I never took him away from you. I would never. Because I am not like you, Ava. I want you to know that I am not like you. I am not you. You may be better looking. You may have all that I want, but I am a much better person than you could ever be. I want you to know that, okay? What you did to us was nasty. All the lies you had told him to cover up your other lies..." I shook my head, shooing away the overwhelming emotions clogging my vision.

"Your relationship is built in deception, but that's none of my business. As long as he forgave you, I don't care. But don't think you won this twisted game you created. You may have gotten the price you were playing for, but you didn't win. No one won. We all lost."

Ava regarded me silently as she wiped her tears and ran her hands over her dress, smoothing the wrinkles. "Thank you," she said, her eyes studying my face. "Thank you." Ava walked around me to my house to grab her daughter.

"Ava." I called out, causing her to halt mid-stride.

"Hm?"

"I just, I just want to know one thing. Did you ever tell him that you cheated on him with Zach? Or was it one of the things you kept from him?"

"What do you think?" she gave me a sad smile.

"Wow." I shook my head in disapproval. "Obviously, I don't know Noah as much as you do, but I know he values honesty. I know he values trust. Tell him everything. Start with a clean slate. He deserves at least that."

"Why? So, he could leave me and come to you?"

"Noah loved me once, yeah. But he loves you. He never stopped loving you, even when he loved me. Because at the end of the day, he came to you. It doesn't matter if he never came back to me because he lost his memory in the accident. He made a conscious decision to come to you when his memory was intact. He left me for you. He was never mine. He was always yours. So don't sell yourself short. He'd never leave you for me. Besides, why strip him of his right to leave you? Why tie a man to you with lies? Why build a home with deception? After everything, you owe him at least that—the truth."

"I'll stick with my way of living life. Thank you for your unsolicited advice about my husband and my home. Let's go Mija." She said, gesturing for her daughter to follow her. Carmen came out rubbing her eyes with her little fingers and waved at me before she got into the back seat of her mom's car.

Ava strapped her daughter's seatbelt and drove away. I stood at my door and watched Ava's car disappear into the night, thinking how far I'd come in life.

Walking back to my house, I locked my doors and went to my living room. I needed to cleanse myself before facing the world again. As I sat on the couch, I found Carmen's forgotten teddy bear hiding under the pillow.

It was a peace offering she had left behind. Or her way of thanking me for leaving her dad alone.

I hugged it to my chest and let my tears roll. I cried for the man I'll never have. His life I'll never share. His kids I'll never bear. After I cried my heart's content, I sent an email to my attending asking for a week off, and curled into a ball, hoping to hibernate until a better day came.

Weeks passed, but that better day never came.

After spending some time in solitary, rejuvenating myself, it was time to go back to work and resume my life. As much as I wanted a clean slate, a new life, a new journey to embark on, I was stuck with the mess of a life I had created for myself. And unless I started cleaning up my messes soon, it was going to be a long life of laying in dirt and playing with it.

I deserved better. I knew better. And so, finally, I chose better—I chose myself.

Nick had sent me several text messages apologizing for what he had done. And I had replied to him with a formal, well-crafted breakup message highlighting how thankful I was for all the good times we had had, but that our course had ended. I knew it wasn't very mature to break up over a text, but we had been done long ago. He knew it. I knew it. I was just solidifying our fate so that we were both on the same page.

I mourned the loss of him. He was my fiancé for a few hours, but he was my lover for three years and my best friend for seven. Regardless of what he did, he was a part of my life for a such long time, losing him left a hole in my heart. I wasn't sure how many holes that organ of mine could withstand before shutting down on me.

But life went on. With or without him, I continued to live.

I never saw Noah again. But I dreamed about him every night. I wished I hadn't known the truth. I wished I had just kept on living thinking that he abandoned me. Because that would've been an easier pill to swallow than knowing that it was me that had abandoned him. I had failed him. I had failed us. Pointing a finger at somebody else was much easier than accepting fault—taking responsibility.

Whoever said knowledge was power hadn't gone through what I had gone through. Because knowing him had done nothing but strip me of all my power.

I had thought about contacting him once or twice, in the guise of giving back his daughter's stuffed animal. But I talked myself out of it. His daughter's face haunted me every night. Her pleading brown eyes as she asked me to leave her daddy alone. Meeting her was the wake-up call I never knew I needed.

If I were given the chance to look at death in the eye and speak to it, I'd beg for the same thing Carmen did. I'd ask it to leave my dad alone. To please not take him away from me. I knew all too well how empty life was without a dad. I wasn't going to be death to another family.

The world didn't revolve around me. Noah's life didn't align with mine anymore. The one lesson I had taken from all that had happened to me was to accept my losses. It was easier said than done, true. But so was everything else in life.

...

a/n- Thank you for reading, voting, and commenting besties! There's another chapter posted, so make sure to read along! 

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