Falling - Part 4

Lester knew from the beginning that love, at its core, was a trick of gravity—a force pulling two people together, making them believe in weightlessness, in flight, in forever. But ended the same way: impact. BAM!

He had spent years trying to build something steady with Ruby, something that wouldn’t break under pressure. After they met and after seven years he had finally asked her to marry him, seven years of waiting, testing, making sure neither of them were stepping into something that would ruin them both. And yet, after all that care, all that time, she had left as though none of it mattered. He still wanted to be her husband.

Lester had learned that the worst pain wasn’t physical—it was uncertainty. And Ruby left him with an avalanche of it. He sat in his quiet house, his mind running in loops, trying to decipher her silence. Was she afraid? Was she in danger? Or was she simply happy, wrapped in the arms of someone else?

Either way, someone else, Mark, was there, standing in the middle of it all like a locked gate Lester had no key to.

Mark

Not a fight. Not an argument. Not even a goodbye. Just an absence that stretched into silence. And now, a man named Mark—a man with too many unknowns, a man who seemed to be moving in shadows.  Lester had not feared this—but still he appeared to be in the place where Lester once had been. Lester felt like an idiot for thinking this but still he was thinking this and knowing it wasn't entirely true too.

The name Mark had floated to the surface of consciousness like a turd in a toilet. No clear definition, no hard lines—just a dark presence obscuring everything Lester seeing. Ruby wouldn’t answer his questions. Maybe she didn’t know how. Maybe she was lying because she was desperate. Maybe she wasn’t lying at all.

A man with too many addresses, too many business failures, too many shadows trailing behind him. A man with a history of bankruptcy, civil judgments, and a tendency to be where he shouldn’t. A man who co-owned a property with someone named Kathryn in the Florida Keys, in a place that housed more than its share of registered sex offenders. A man whose name twisted in Lester's stomach like a sickness. He remembered how he found the VIN to a shitty Monte Carlo, which made him feel a bit better.

A man who had somehow become Ruby's refuge. Or her captor. Or her undoing. Then again, maybe Mark was Ruby's bitch.

Lester wasn’t looking for revenge. He wasn’t looking for confrontation. He was looking for clarity. If Ruby was safe, if she was being cared for, if she was thriving—then Lester might move on. But if Mark was a problem, if he was a threat, then Lester would not sit idle, Lester was a storm.

Ruby's silence felt deliberate. Once, she had been full of words, spinning stories in the air like thread from a loom. Now, she had become an echo. The absence of you causes pain, she had written once. But was she feeling that absence now? Or had she filled it with Mark’s presence?

She had once told Lester, Borrowed things always have to be returned.” But what if she had never belonged to Lester in the first place? What if, all along, she had been slipping through his fingers, waiting for someone else to claim her?

Mark was in the way. Lester could feel it. But was he her dog, a helper, a barrier or a wall Ruby had built herself?

Ruby

Ruby’s silence was the most painful part. He could have lived with anger, could have faced her resentment, could have weathered the storm of words if only she had given him that. But instead, there was only distance, only unanswered messages, only a void where once there had been a fight, passion, a connection.

He couldn’t let go. He still felt her everywhere. In the corners of the house they once shared, the house that he was now packing up, moving out, by himself. In the creases of old notes left in handwritten notebooks, an image of a four-leaf clover. He still reached for his phone, expecting her to call, expecting her to say I miss you the way she always had in the past.

Ruby now seemed to be a woman made of whispers and smoke, a phantom that drifted through lives and left only a memory of warmth. She had convinced herself that disconnection was self-preservation. If she could cut herself away from Lester, from their past, from the ache of everything undone, then maybe she could start again. But disconnection was not the same as freedom.

She was exhausted. A life of constant, unfulfilling motion, of falling into new situations, new men, new promises that never quite took shape. I saw this in my dream, she had once said, the words slipping out before she could stop them. Your memory looped inside my head. But was Lester a memory now, or was he still a tether pulling her back toward something real?

Maybe Mark had become her safety net, or at least that’s what she told herself. He was practical. He had connections. He knew how to harass the world into working for him, even if it came at the expense of others, she might become an other, someone harassed. And maybe that’s what she needed now—someone who wouldn’t love her too much, who wouldn’t ask too many questions, who wouldn’t expect her to be whole. He was a furniture salesman for fucks sake. She said she wanted someone who was her intellectual equal. I guess she found that in Mark, a few steps down from Lester.

There was nothing. Just a lingering ache, a love unresolved, a door left open just enough to let the cold seep in.

Ruby was exhausted from running, but she knew no other way. She had always been a woman of escape routes, of doors left ajar, of carefully packed suitcases just in case. Even when she was with Lester, even when she had told herself she was happy, there had always been an unease—a feeling that she was waiting to fall.

Maybe it had been her all along.

She loved Lester, or at least, she had tried. She had wanted to be the woman he saw in her—the one he had loved so fiercely, so patiently, so fully. But she wasn’t that woman. Not really. She was the girl who had been passed between lovers, the girl who made men feel young, the girl who was borrowed but never truly owned.

And now, Mark. Mark had appeared like an answer to a question she hadn’t realized she was asking. He didn’t ask for love. He didn’t demand devotion. He simply took up space beside her and let her exist without expectation. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t loved or adored.

Lester had been safe. Lester had been home. Lester called her once the Altar of Venus, probably this meant he once worshipped her, and he did, in a way. Then, she had left home behind. She recalled, Sometimes Lester was the one who needed to be fixed and that gave her something to do. She seemed to want the things he had given her but just not from him.

She thought about calling Lester sometimes. Thought about trying to explain. But what was there to say? You were right? I was afraid? I don’t know how to love without running? He deserved better than that. He deserved the kind of truth she wasn’t strong enough to give.

And so she stayed silent.

Frankie and Johnny

Frankie had spent her life drifting between moments, never staying long enough for them to settle into permanence. It wasn’t that she didn’t want roots—she just never found the right soil.

Johnny was different. He was the kind of man who stayed, who endured, who fought for the things he loved even when they burned him. And now, as fate would have it, their paths were about to cross.

Neither of them knew it yet, but they were moving toward each other like two currents in the same river, destined to collide. Frankie would teach Johnny how to let go. Johnny would teach Frankie how to hold on. And in the process, they would reshape each other in ways neither of them could yet understand.

Lester

Lester wanted to believe that Ruby had simply moved on. That she was rebuilding her life without him, and while it hurt, he could learn to live with it. But something gnawed at him, something beyond heartbreak. A feeling that this wasn’t just about betrayal.

It was about justice.

The second she had the green card, she had gone. No more papers to be filed. No more waiting. No more him.

Had she planned this all along? Had he just been another step in her unreachable journey? He didn’t want to believe it. He didn’t want to be that man—the one who had been used, the fool left staring at an empty house, wondering how it had all gone so wrong.

But wasn’t that exactly what he was?

And what if he made a call? What if he spoke to the immigration office, let them take another look at their marriage, let them ask the questions he had been too afraid to ask?  He wasn’t a petty Man, so he was not gonna do that.

But, the power was his, and that realization settled in his chest like a slow-burning ember and at the same time clawed at his guts like a weeping ulcer.

He had options. He had leverage. And for the first time in months, he wasn’t the one left waiting.

Lester sat with his phone in his hands, the screen open to Ruby's name. He had written a message a dozen times and deleted it just as many. He had a choice now—to reach for her one last time, to beg for an answer, to demand the closure he knew he would never get. Or to let go. Truth is, he reached out to her more than once a day. He would continue to do so.

The power had shifted. Ruby might have left, but he was still here. Still standing. And maybe that was enough, for him.

He exhaled slowly and placed the phone down. He couldn’t be the one left waiting anymore.

But, Lester, was still in love. So badly in love, so so badly in love.

The Grounding

Frankie adjusted the collar of her coat and stepped into the cold air, her breath curling in the night like cigarette smoke. The city hummed around her, alive with people who moved with the kind of urgency that only mattered to them. She didn’t belong to anyone, and she liked it that way.

Across town, Johnny tapped a cigarette against his palm, staring out over the river as the lights shimmered on the water. He wasn’t thinking of anyone in particular, which was a relief. For once, his life wasn’t a mess of tangled emotions and misplaced loyalty. He liked the quiet, the anonymity. But he had the nagging sense that something was about to change.

Frankie and Johnny had never met. Their lives moved on separate tracks, neither aware of the other. But fate—or something that looked a lot like it—had a habit of pulling strangers together when they least expected it.

Both were walking toward something unknown. Both were about to collide with a truth that altered lives. Neither were falling, neither were flying and so they had no reason to suspect the harshness of the ground.  When you are grounding you have no idea about flying and you are free.

Neither had any idea yet.

Falling: Threads of Light All Chapters

Falling: Threads of Light Part 5 - Quantum Entanglement