TOWARD THE DISTANCE Chapter 20

One month after Elena left, Cade collapsed.

The housekeepers found him on the bedroom floor in the middle of the afternoon — unconscious, his skin grey, his breathing so shallow it was almost imperceptible. They called an ambulance. He was rushed to the hospital and admitted to the ICU.

His parents arrived within the hour. Cade's mother looked ten years older than she had a month ago. They sat in the waiting room, side by side, holding hands like teenagers, while a doctor delivered the news.

"Severe dehydration and malnutrition," the doctor said. "He hasn't been eating or drinking properly for weeks. His body simply shut down."

Cade's mother closed her eyes.

"But that's not the main concern," the doctor continued, lowering his voice. "The real issue is psychological. He's showing signs of a serious depressive episode — and given the trajectory, if he doesn't get treatment soon, there's a genuine risk of self-harm."

Cade's mother fainted. Cade's father caught her just in time, easing her into a chair, then signed every piece of paperwork the hospital put in front of him with a shaking hand.

Once both Cade and his mother were stabilized, Cade's father recorded a video.

He sat in Cade's hospital room, his white hair disheveled, his eyes red and swollen. He looked directly into the camera — at Elena, wherever she was, whoever she had become — and said one thing:

"Please. Come back. For whatever reason, for whatever you feel about my son — just come back and save him."

The video was uploaded that same night. It spread faster than anything Cade himself had posted. People who had been following the story — who had watched Cade's confession on television, who had seen the billboards and the ads — felt something crack open when they saw his father's face. The rawness of it. The way a man in his seventies was begging a woman he barely knew to come home and rescue his son.

Elena, on the other side of the world, knew nothing about any of it.

She had made that choice deliberately — to cut every thread, close every window, leave no way for the outside world to reach her. And so the outside world couldn't.

Norway in winter was exactly what she needed. Cold, quiet, impossibly beautiful. Snow fell in thick, silent curtains, blanketing the small town in white. The roads into the city were blocked by storms for weeks at a time. The nearest neighbor was a ten-minute walk through the woods.

Elena had rented a small wooden cabin from a woman named Lisa — warm, funny, impossibly kind, the sort of person who showed up with homemade cookies and stayed for two hours without being invited and somehow made the visit feel like a gift.

Elena had also adopted a cat — a scraggly, demanding little thing that immediately decided it owned her and spent most of its time either on her lap or demanding to be on her lap.

On a grey afternoon in early December, Elena sat at the window with her easel set up, painting the landscape outside — endless white, bare black branches, the kind of silence that felt almost sacred. The cat was curled at her feet, purring. A cup of fresh-ground coffee steamed beside her palette.

Someone knocked at the door.

Elena set down her brush, picked up the cat, and went to answer it. Lisa stood on the porch, stamping snow off her boots, holding a paper bag.

"I baked cookies," she said, already stepping inside. "Oatmeal raisin. My grandmother's recipe."

"Thank you," Elena said, and meant it more than Lisa could possibly know.

They sat together for a while, talking about nothing important — the weather, the cat, a book Lisa had been reading. Then Lisa set down her coffee and said, carefully:

"Wren Faraway… I saw something online yesterday. A video. A man apologizing on television — for cheating on his wife. He posted a missing persons notice with a photo. The woman in the photo looks a lot like you."

Elena smiled — small, quiet, unbothered. "Does she? That's interesting. But honestly, my face is pretty common where I come from. Lookalikes aren't unusual."

Lisa nodded. She understood what Elena was really saying. She let it go.

"Actually," Lisa added, after a pause, "it's not just him. His parents posted a video too. They said he's in really bad shape. That he might…" She trailed off, choosing her words with care. "They said he might not recover if no one reaches him."

Elena held the cat a little tighter against her chest. Her eyes stayed on the snow outside the window.

"Everyone is an independent person," she said, after a long silence. "No one has to survive by depending on someone else. If he truly can't go on without me… that's not something I can fix. And it wouldn't be fair to sacrifice myself to save him."

She meant every word. Even if Cade Harrington himself stood in front of her and wept, she would not go back. Not for him. Not for anyone.

Lisa smiled gently. "Then stay here as long as you need. The roads are blocked anyway — no one's going anywhere for a while."

Elena's eyes glistened, just slightly. She blinked it away and picked up one of Lisa's cookies. It was warm, and sweet, and perfect.

"Thank you," she said again. "Really. Thank you."