Us | A Stardew Valley FanFiction

Chapter 1 - Prologue

There's lipstick on his collar.

For the past twenty minutes, he's been droning on about how sorry he is, and how we will figure this out, together.

For the past nineteen minutes, I haven't been listening.

There'd been no mention of the crimson infidelity on his collar; I doubted he even knew it to be there. His repeated apologies had nothing to do with the lipstick, and I couldn't figure out which was worse: what he was apologizing for, or what he wasn't.

I'd been fired.

Well, "laid off."

Three quarters of the way to our seven year anniversary and coworkers for nearly just as long, Josh and I lived in a shitty apartment and worked shitty corporate jobs, waiting for a happily ever after that got further away by the minute.

Josh had always been a favorite at Joja, rising through a million different titles with more pay and less work within the first month; I was so far down in the ranks that I'd be better off underground.

I wonder how many other people were fired today...I bet not many of them had that news delivered by their partner. Can Joja really not afford to pay me minimum wage anymore? God, I don't think I've missed a single shift! At least not besides the week I got my wisdom teeth out. Is this what this is about? The wisdom teeth?

"Sadie!" Josh said, waving his hands in my face.

My eyes snapped back to him, and then the lipstick.

"Are you okay?" he asked, following my gaze towards his collar.

The room fell silent.

"Oh, this?" he stammered. "I must've spilled something."

I knew he was lying. He knew he was caught. The silence lingered.

Unemployed and single. Put that on my tombstone.

There was nothing else to say as I walked into our bedroom, locking the door behind me. Josh followed promptly, begging for forgiveness through the door. I began gathering my things almost robotically, shoving them into suitcases and duffel bags until their seams exploded with pieces of me.

I bulldozed towards our bathroom closet, my eyes locked on the safe nestled in the far corner. I had never needed it; nothing within it was mine. But I trusted my intuition—it rarely failed me. Something told me to open it. So I did.

I tried to, rather.

I didn't know the combination.

0828. Josh's birthday. Wrong.

1007. My birthday. Wrong.

0715. Our anniversary. Wrong.

"God damnit," I muttered, watching the keypad blink red for the third time. Josh's pleads echoed through the room, and for a second, I considered asking him to open it.

But secrets prefer to be kept, and Josh believed the same. If I had the right to know what lived behind this door, it would've opened the first time.

Against my own will, the more wrong attempts, the more I needed to know what was hidden inside. Josh used the same passwords for everything...but not this. Why is this one different?

Maybe there's a picture of the woman he's seeing on the side. Or a million gold. Or a dead body.

My mind raced as I tried one more code.

0427. The day we got hired by Joja, all those years ago.

The keypad blinked green, and I could hear the sound of a lock turning inside of the safe.

I was in.

At first, I didn't see anything of note. Josh's social security card, his passport, and a spare key to his car. The 24 karat gold watch that he inherited from his father. A stack of files with the Joja logo smeared across the front.

As I was about to close the safe, something caught my eye. An envelope, placed carefully behind the stack of files—practically out of sight. I reached in and grabbed it, immediately recognizing the crinkle of old, frail paper.

Miss Sadie Simmons, the outside read, with the address of our old apartment in the suburbs.

Trembling, I opened the envelope, and emptied its contents—which was just paper.

But not just any paper.

It was a letter from my grandfather.

Dear Sadie,

If you're reading this, you must be in dire need of a change.

Tears welled up in my eyes as I read on. It was like he was still here, watching me be humiliated by Josh; he was sending a sign that I needed to leave. I hated that he had to see me like this, if he really was out there somewhere. I was supposed to end up a strong, independent woman—I was supposed to carry on our family legacy. I was not supposed to end up in a situation like this. I refused to end up in a situation like this.

I've enclosed the deed to that place...my pride and joy: Appleton Farm.

I stopped breathing as I read the sentence again. And again. And again.

My eyes jumped around the page, my brain barely processing the final few paragraphs. I couldn't even focus on the miracle that just happened. The only thing I could comprehend clearly was that I was just seeing this, now, years upon years after the death of my grandfather.

Josh was trying to hide this from me.

I burst out of the bedroom, nearly knocking Josh down with the door—I stared at him through the tears.

"What the hell, Josh?"

Confusion flooded his face as he tried to figure out which portion of the last thirty minutes I was mad about this time.

I shook the letter in his face, gripping it tightly, as if he was going to try and take it from me.

His expression softened. "Oh, Sadie," he sighed, turning to face the window.

"God, I know I messed up, okay? That letter came in one day while you were at work, back before we moved here. I had just convinced you to come to the city with me, even though it was easy to tell that you didn't actually want to. If you had opened that letter, there would've been no changing your mind. You have to understand..."

Josh hid a letter from my dead grandfather, and felt no remorse, because that meant he got his way. He dragged me to the city, knowing I wouldn't be happy here, just to cheat on me, and now fire me? Would he have even given me this letter if I told him that I was leaving him, or would he have kept it forever out of spite? Would he have moved to the Valley without me? No, definitely not, he's far too successful here. I can't believe—

"Sadie!" He pleaded, once again pulling me out of my thoughts. "Please don't do this. I know exactly what you're thinking. We can make this work, babe, I swear."

That same, deafening silence filled the room once more, and this time, I was the one to break it.

"No."