Her effort falls flat. His depression is contagious and seeing him like this is enough to have her just as desolate. It creeps into her chest and twists and ties until she can’t breathe without wanting to cry, only feeling more useless than ever.
“I’m not sure how we should get there,” she watches his fingers shake against the concrete. “Or if we should wait and stay here longer. Please tell me what to do, Wade. I don’t want to make a mistake.”
All she has done since she lost him that day at the start of the turn, is make mistakes. They spent the night at her apartment after he found her there, intending to head back to his otherchildhood friend, Cole, in the morning. She never spent as much time with Cole as Wade did, but she knows that Wade trusted him as much as he trusts her.
They got separated instead, two miles away from their destination. Funny how nothing ever goes to plan when fighting off rotters is a daily chore.
They can’t both fall apart now. One of them needs to stay strong, so she sucks in a sniffle and hides the tremble in her voice.
“Think about which place you’d like most. I’m gonna take this and bring you something else, okay? I’ll be right back.” She grabs the uneaten tray, inhaling the contents herself as she carries it out the door and down the hall, intending to exchange it for something fresh when Luke stops her short of her goal.
“How is he today?”
“The same,” she replies, moving past him into the nearly empty common area.
“Will you take the room I suggested now?”
“No, but I’ll take the blue house if it’s still unoccupied.”
He pauses with a frown. “You won’t take a room across the hall, but you’ll take a house down the road?”
She gives him a level stare until the marble falls into the hole.
“No. No way. Have you lost your mind, Kara?” he half yells.
“We can’t stay here. This place is terrifying for him. We need to go somewhere quiet where it’s just us.”
“You’ve gotten lucky so far that he hasn’t hurt you. Now you want to go off alone and tempt fate? I can’t allow it.”
“I’m not asking permission.” She dumps the empty tray and fills a new one. “I’m just asking if anyone else is living there now.”
Luke sighs. “I’m on your side here, you know that, right? I’m trying to help.”
“Then help.”
“It’s vacant,” he admits with a shake of his head. “You’re going to get yourself killed out there with him.”
“Are you going to help me move him or not? I’ll figure out how to do it myself if you won’t.”
“I’ll help.”
“Okay.” Some of the hostility she always harbors around him begins to fade now that’s he’s agreed to assist her in what she knows damn well she can’t do alone. “Thank you.”
“You’re really willing to risk everything for him? Even your life?”
“He’d do the same for me.”
“Would he? Are you sure of that? Because if you’re not, then I beg you to rethink this.”
“I’m not changing my mind. After all this time, I thought it was obvious that I don’t tend to do that.”
Luke pauses, clearly mulling over his words before finally setting them free. “I kept hoping that once this was over and you found him, one way or another, that things could be different.”
One way or another, he says, as if the possibility of finding Wade dead would ever allow her to have a‘normal’life again.
“That’s never going to happen. It’s been years.”
“Let me know when you decide you want him moved.”
