I cry because Cassie is right. I am here, on this couch, in this apartment, in this life I built like a cage and convinced myself was a home because its bars were prettier than the ones I grew up in.
I thought I had gotten out.
I thought surviving was the same as living.
I press my face into my knees and cry for all I have lost, letting the night take it.
Chapter 3
Zane
Sleep refused to come last night.
I laid in that bed longer than I want to admit, staring at the ceiling, listening to the building settle around me.
The room felt wrong. Too wide. The ceiling too far away, the walls too far back, the mattress too soft beneath me. My body kept waiting for the clang that never came. You get used to the cage and the open space starts to feel dangerous.
So I climbed onto the roof.
Hauled myself up through the hatch, the night air hitting me in the face the second I cleared the opening. I lay down on the tin with one arm behind my head, let the cold seep through my shirt, and told myself it was because I wanted to finally see the stars after all this time.
I tell myself a lot of shit.
But in all honesty, the roof called to me because Skylar once sat beside me up there.
I laid there with the town humming below me and the stars scattered across the black above, and for one brief, fucked-up second I was eighteen again. Angry and stupid and reckless. And she was beside me.
I could see her.
Knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them, hair loose around her face in the breeze. That mouth set the way it always was, ready to cut me open if I got too comfortable. She used to stare at those stars as if she hated them for being free. And then she’d glance at me, quickly, and look away again before I could catch what that look meant. But I always caught it.
That was the problem with us. We were too good at seeing each other, better at it than either of us wanted to be.
Last night, I watched those stars until my eyes burned and the cold had seeped into my bones, and for the first time in a long while, the walls in my head moved back a little. Not gone. They never go. Prison doesn’t leave when the gate opens. It follows you out, settles into your shoulders, crawls behind your eyes, and teaches your body to brace for impact before your mind has even registered the threat. You don’t unlearn that in a night. You don’t unlearn it in a year.
But on that roof, beneath that sky, something loosened. Enough to let the air in.
Just enough to remember what it felt like to breathe without measuring the space between walls. And then her ghost rolled onto its side beside me on the tin, hair loose, eyes on the stars, and ruined the whole fucking thing.
Now it’s morning, and I am under the hood of my old car, pretending that engines are still the one thing in this world that makes sense.
They used to. That was before my hands learned to shake.
The garage is quiet except for the occasional hiss from the air compressor and the sound of Rainer moving somewhere near the office.
Sunlight spills through the open roller door. My car sits with its hood up, exposing everything I never got to finish. The engine is half stripped, with parts lined up along the workbench.
The smell of oil should calm me. It tries. God knows it tries. This place smells exactly the same as it did before everything went to shit. My body remembers it. It reaches for it the way you reach for something in the dark that was always there.
Once, my body knew exactly what to do in here.
Every bolt, every sound, every vibration.
I could listen to an engine cough once and tell you whether it needed spark, fuel, or air. I could work for hours without thinking, hands moving by memory, mind going quiet in a way it never did anywhere else.
Now I stand here with my shoulders locked up around my ears, jaw set, and every nerve in my body waiting for something to go wrong.
The wrench slips.
