How is she?
Three words.
That’s all.
But those three words sit on my tongue like broken glass—small enough to say and big enough to destroy whatever’s left of me the second they hit the air.
Every mile of road we put between me and those gates makes them heavier. All I want is to turn to Rainer and ask him. Rip the wound open because not knowing has been eating me alive allthis time, gnawing through me slowly and quietly, the way only unanswered questions can.
I clench my jaw until the ache spreads down into my neck. My fingers flex against my thigh once, then twice.
Is she happy?
That one lands in a different place entirely. In places you can’t reach into to pull things back out of.
Here’s the fucked-up part: I wanted her to be happy.
That was the whole point of pushing her away the way I did, making sure she had every reason to walk and keep walking and never look back. I did that for her. I told myself that in every sleepless hour, in every gray morning, in every moment when the guilt grew heavy enough to stop my lungs from working properly. I gave her up so she could have something better than a boy the world had already decided was a lost cause.
And now the thought of her actually being happy—her life full, warm, and untouched by the wreckage of mine—splits me straight down the middle. It’s the cruelest irony.
I stare out the window and still I say nothing.
We roll through town, and I recognize pieces of it.
The bones are the same. Everything else has shifted. The corner store is gone, replaced by a clean little café with plants in the window and people sitting outside with their coffee and their ordinary Tuesday-morning lives.
The old bottle shop is still there. Of course it is. Places like that never close.
We pass the bus stop where I spent my first night after leaving Dolores’, with nowhere to go. Lying there with my bags wound tight around my boots so nobody could take them without taking me too. Staring up at the gray morning while the traffic groaned past and none of it slowed down, none of it cared.
We continue moving and I keep my eyes on the glass as the library comes into view.
My jaw goes tight before I even fully register it.
The steps out front. The iron railing along the left side, still bent at the top. Cassie’s voice on the phone telling me Skylar had nowhere to go. Skylar, folded in on herself at the bottom of those steps. Bag by her feet. Head down, forehead pressed to her knees, making herself as small as possible, which was never small enough to hide her from me. From a distance she’d looked breakable that day. The quietest I’d ever seen her, and Skylar was never quiet. It had hurt to see her like that, and seeing that place now still does.
I shift in my seat causing Rainer to notice. His grip on the wheel tightens, barely, the smallest tell. He says nothing.
We turn down a familiar street and my body knows it before my brain does. Something in my chest pulls tight. My breathing changes before I even see the garage.
It appears at the end of the block the way things appear in dreams.
The roller door is down. The sign still bolted above the entrance, sun-faded and worn at the edges but still there. It’s brick and steel and oil stains soaked so deep into the concrete they’ve become part of the floor itself. A busted roller door. A workbench buried under parts and years of hard work. But it’s the closest thing to home I’ve ever had.
Rainer pulls into the driveway and kills the engine. The truck ticks as it settles. Heat pops under the hood. I stare through the windshield at the garage door.
Rainer gets out.
I don’t move.
My hand finds the door handle. My fingers curl around it, but they stop there, unable to close the gap between where I am and wherever the fuck comes next.
Rainer turns around and waits.
I push the door open and climb out.
My boots hit the concrete and the smell of oil and grease finds me before anything else does. It rises off the ground, off the walls, off the very air around this place, and it hits me somewhere behind the sternum with a force I wasn’t ready for.
