Her handwriting is small and careful, the neatness of a designer’s hand.
I’m sorry.
I think I was wrong.
About all of it.
— S
Standing in the kitchen with the note in hand, the new flowers on the island, the painting on the wall, and something dropping out of the bottom of my chest, and not stopping.
She is gone.
Chapter Thirty
SOPHIA
Vixen Falls looks exactly the same.
That is the first thing I notice, stepping out of the terminal into the cool air and feeling the particular smallness of it settle around me, the familiar streets and the quality of light that is nothing like Nevada. It is softer here, greener, and entirely without the vast indifferent beauty of the desert that I had spent months waking up inside.
The kind of place that had always felt like home.
Only it doesn’t feel like home.
Standing there with my bag at my feet and the cool air on my face, waiting for the relief to arrive, the settling, the sense of the world righting itself the way it is supposed to when you go back to somewhere familiar doesn’t come. Instead, what comes is the ache of someone who has left something behind and is only now beginning to understand what it was.
Annie’s car pulls up.
She doesn’t say anything when I get in. She just looks at me with one long, assessing look, the particular efficiency of a Marine who can read a situation faster than most people can form an opinion about it, and then pulls out of the terminal and drives while I look out the window.
The streets of Vixen Falls move past, the café on the corner where Ryan and I used to get coffee on Sunday mornings, the park where Annie and I had walked a thousand times, and the particular familiar geography of a life I’d lived for years. It feels like somewhere I used to live, like driving through a photograph of a place rather than the place itself.
“Talk.”
So I do.
Everything there is to know about Vegas, the house, Tate, the slow burn of it, the way it had built over months without me meaning for it to. The Grand Canyon, the bike, the night before he left for Mexico, and the particular rightness of waking up in his arms and knowing without question that what I felt was real. The morning after, the careful way he’d kissed me before he left, candlelit dinner and his hand over mine on the table, and the five words that had changed everything, ‘I’m leaving in two days.’
And then Raven.
Her words sitting in that clubhouse kitchen like something I couldn’t scrub off my skin, no matter how many times I told myself she was wrong.
‘Your man is barely cold in the ground. And you’re already in his brother’s bed.’
Annie is quiet for a long moment after I finish.
We are parked outside my apartment building by then. She’d pulled over at some point without me noticing, the engine is off, and the Vixen Falls evening is doing its quiet thing outside the windows, the streetlights coming on one by one in the early dark.
“How long have you had feelings for him?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “A while. I kept telling myself it was grief… proximity. That I was attaching to the nearest safe thing because everything else had been taken away.”
“And now?”
I look at my hands in my lap for a moment. “Now, I think it was real. I think it’s been real for a long time, and I just kept finding reasons not to look at it directly.”
Annie nods slowly, the way she does when she is thinking something through before she says it. “Then what are you doing here?” she asks, simply and directly, the way Annie always saysthe hard things, without softening them or wrapping them in something easier to swallow.
