I pack a bag, the same one I’d brought to Vegas the first time, the one that had sat in his guest room, then in his room, and now sits in mine here with the particular strangeness of a thing that doesn’t quite belong in either place anymore.
I leave Ryan’s photograph where it is on the bedside table.
I’ll always love you, I think, standing in the doorway, looking back at it.That will never change. But I think it’s time.
I pick up my keys and walk out of my Vixen Falls apartment, calling Annie from the cab.
“Finally,” she says.
I laugh, small, genuine, and slightly wet around the edges. “Don’t say I told you so.”
“I would never,” she says in a tone that suggests she absolutely would.
“Annie.”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. For everything.”
A beat of quiet, warm, certain. and entirely Annie. “Go get him.”
Smiling, I head for the airport.
Chapter Thirty-One
SOPHIA
The desert appears below the plane as we begin to descend.
I’d been watching for it, my face turned to the window for the last twenty minutes, waiting for the moment the landscape shifts from green and ordinary to that vast ancient gold that has gotten into me somewhere over the last few months without me deciding to let it.
There it is.
Enormous, indifferent, and completely beautiful.
Home, something in me says quietly.
I don’t push it away.
The heat hits me the moment I step outside the terminal. It’s that full, dry Nevada heat, the kind that settles into your bones and makes you feel present in your body in a way that nothing else quite manages. Standing on the sidewalk outside arrivals with my bag in my hand and my face turned up to the Nevada sky, I breathe it in.
Vixen Falls was where I’d grown up.
This is where I live.
I get in the cab.
“The Sinners MC clubhouse. East side.”
The driver doesn’t blink.
This is Vegas.
Watching the city move past the window, I think about what I am going to say. I’d been composing it on the plane, the words I was going to use, the order of them, the particular honesty that Tate deserves after everything. Not a performance or a speech. Just the truth, said directly, the way he always said things and the way he’d taught me to say them by example over the monthswe’d lived in the same house and built something neither of us had planned for.
I’m sorry.
I was wrong.
