“I’m here now.”
He looked at me.
“The yard is beneath us,” I said. “Caleb and Owen will be downstairs tomorrow. Maeve will return. We can set an alert on your phone whenever I leave.”
“More alarms.”
“A whiteboard.”
“More instructions.”
“You can come downstairs with me.”
His brow tightened.
“I can’t follow you everywhere.”
“No.”
“I need to learn how to be alone.”
“Yes.”
His fingers loosened slightly.
“But not today,” he said.
“No. Not today.”
His shoulders lowered.
I held out my hand.
Noah took it.
“You are the only thing that stays the same.”
My throat closed.
“The hospital changed. The doctors changed. Then this place. Sometimes I wake up and lose the day. Sometimes I know a thing I shouldn’t know, and then there is nothing around it.”
His grip tightened.
“But you are always there.”
“I’ll keep telling you before I leave.”
“That isn’t what I mean.”
I waited.
“You feel the same everywhere.”
The words reached somewhere defenseless inside me.
I turned his hand over and pressed my mouth to his knuckles.
The kiss was instinctive.
