Alive.
Here.
“Cal?”
“Yes?”
“You don’t always have to be the wall.”
“What should I be?”
His hand settled at the back of my neck.
“Mine.”
I closed my eyes.
The word reached every place in me that had been braced for loss.
“Always,” I whispered.
Noah’s fingers tightened gently.
“Always.”
Chapter 26
NOAH
The accident lived differently inside me after I remembered it.
Before, it had been a locked room beneath the house.
I knew it existed because the walls shook whenever I passed over it. I heard sounds through the floor. Metal. Rain. A man shouting. Three knocks. I dreamed of dark water and pressure against my chest without understanding why.
Then the song opened the door.
For several minutes, I had been inside the van again.
Not watching.
There.
The steering wheel bucking beneath my hands. The windshield going white. Steel crossing the road where no steel should have been. The terrible floating moment after the tires lost the asphalt.
Pain arrived with memory.
Then it left.
The next morning, I could look at the scene without feeling my bones break again.
I remembered turning the wheel toward the rock.
I remembered thinking about the car behind me.
I remembered trying to breathe after the van stopped moving.
And beneath all of it, I remembered Reid.
