The front door opened behind me.
“Aura,” Charm called.
I kept walking down the steps. “Go back inside.”
“Please.”
I pulled up the Uber app with shaking fingers and didn’t turn around. “I said leave me alone.”
Bliss came outside next. I heard her before I saw her, her breathing uneven and small.
“Ay—”
I stopped on the wet walkway and looked back.
Both of them froze on the porch.
“Do not follow me,” I said.
Bliss’s tears spilled over. Charm looked wrecked.
Good, some awful part of me thought. Let someone else feel ruined for five minutes.
The driver was seven minutes away, which was too long, but remaining there with the house glowing behind them and every window full of people who had watched me break was not an option.
I crossed the lawn instead of waiting near the curb. My boots sank slightly into the wet grass, and my phone buzzed before I reached the sidewalk.
Bliss.
I declined the call.
Charm called next, and I declined that too.
Then I opened my location settings and turned sharing off.
For one second, my thumb hovered over the screen, and something inside me almost softened because they were my girls, my sisters, and the women who had held me together before I knew how to make myself look whole.
The Uber rolled up five minutes later, its headlights sliding over the curb and catching the wet pavement in white streaks.
I got in without looking back at Hockey House.
The driver glanced at me in the mirror. “Everything okay?”
I smiled because apparently my face still knew how.
“Perfect,” I said.
Then I looked out the window while the house disappeared behind us, bright, loud, and full of people I loved who had finally found the one place I would not let them follow.
7
Easton
The second Aura walked out, the room changed around me.
One minute, the party was a living thing—music, bodies, cheap beer, and heat rolling off too many people packed into Hockey House like we were all still stupid enough to believe winning our first real game meant the night couldn’t turn ugly. Then the front door shut behind her, and every sound in the room landed wrong.
I stood there with Brinley’s lipstick probably still smeared near my mouth, my chest heaving and my hand flexing at my side like it wanted a throat, a wall, anything solid enough to take what I couldn’t say without making the whole room worse.
