PAIGE
The walk lasts forty minutes.
Nacogdoches is flat. Sticky. Even at eight in the evening, the air sits on my skin like a wet cloth, and the cicadas are screaming from every tree on the block like they've got something to prove. The sidewalk's cracked. Old oaks line the streets. Everything's green and overgrown in that East Texas way, where nature doesn't ask permission, just grows right over whatever humans put down.
I can see why he left. And I can see why it cost him so much.
This is a place that holds onto people. The houses have wide porches. The yards run together without fences. Somebody's smoking ribs three streets over, and the smell follows me the whole loop, and if I grew up here, if my mama's kitchen and my granddad's mill and the girl I loved and the brother I trusted were all within a twenty-minute drive, leaving would've taken a piece of me that never grew back.
That's what happened to Aiden. The piece didn't grow back. He just learned to live without it.
And now he's sitting in a hotel room trying to hand me back because Delaney Harrison saidvictimin a hospital lobby and it went through him like a bullet.
My phone buzzes.
Gwen
How's Texas
Hot.
Gwen
And?
Hot.
Gwen
Paige.
He's shutting down. His ex said some things. His mama doesn't get it. He's trying to send me home.
Gwen
Is he succeeding?
What do you think.
Gwen
That's my girl. Give him tonight. I tried to shut Hunter out a bunch of times before he convinced me to stay. We do that. The scared ones. We shove you away to test if you'll go, and when you don't, something cracks open.
What if it doesn't crack open?
Gwen
Peaches. The man carved you a SPOON.
I laugh in the middle of a Texas sidewalk, and an old man watering his lawn gives me a look.
Gwen's right. She's always right about this, because she married a man who didn't speak for a decade and loved him until he did. If anyone knows what it looks like when a broken man tests the fence, it's Gwen Richardson.
I walk back.
The hotel lobby's empty. Elevator up. Hallway. Room 412 is quiet behind the door, and my hand hesitates on the keycard.
Mama. What would you do?
