Page 50 of Coming Home

"I should have been a brother, not a businessman sending formal texts she could easily ignore." His voice broke.

I stood there and let the silence cover him. As I watched my best friend break apart over the sin of keeping secrets, my own secret was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. I was doing the exact same thing to him. Right now. Today. I was hiding a progressive neurological tumor from the person who handled my entire life, convinced I was protecting his peace, when in reality, I was just too proud and too terrified to let anyone see my walls closing in.

I was Theo. I was committing the exact crime he was currently loathing himself for. And I couldn't find the voice to confess it.

The drive back to the valley was silent. I sat in the passenger seat of his car, granting him the territory he needed, watching the blurred horizon of the city slide past the glass.

My eyes were doing the familiar, rhythmic reflex—checking my peripheral coordinates every three minutes to ensure the vision was holding. It was still there. The episode from the clinic hadn't repeated itself, and the updated medication was buying me traction. But it was already taking more of it to hold the same ground than it had a month ago.

At a long red light off the highway, Theo turned his head slowly and looked at me. It was a long, searching look, digging straight into twenty years of shared blood.

"Are you taking care of her, Ralph?"

"With everything I've got."

"Are you in love with my sister?"

The directness of it hit my lungs like a starter's pistol. Theo didn't deal in euphemism; he didn't circle a target. He went straight for the jugular of the thing everyone else was dancing around.

"Yes," I said, looking him dead in the eye. "I am."

He held my gaze for three long seconds while the dashboard clock ticked. The light shifted to green, and a truck behind us let out an impatient honk.

"Keep her safe, Ralph." He shifted the car into drive, his voice dropping low and final. "I mean it. If you break her, there isn't a place on this earth you can hide from me."

"I won't break her."

He dropped me off at the foot of my driveway and pulled away without another syllable. I watched his red taillights bleed into the midday haze before turning toward the house.

The moment I stepped inside, the atmosphere hit me. It wasn't the comfortable, living quiet of Emma tucked away in the guest room with a book. It was a different frequency. Empty.

"Emma?"

Nothing.

I walked down the corridor, my chest tightening with every step. The guest room door was wide open. The mattress was bare, the linen sheets folded into a tight, military-grade stack right in the center of the bed. The closet was open.

The pink suitcase was gone.

I pulled my phone out, my thumb shaking as I hit her contact. It rang four times before dropping into her voicemail. Her recorded voice, flat and neutral, asked me to leave a message at the tone.

I redialed immediately. Voicemail.

I stood in the center of the empty guest room, and the silence pressed in on me.

Suddenly, my vision hitched. The sharp corners of the doorframe went soft, the edges of the room bleeding into a milky, unfocused smear, the white sheets on the mattress turning into a bright, blinding cloud. I blinked violently, my fingers gripping the wood molding so hard my knuckles popped, a cold sweat breaking along my neck. I couldn't tell if the shadow was the tumor claiming territory or if it was just pure terror—and in that moment, it didn't matter, because either way, I couldn't see, she was gone, and I had let her walk out into the dark again.

I called Theo back. He answered before the first ring completed.

"She's gone," I growled into the receiver, my voice harsh with panic. "The room is cleared out. She's not answering my calls!"

A sharp, ragged breath came through the line. "Where would she go, Ralph?"

"I don't know. Maybe… The Broadway station," I said, the memory hitting me.

"Broadway? What the hell is at Broadway?"

"It's a long story."