Page 191 of Mile High Ruin

I remember asking too many questions.

I remember Viktor answering only some of them.

I remember crossing another border and then another airport, changing routes twice, waiting in terminals where nobody knew my name and trying not to look over my shoulder every time a silver-haired man entered my peripheral vision. By the time I reached home, I was exhausted enough that the first thing I did was sit on the floor of the airport bathroom and cry.

I never told Ethan that part. I never told him most of it.

He knows I had trouble overseas. He knows I came back suddenly. He knows I changed cities because I wanted to be closer to the hospital where his treatment moved.

That’s enough. It has to be.

I look back at him now. He’s fallen asleep again, his hand still inside mine.

I stay until the afternoon nurse comes in to check his medication. She smiles at me in the careful way people do when they have begun to recognize grief before the person experiencing it is ready to call it that. “You should get something to eat.”

“I ate.”

She looks at the untouched sandwich near the window. “That was breakfast.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You still need to eat.”

“I will.”

She gives me the same look I give Ethan when he lies.

I almost tell her that irony is cruel. Instead, I stand. My legs ache from sitting too long. “I’ll go home for an hour.”

“Two.”

“One and a half.”

She sighs.

I lean over Ethan and kiss his forehead. He doesn’t wake.

The hospital corridor smells like disinfectant, old coffee, and something metallic I can never quite identify. I walk past families sitting in plastic chairs, past a child asleep across two seats with his head in his mother’s lap, past a man arguing quietly into a phone near the elevators.

I keep my head down. Not because I think anyone here knows me, but because I have developed habits I don’t know how to stop. I check reflections, car mirrors, people standing still too long.

It’s ridiculous. I know that. Vadim is probably not here. He may not even be looking anymore.

Some days I hope he’s not.

Other days the thought that he might have stopped hurts enough that I become angry with myself for caring.

I tell myself I escaped. That should be the important part. I got away from the compound, away from the guards, away from the man who decided where I slept, where I traveled, and whether I was allowed to leave.

I got home. I got back to Ethan.

I should feel safe.

Instead, every few days I see silver hair in a crowd and my body forgets how to behave.

It happens again outside the hospital. I’m crossing the road with the pedestrian light when I see him on the opposite pavement—tall, broad shoulders, silver that shines in the afternoon sunlight. My foot stops in the middle of the crossing.

A horn sounds behind me.