Page 151 of Suite 7

She steps in. The doors close on her face — not angry, just devastated, just Sloane, just the person who has known me better than anyone for nine years — and then she’s gone.

The silence that crashes in is absolute.

I stare at the closed doors. At the cardamom rolls scattered across the hardwood. The breakfast she brought to surprise her brother, rolled into corners, settled against cabinet legs.

She was happy when she bought those.

The thought arrives simple and complete.

I don’t feel myself go down. One moment I’m standing and then the floor is under my knees and the rolled cardamom scattered around me and I can’t — my lungs have forgotten the order of things. In first, then out, that’s how it works, that’s how it’s always worked, but there’s just this locked, airless nothing where breathing used to be, and the closed doors, and nine years, and I don’t know who you are right now⁠—

“I lost her.” The words come out strangled. “Oh god, I lost Sloane⁠—”

Kane’s down beside me before I finish the sentence.

“Vera.” His hands find my face. Tilt it up. “Right here. Look at my eyes.”

I find them. Gray. Steady. Here.

“In.” He breathes it with me — slow, exaggerated, like we have all the time in the world and the floor isn’t covered in her rolls and she didn’t just⁠—

My chest hitches. Fails.

“Again. In.”

Something gives. A fraction. The locked thing loosening slightly under the pressure of his voice.

“Out.”

My lungs shudder and release.

“In.”

The room stops tilting by degrees. His thumbs move against my cheekbones in slow circles, the same rhythm as the breathing, and I follow it because it’s there and he’s there and right now that’s the only thing I can hold onto.

“Out.”

And again.

And again.

Gradually the edges of the room come back. The floor under my knees. His hands, warm and certain on my face. The silence where her voice was.

Then the breath finds me fully — one real one, all the way down — and that’s when the tears come.

Not the controlled kind. Not the quiet kind. My whole body shakes with it, great heaving sobs that have no shape, no language, just nine years and her face and I don’t know who you are right now coming out of me in waves I can’t stop and don’t try to.

Kane pulls me against his chest and I go. Both hands fisting in his shirt. My face pressed into him. The sobs tearing through me one after another after another while he wraps around me and holds on — not trying to stop it, not shushing me, just there, solid and certain, his hand moving in slow passes up and down my back while I fall completely apart against him.

I cry until there’s nothing left.

Until the waves space out and slow and my breathing comes ragged and uneven through the wreckage of it.

Until all that’s left is the wet front of his shirt and his arms still around me and the cardamom rolls scattered across the floor and the quiet where my best friend used to be.

We stay there. I don’t know how long.

At some point my breathing evens out. Kane feels it — the shift in my body when the worst of it passes — and without a word he stands, drawing me up with him, and leads me to the couch. Wraps a blanket around my shoulders. Goes to make tea like boiling water is a form of action, like doing something small is better than doing nothing at all.