Page 169 of Josephine and Clay

He doesn’t look at me. “The circuit.”

I should've expected it.

I did expect it.

That doesn’t stop the hollow little drop inside my chest.

“Your leg isn’t healed.”

“Not to ride yet. But I can be there. Around it. Rehab on the road. Keep connected. Talk to my manager. Figure out when I can get back in.”

I look at his cast. “That sounds premature.”

“Probably.”

“At least you know.”

He glances at me, then away. “I can’t stay here much longer.”

There it is.

The thing beneath everything.

I'm careful with my voice. “Why?”

His fingers tap once against the crutch. “Because I can’t breathe here.”

The words go through me with a terrible, quiet finality.

I stare at him.

He keeps going, like now that he’s started, he can’t quite stop. “Everyone has a place. Boone, Dallas, Nash, Mom. They all fit here. They built lives here. I walk into a room, and it’s like…” He shakes his head. “Like I’m standing in the wrong house.”

“That’s your family.”

“I know.”

“They love you.”

“I know that too.”

“But it doesn’t change how you feel.”

He looks at me then.

For one second, he seems relieved I understand.

I wish I didn’t.

“No,” he says. “It doesn’t.”

My chest aches in a way that feels both compassionate and unbearable. Because I can see him. I can see the scared part under the reckless part. The lonely part under the charm. The boy who never felt he belonged in the place everyone kept calling home. And I can also see what would happen if I told him right now.

He’d say he was staying.

Maybe he’d even mean it.

But standing here, with pain written all over his face and panic sitting just under his skin, I wouldn’t know whether the decision came from love, fear, guilt, or obligation.