Page 77 of All the way home

“God, Rena, are you blind?” He shakes her off. “It’s bad enough that you’re using me as a scapegoat. I just—you’re such a hypocrite.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What do you think it means, Rena?” Kieran whips around. “Maybe stop fixating on me and think about your own shit for a second. You think I’m manipulative?”

She flinches backward.

“Look at yourself in the mirror.” Kieran shakes his head. “Maybe if you look long enough, you’ll see something other than me.”

Then he turns on his heel and walks away.

This time, Rena doesn’t chase after him. She does not try to stop him.

He doesn’t look back.

Not that she expects him to.

Pressing her fingertips to her eyelids, Rena tries to catch her breath and can’t.

Her whole life, every time she and Kieran have fought—which they hadn’t done very much, before last year—they do it twice. First, dancing around what they really mean, and then again a second time, when the tension is so high they can’t help but say every mean thing they can think of. Those fights are brutal—blistering words slung back and forth until it’s hard to breathe, until she can’t even think under the weight of hurt and guilt and shame, but she still prefers them to the fights where they spit at each other without saying a word, because at least then, after the nastiness has drained away, it’s properly over.

But that pattern’s been broken for some time now.

Months of first fights, stacked on top of each other. Fights that leave her reeling, chest heaving, so angry she could spit fire, devastation ripping muscle from bone. Fights that turn, slowly, a rotation through everything they’re not quite saying, an ominous roll of thunder that never delivers.

Rena’s stopped waiting for rain, because it never comes. But that doesn’t ease the knowledge that when the storm does come—if it ever really, truly comes—it’s going to be a hurricane.

Hour Seven-5:26 P.M. Chapter Twenty-Five

Zach

By the time Zach gets back to the gate, Kieran’s vanished.

So has Rena.

Lucas sits alone with the suitcases, expression like a thundercloud.

Something in the pit of Zach’s stomach flips as he surveys the weary lines of Lucas’s posture. He looks up at Zach’s approach, recognition and then something else—worse, pity—flickering across his face.

What would Tove do?

She’d be calm. Collected. Tove would approach this with journalistic detachment.

Uncomfortable, Zach clears his throat. “Do you know where Kieran went?”

“He didn’t say,” Lucas says, voice flat and dead, gesturing aimlessly. “They’re airing another episode of the Wonder Twins somewhere out there.”

“Well, I’m going to see if I can find him.” Zach turns to leave, unsettled.

“Your funeral,” Lucas mutters.

Zach stills. Slowly, he turns on his heel. “Sorry, am I missing something?”

Lucas holds his gaze for a long moment, something complicated playing out on his face. Then, at last, he shakes his head, rubbing a hand along the side of his face. “No, man. Sorry. I’m just in my head. Things got a little hairy after you left. I’m not trying to freak you out.”

Rather than say the honest truth, which is that Lucas is freaking him out, Zach just rolls his bottom lip under his teeth and tries to figure out what to do.

“He’s a good person,” Lucas assures him. “I know he didn’t mean anything by not telling you the whole truth. He’d apologize if he were here. He’s good about that.”